Now, cows, bicycles, villagers carrying jerry cans, wood, cotton, children, and the occasional UN vehicle or open bed truck filled to the brim with peasants or Ugandan Defense Forces flank the unpaved roads of the Northern region of Uganda. Previously, the twenty year reign of terror by Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army scared them away.

The villagers are still confined to IDP camps (Internally Displaced Persons), but they’ve recently moved closer to their own land, to areas where they can farm – grow a little of their own food, and some cotton too to make some extra money. Their homes are round mud huts, built from thatch and bricks when they’re available.

People wear tattered clothes that hang off their bodies, and for most the clothes on their back are the only ones they own. Many of the children wear only a shirt or pants, some both, and some neither. Few wear shoes and mud and a fine layer of red dirt cakes the feet of everyone, of everything.

The Backstreet Boys and Ace of Bace play on the radio when we get reception. We drive through remote regions where stereotypes of villages and poverty abound – old women with long sagging breasts and children with distended bellies. But there’s more here too.

There are hard working farmers who want nothing more than an end to the war so they can grow food crops to feed their children, cotton to make some money, and do it all in peace. Maybe even earn enough for school fees or some salt, sugar and butter. And if the weather is good and the crop yields are high, maybe even a cow.

The North was once Uganda’s bread basket but for years the land has been fallow, producing little and proving inhospitable to the Acholi who have always called it home. Their boys and men have been abducted to serve in the LRA or killed, their cows taken by raids from the Karamojong (nomadic cattle herders from the bordering area with Kenya and Sudan who have acquired old AK47s and Kalishnokovs), their cries ignored by a government more than 400 kilometers away.

NGOs abound and food relief is there, and hope, which was once as rare as meet at the dinner table, is now being cultivated along with cotton by a mega company called Dunavant. They’re investing $1.3 million along with another half a million by USAID to give the farmers seeds, tools, pesticides and instructions. More about Dunavant and the Northern Region to follow…