Helping people find their way home

WARWICK — Last fall, Sarah Rawson, the daughter of Andrew Rawson of Los Angeles and Donna Haley of Warwick and a graduate of Warwick Valley High School, was working in Northern Uganda with the FAPs, Formerly Abducted Persons.

A recently released and somewhat controversial video on this subject, KONY 2012, has not only exploded on Facebook, but has been the subject of several segments this past week on national news.

The film, created by Invisible Children, Inc. was intended to promote the organization’s movement to make the indicted Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony Internationally known in order to arrest him in 2012.

Rawson spent four months, September to December, in Gulu, Uganda, researching, interviewing, and ultimately developing a method to help the process of re-integration of FAPs, Formerly Abducted Persons, back into their culture and society after having been abducted by Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA.)

While there, she worked with Theater for Development (TfD) techniques, informed by her own study in acting at her mother’s MCC Acting School in Warwick.

The mission of Theater for Development is to create awareness and find solutions to development challenges by dramatizing them in plays for, with and by communities.

Rawson, a member of the National Honor Society, graduated from Warwick Valley High School in 2009. She is now completing her Junior year at George Washington University, where she studies international affairs and sociocultural anthropology.

The young woman spent her entire academic year studying abroad and is now studying in Strasbourg, France while also working at the Council of Europe, which is headquartered there.

During the fall semester Rawson was in Uganda with a study abroad program that focused on international development, her area of concentration within international affairs.

“For two months,” she reported, “I lived in the capital, Kampala, with a host family where I studied Luganda language and Ugandan history as well as development paradigms, challenges and prospects unique to Uganda. Then I moved to Gulu, a district in Northern Uganda, where I spent the remaining one and one half months carrying out independent research.”

Gulu was one of the areas most affected by the Lord’s Resistance Army and was the reason Rawson chose to go there.

“I wanted to research in a post-conflict area,” she said, “since I was interested in testing how creative processes, especially participatory theater methods, based on the Theatre of the Oppressed techniques of Augusto Boal, could hasten social reconciliation and reintegration of former combatants among the Acholi tribe. The Acholi is one of the largest tribes in Northern Uganda and was largely plagued by the LRA for nearly 20 years.”

Hungry for power In 2006, she explained, a cease-fire was established and since then Northern Uganda has been relatively free from LRA attacks, although there are still tribal conflicts of land-grabbing threatening the region today.

Rawson added that when Kony first took up arms in 1986 he claimed to be fighting in defense of the Acholi people against the Uganda government in Kampala, headed by President Museveni, who remains president today.

“The reality,” she said, “is that the LRA quickly lost political motives, but becoming hungry for power and domination, were led by Joseph Kony to commit indiscriminate mass acts of terrorism, many of which Acholi people were the targets.”

In total the LRA had abducted up to 60,000 girls and boys into their forces, grooming the boys into indoctrinated commanders and marrying off the girls to soldiers as sex-slave wives.

The battles between the LRA and the Ugandan military resulted in the killing of tens of thousands of people and the displacement of more than 1.5 million people.

“Six years of relative peace,” said Rawson, “made Gulu a perfect location to carry out research on post-conflict social reconstruction.”

Regain dignity As critics of the KONY 2012 campaign have pointed out, Joseph Kony is no longer in Northern Uganda. He probably left at some point around 2006 and remains in hiding in either Southern Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) continuing to terrorize populations and loot villages for survival.

Despite Kony’s departure,” said Rawson, “the people in Gulu are recovering from an existence in which they have been robbed of their lives, friends, culture, livelihoods, homes and security. I’ve visited many IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps and people are only now beginning to try to regain confidence and dignity to reconstruct their society and relationships.”

Most social relationships in that area were destroyed since many children were abducted and then forced to kill their own family members or fellow villagers, destroying the community and family-oriented tribal system.

This is now more apparent than ever as formerly-abducted child soldiers begin to return home to find hostile and unwelcoming communities and sometimes even families who refuse them.

“Because of this problem,” said Rawson, “I was searching for a way to help bridge that social gap between formerly abducted persons, who were forced into LRA service, and those community members, who were victims of the LRA’s terror, in order to help communities reestablish working relationships so that they can embark upon a sustainable path to peace and development.”

- Roger Gavan