Broken Open

Rock Quarry at Acholi Quarters


During my time in Kampala, I was able to witness children, women and men mining rocks and learn more about this tiring, dangerous, tedious, and means providing job a number of people in the Acholi Quarters find themselves doing to provide for their basic needs (food, shelter, healthcare, education, etc.).

Before arriving in Uganda, I read a number of articles about the rock quarry and labor conditions. I found a number of things read to be true. Hundreds of children, women and men, mostly refugees who fled a civil war in Northern Uganda, work the mines around the Acholi Quarters area for hours to make 200 Uganda shillings ($.12 U.S. cents), for every 5-gallon yellow bucket they fill with chipped rocks used to make gravel.

Though this provides valuable ends for a number of people I was privileged to meet and see along my pilgrim's journey, I question the means/conditions of the work environment. Walking through the quarry, I witnessed the workers without saftey helmets, goggles or gloves swing metal against stone that flew various directions. I saw children whose arms and legs were marked by the danger of flying stones and sat in the home of a women whose eye was badly injured while working the quarry, which has left her unable to work for 6 months, dependent upon the support of a NGO (Non-Government Organization) to provide food for her family. A couple of days before we arrived, a man was killed at the quarry pictured abover in a landslide. Lanslides of falling rocks are frequent in the quarry.

There were a few times that I replaced faces of people I saw at work with the faces of children I adore at Belmont, the youth I journey with in ministry and beautiful women who I call friend, mentor and family here in the USofA, and paused to swallow the very bitter pill of inequality, economic & social complexities, injustices, happenstance, and privileged that makes situations everyday harsh realities for some and foolish "what if" for others. Lost for words and burdened by many questions, I walked in silence greeting people I passed along the way with a smile and the Acholi greeting. "apwoyo." Acholi is a language primarily spoken by the Acholi people in the districts of Gulu, Kitgum and Pader, a region known as Acholiland in northern Uganda. Acholi is also spoken in the southern part of the Opari District of Sudan.

As one who informed by a society that speaks out against and frowns upon child labor, I continue to struggle with the tragic reality that a number of the children in the quarters find themselves in. Two boys that I got to know and spend some time with, unable to afford to go to school consistently, find themselves working the rocks for sometimes 8 hours a day to help support their mother in providing their 20,000 shillings a month rent and food for their table. They work two different quarries that are about 1 to 2 km away from their one room mud constructed home to crush stone, averaging 2,000 shillings a day between the both of them. Their father was a soldier from the north, killed by rebels during this 22-year civil war between the government and the rebel group by the name of Lord's Resistance Army. Millions have died, millions have fled. Most have found refuge in IDP camps up north, but one article reported that advocacy groups estimate that there are up to 600,000 in the southern cities.

One articled reported that, "A truce has enabled many of the camp-dwellers to go home, with food, tools and building materials provided by the government and aid groups. But the urban refugees don't qualify for help and have remained unregistered and invisible." (USA Today story on the Rock Quarries of Uganda)

Thanks to Mr. Plyler, my friend James and my new friend George, the people who reside in Acholi Quarters do not remain unregistered and invisible to me.




My first afternoon in Kampala, Uganda was spent on a hillside blanketed with mud huts and homemade brick one or two room homes walking red dirt/mud pathways, being warmly and graciously greeted by new friends who grabbed my hand and said, "Apwoyo! You are most welcome." Children, women and men of Acholi Quarters, welcomed me not only into their homes and meal tables, but they welcomed me- a stranger - into their lives. They broken open my heart in ways tit had not been broken before... I tasted a new flavor of freedom, joy, hope, resilence and LIFE. From the moment I got out of the special hire car onto the pot holed dirt road, shook the hands of the little boy standing beside the mural wall, and heard the strange word "Apwoyo" followed by "You are most welcome," I felt the heart cracking once again and gave way to the sweet Spirit of God that filled the people I was blessed to encounter along the way.

I now know their names, their faces are imprinted upon my heart. When I read about the rock quarry and speak of the rock quarry, I think of Jok-John, Stephem, Emos, Anna, Seila, Fiona... the list goes on. I am still trying to make sense of it all, listening for the answer to "so what now?", hungering for kingdom like community of blessings & woes, and desperate for the imagination to live, believe and act as though another way is possible. I long for salvation...redemption.