The term child-headed household is a word commonly spoken in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps such as Koro Abili. In the past decade or so, many children have lost their parents to AIDS or to violence. To make matters worse, the violent conflict perpetrated by the rebel army, the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, often kept them separated from friends and family who might offer support. “Child-headed household” is a term used to describe children in Northern Uganda who are being cared for by older siblings or relatives who are still only children themselves. Most of the child “heads” are in their mid- to upper-teens. However, the anomaly exists of much younger children being forced to care for their families. Ojok Soweto has carried a tremendous burden of responsibility already in his short lifetime. He is now 14 years old, but his serious face speaks of troubles and suffering far beyond his years. He has been the primary caretaker for his three younger siblings for the past three years. He has had to provide food in the midst of desolation, safety in the midst of war, and hope in the midst of despair. He kept his family alive when all they had was each other. Here is his story.
Soweto was born in the village of Abole in 1993. His parents, like most villagers, were peasant farmers. He was the first-born child, followed by two more brothers and a sister. Soweto remembers living in Abole up to the age of 8 or 9 with his parents, siblings, and grandmother. Up to this time, the LRA had made few forays into their village. However, one day, men dressed like the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF), or government forces, came into the village and began to converse with the people. The villagers were not alarmed because, by this point in the war, the UPDF were there to protect the rural population from the LRA. The soldiers remained in the village for most of the day, even cooking and eating their supper there. However, when the soldiers left later that evening, they stole the villagers’ money and goats and chickens, though they did not harm anyone. The villagers later realized that the men were actually LRA soldiers who had been wearing UPDF uniforms. However, they did not realize they had been tricked until they heard a report that the LRA had attacked a nearby village later that night. It was then that the villagers realized the men who came to their village had actually been LRA soldiers wearing government UPDF uniforms.
After the encounter with the rebels, Soweto’s parents realized the danger of remaining in the village. That same week, they packed up their belongings and moved their family to a place near Gulu Town where they would be less vulnerable to “visits” from the LRA. Soweto had already completed P.1 and P.2 at a school near his village. He had passed P.2 near the top of his class. When he joined another school in town, however, the new school required reports or the proof necessary to show that he had completed P.2 at the village school. In their rush to pack up and leave the village, Soweto’s parents had either lost or failed to obtain the necessary school documents. So, even after all his hard work the year prior, Soweto was forced to repeat P.2. But this was only the beginning of his troubles.
When initially asked about his parents, Soweto becomes quiet, hesitant, and stares at the ground. It is the look and actions of a boy who has had to bear too much in his life. But he slowly begins to tell me more of the story. When Soweto was 10 years old, his family was able to get a bicycle, a much sought after commodity in rural Uganda. His father would often use the bicycle to travel back to the village during the day where he could tend to the family’s garden. Although it was risky to travel to rural areas in an active war zone, Soweto’s father knew that his family would starve without the source of food and income that their garden brought them. Consequently, he would risk the danger on numerous occasions, as did other men, to return to the fields in the village. According to Soweto, his father was riding the bicycle back to town one day when a group of rebels happened upon him. As part of their campaign to inflict fear and control, the LRA had made it common knowledge that anyone caught riding a bicycle would suffer severe consequences. Though the exact details of his father’s death will always be a mystery, Soweto knows that his father died in the bush that day at the hands of the LRA. Later that same year, Soweto says that some other people from the area became jealous of his mother because she had a bicycle. As is a common belief in rural Uganda, he tells me that he thinks they used witchcraft to cause her misfortune. A common “witchcraft” practice in Uganda is to poison people. Possibly poisoned, Soweto’s mother fell sick suddenly and was taken to the hospital. Soweto’s childhood memory is fuzzy when it comes to the details surrounding his mother’s death, but it appears that she was brought back home from the hospital before she died several days later. She was still a young woman, probably only in her twenties.
After his parents’ death, Soweto’s grandmother took the children to Koro Abili IDP camp where she stayed with them for a time. Fortunately, before she died, Soweto’s mother had been saving a little money that she had earned by selling fish in the market. Soweto’s grandmother used that money to build a hut for the family, buy food, and pay the fees for Soweto and his brother Jimmy to go to school. Because he was only a young boy at the time, Soweto says that he does not know exactly how much money his mother had saved before she died. He only knows that his grandmother told him it was finished after she had bought school uniforms for the children. Soweto attended P.3 at a primary school near the camp, but he was unable to pay the exam fees at the end of the year. Consequently, he was not given credit for passing the class.
After a few months, Soweto’s grandmother abandoned the children. It is unclear whether responsibilities elsewhere forced her to leave, or whether she was simply tired of caring for the four children on her own. Whatever the case, Soweto was left with the tremendous responsibility of caring for his three younger siblings. At the time, Soweto was 11, his brothers Jimmy and Dennis were 8 and 4, and his sister Kevin was 3 years old. The children still had the hut that their grandmother had built within the camp, but they had little else for survival save for the clothes on their backs, a few saucepans, and one papyrus mat for them all to sleep on. There were no blankets, no cooking utensils, and no food.
Soweto and his brothers became a team bent on survival. They had no one to turn to but each other. Soweto tells me that his brothers were helpful and would listen to what he told them to do. Their little sister, however, was an added burden. As a baby, she had just been learning how to walk and talk when she came down with a serious illness, probably malaria. She survived, but has not been the same since. After that, Kevin did not speak or interact as other children her age. Also, she had been unable to walk since her sickness. Soweto tells me it was not difficult to take care of Kevin because she did not cry very much. Whenever they had to move long distances, Soweto would carry Kevin on his back. When the boys needed to go out to scavenge for food, little Dennis would stay with her or they would ask a neighbor from the camp to look after her. Kevin seemed largely unaware of all that was going on around her. Perhaps it was a blessing that she didn’t understand the gravity of their situation.
The children persistently faced the problem of food. A sympathetic neighbor from his old village allowed Soweto to come and do a little work in his local hotel. Soweto would wash the dishes and sometimes help to wait on tables. More importantly, he had the opportunity to observe how the food was prepared. As a male child, he had never been formally taught to cook, and thus had no skills to prepare food for his siblings. He struggled with what little he had learned at the restaurant, as well as through trial-and-error, to cook supper for his family. However, besides the problem of preparation, Soweto had no money and no goods for which to obtain food. Sometimes he would go out to the bush to search for wild roots and vegetables. Other times, he would search in the garbage. According to one of the original project mentors, when the project staff originally came across the children, Soweto was cooking vegetable peelings that he had found in the trash piles around the camp. Another time when an aid worker visited, the children were eating molded, contaminated bread because they had nothing else.
Additionally, the children faced the imminent worry of an attack by the LRA. If the rebels were to raid the camp, the children would run to the bush and hide just like everyone else. But the camp and the surrounding area offered little protection. Soweto tells me that he had always felt much safer when his family lived near town, a place where the rebels feared to venture. In the camp, as young children without a parent to protect them, Soweto and his siblings were incredibly vulnerable. Soweto especially, because of his age and his sex, would have been sought after by the LRA as a new “recruit” for their cause. Had he attempted to flee with three young children in tow, especially one who was disabled, Soweto would have been an easy target for abduction. Fortunately, the children did not suffer through any major attacks by the LRA while they were alone in the camp, though the threat constantly loomed over them.
In 2006, Children of Hope opened a site in the Gulu area. Their initial focus was to enroll children of child-headed households. Soweto, Jimmy, Dennis, and Kevin were one of the first families to be supported by the project. They immediately began to receive food supplements and eventually were given additional supplies such as cooking pots, mattresses, clothes, mosquito nets, etc. Even more importantly, a Children of Hope mentor was assigned to watch over the family. The mentor, whose name was Martin, began to visit and check on the children several times a week to provide compassionate oversight and to ensure that the children were receiving the things that they needed. Gradually, the children began to emerge from the dark life of mere survival that they had been forced to live.
These days, Soweto’s grandmother has returned to the camp to live with the children. Now that the burden of provision has been lightened by sponsorship, perhaps his grandmother now feels that she can handle caring for her grandchildren. However, Soweto’s grandmother is elderly and frail, and the burden of responsibility still falls largely upon Soweto’s young shoulders. He alone digs in the family’s garden because his grandmother is too sickly and the other children are still too young. However, his grandmother will sometimes walk the 7 km to the family’s garden to help collect the rubbish (discarded weeds and debris). Soweto tells me that it takes her all day to make the journey because she is so weak. The three boys are all in school. Without an educated adult at home to help them and encourage them, however, the two younger boys especially struggle with their studies. Little Kevin still lacks the social and perhaps mental capacity to be able to interact as other children her age. The project has pursued means to determine the nature of her disability, but medical experts are in short supply in Northern Uganda and it has been difficult to find a doctor who can make an accurate assessment of her condition. With some encouragement, she has now begun to stand and to walk for short distances, though her legs are still weak. Kevin stays with her grandmother, or a neighbor, during the day while her brothers are in school. 
After missing a year or two of school following his parents’ deaths, Soweto leapt back into his academics with a passion. Last year he passed P.3 as the top student in his class. Although this year, he is 14 and only in P.4, he continues to delve into his studies with enthusiasm. When asked what makes him happy in life, Soweto says that learning something new in school and understanding it causes him a happiness that stays with him all the way until he reaches home. A hint of pride and accomplishment briefly appears in his face as he talks about school. He loves to learn and is obviously a bright student. Hopefully, the passion for learning will remain with him as he continues to mature. Oftentimes, children who are behind in school struggle as they mature to deal with the embarrassment of being older than all their classmates. As it is, Soweto will not graduate from primary school until he is 17 or 18. Soweto makes no response when asked about his dreams for the future. Perhaps in his attempts to survive the present, he has not allowed himself to think about the future. Eventually, Soweto provides a general answer in reference to his future. He hopes to have a good family, to be “close to God”, and to be able to help other people. He says that if he ever had the means, he would buy a plot of land in town because that area is more secure in the event of war. Then, if the fighting resumes (which it very well may), he can offer a safe place for his family and others who might want to come stay with him.
The problems Soweto’s family faces now concern the consequences of peace. Yes, peace. Authorities are encouraging people in the camps to return to their villages now that there has been peace for the past two years. In fact, they are beginning to force people out. Soweto worries about how his family will manage the move. They have no one to help them rebuild their home in the village. The children will have to travel a much greater distance to reach their school. They will be further away from the oversight and aid of the project. Sadly, all they have is currently in the camp. If they leave, they will again have nothing. This is the problem faced by many of the project’s children who are part of child-headed households. Hope Alive! is working on solutions to aid the children in their relocation outside the camp and forming plans for continuing to monitor them on a weekly basis.
Soweto, his brothers, and his sister have come a long way in the past few years. Though Soweto still maintains a veneer of seriousness and intensity, he is now beginning to enjoy some aspects of his childhood that were lost - such as being able to play soccer and spending time talking with his friends. He and his siblings are now beginning to feel that sense of security that they lacked for so long. They are now beginning to think about the future. Soweto’s advice to others, especially those who have had to grow up without their parents: “Don’t worry, because God can still make the situation change [for the better].”
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