I Live Again

Yesterday evening (Monday) we had a visit by three incredible people. Benson Ocen, and his wife Ruth, are founders of I Live Again (ILA), and Joel is one of their key trauma counselors.

All three of them are from the Acholi tribe, and have varied experiences of the horrific times when Joseph Kony and the Lords Resistance Army were leading a reign of terror in the area.

ILA works with the survivors of that period, and helps take people through a programme of trauma counseling, discipleship, forgiveness and reconciliation, and where wished for, they assist in resettlement back to the Acholi tribal homelands. Obviously the speed of progress through the programme is different for each individual, and for some the process of healing and forgiveness is much more painful and slowly achieved than for others.

Some of those participating were victims of the LRA – and speak of watching loved ones being killed, or brutally tortured and left to die. Others are ex-child soldiers and testify to the horrific deeds that Kony and his men forced them to do, to their own families first, and then to others in their community. The guilt that these people carry around is massive, and for them forgiveness must first start with themselves, as they work through the internal knowledge of what they have done – atrocities often not shared previously with anyone.

And of course for these people also is the fear of being found out, and what their victims might do in revenge. Massive massive amounts of pain, hurt, and trauma that we can not even begin to imagine.

ILA is working day in and day out to help people move forwards in their lives – to help them, slowly by slowly, find a measure of peace, and then to nurture that small seed of peace and forgiveness to spread throughout the person, and into their family and community, that reconciliation can begin.

Listening to Benson, Ruth and Joel is hard – to hear the testimonies that they bring, to try to even comprehend the awful things that one man can do to another. And then to try and understand how anyone can be so forgiving – and be challenged to be as forgiving in our own contexts. To be challenged to let go of the hurts and pains of the past – that are holding us back, and to be challenged to do that by someone who has forgiven so so much more that it makes our little gripes seem embarrassingly trivial, and makes us feel uncomfortable to consider how petty it was to hold on to them in the first place.

So there is all of that to deal with. But then there is also the knowledge that although Joseph Kony isn’t in Uganda anymore, he and his LRA are still out there somewhere, and yet the world doesn’t seem to care.

He has gone through Sudan, and through DRC, and now is somewhere (it is thought) in Central African Republic. And he and his army are still recruiting child soldiers and child ‘brides’, violating lives, terrorizing villages and communities, forcing children to kill and maim members of their own family, or be killed themselves….

He is still out there doing all this, but do we hear about it on the news? Does it ever make the headlines?

What is it that means that we do hear about the killings going on in Syria and Iraq, in Israel and Palestine, and yet we don’t hear about the killing of others in poor corners of the world? Each person killed is one person too many, each person killed has the same right to life as any other. Each person killed has the same right to be mourned, and their story told, as any other. And yet it doesn’t happen like that.

I know there are copious reasons out there why things are like they are, and I’m not about to try and change the world of media reporting! But after the ILA talk yesterday, I do feel that the least I can do is raise awareness about those poor, frightened, traumatised victims, and their families, many killed or maimed or scarred for life; and send up a prayer for them, for those seeking to help them in their recovery, and for justice to be achieved, that Joseph Kony and the LRA’s reign of terror be brought to an end once and for all.