On June 15th we set off for Pader, the capital of Pader district, a few hours east of Gulu. Our objective was the Pader Girls’ Academy, a Uganda Fund beneficiary. The deplorable roads tested even the strongest stomachs, but finally we arrived at the school, a small compound surrounding a dusty courtyard not too far from the main road. The grounds were spacious, and teeming with farm animals—cows, pigs, chickens, and goats. Big black and orange lizards scurried on the walls.
We met with Catherine, the smart and energetic headmistress, in her office off a caverous room which seemed to double as a teachers’ lounge and vocational training classroom (another adjoining room stored lab equipment for an as-yet unbuilt laboratory). When we exited to the building, the girls had assembled in rows, and we found ourselves in a fine position to address them and explain our presence.
We introduced ourselves to the roughly two hundred students before us, in green ors blue uniforms, many of whom held babies tied to their backs; the remarkable thing about the school is that, in a country where girls who get pregnant are generally expelled from school, the Pader Girls’ Academy specifically seeks students who were abducted by the LRA or otherwise war-affected, and this usually means they have children they did not want. And not only that—the girls are encouraged to bring their babies to school with them. They breastfeed in class and sleep with their babies or house them in a nearby nursery. While we worked we smiled at the toddlers who ran freely around the grounds, faces smeared with porridge, while their mothers learned. Some of them didn’t mind our white skin; others began shrieking in terror upon seeing us.
Completing the square arrangement of buildings was the classrom building, a simple cement row of 3 large classes with open-air barred windows, the dormitory (with triple bunkbeds and some girls sleeping on the floor), the kitchen (the four women inside began clapping and singing in unison by way of greeting), a food store (beans and rice—the WFP is cutting the school off this winter, but they’re starting a farm to feed themselves and already raise chickens), and a small shed.
Pader itself is pretty desolate. Not much variety in the way of food or groceries, even compared to Gulu. After one night in Pader we started thinking of Gulu as a metropolis where money could buy anything. Oh, to be back in the largest town in the Ugandan hinterland! To be back in civilization, where there’s no hot water but at least it comes through a pipe!
But our work at the school was exhilarating. The girls were dedicated students and dedicated mothers, a balancing act which most of Uganda apparently considers impossible. We interviewed two students, Caroline and Judith, on our second day. Caroline has a baby named Shalom, and spoke superb English. Judith spoke Luo in her interview (we enlisted a teacher to translate), and her baby is at home. We also talked with Catherine, and later, Alice, who started the school and now works higher up at the Christian Counseling Fellowship.
The next day, before we left, we returned to the school to interview a teacher and sit as guests at a performance held to thank us. As we sat onstage with the faculty, the girls performed the courtship dance we had seen in Awach—boyless. Some of the girls played “boys,” and the older women from the nursery and kitchen took part as well. Unlike the Awach dance, this one was held indoors, and the drumming was deafening, ringing in our ears as we trundled back to Gulu.