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For Abducted Ugandans, An Elusive Reintegration
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He farms most days: cassava, corn and beans. Ogwal is replanting his neem trees, as all but one were destroyed during the war. There is often an air of tentativeness around the men. Villagers said they try to speak to them calmly.
Lilly Atim, who lives next to Ogwal, said that she sometimes hears him screaming at night and that he hallucinates at times during the day. She does not ask him what he sees. Other times, he and Amar simply fall quiet, or isolate themselves.
When that happens, Atim said, she tries to coax them into conversations about their children or farming, anything to reestablish a connection.
"Slowly by slowly, I try to lure them into talking," she said. "I want to show them we support them. I tell them to be strong, that this is your home, and to be very free."
She and others said that although they feared and loathed the Lord's Resistance Army, they never fully transferred those feelings to their old friends. "We were really crying for them to come home," she said.
A recent survey by the Refugee Law Project, an advocacy group based in the capital, Kampala, found that although some returnees have been stigmatized, there have been few revenge killings, as was feared.
"What is remarkable is that such intimidation, unkind as it is, has not been translated into violence," the report said.
It is too soon to say in general how the process of reconciliation is going in northern Uganda. Mostly, progress is measured in individual stories, some horrifying, some just sad. Many young women who were forced to "marry" rebel commanders, and often came home with children, have been rejected by their families, for instance. So have many former child soldiers, who now roam the streets of towns here, homeless.
But there is also Beatrice Aciro, who was held in captivity as a rebel "wife" for 10 years. She had two children before she escaped, eventually making her way back to her village.
She was worried about how her father would react. But when she saw him for the first time since she was 16, "he just kept quiet and looked at me like this," said Aciro, holding her hands to her face. "My crying made him cry like a child. Then he said, 'That's enough.' What he wanted was me. My children, he carried them, and he looked at them, looked at them. I told them, 'This is our dad.' "
Special correspondent Rebecca Harshbarger contributed to this report.
