2013 is a year I return to often in my memory, not because everything was easy, but because everything was real. That year I left the comfort of theory-driven classrooms at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and stepped into Gulu, Northern Uganda, for my academic field internship. Gulu was a place still carrying the scars of a brutal conflict. I arrived with an open mind and a head full of peacebuilding theories, but I did not yet understand how different lived experience would be from what I had studied.
Arriving in Gulu: When Theory Meets Humanity
I arrived in July. My first tasks were ordinary ones: finding a house, getting a phone, and learning my way around town. Colleagues from the Kroc Institute had arrived a few days earlier, and Dr. William Komakech oriented us, showing us where to shop, briefing us on safety and security, and explaining the local culture and the history of the conflict.
Gulu is the largest town in Northern Uganda and, after Kampala, home to more expatriate NGO workers than anywhere else in the country. It is also remembered as the heartland of the war waged by Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). For two decades the LRA raided homes and abducted thousands of children, and nearly two million people were pushed into displacement camps. By the time I arrived the guns had been silent for several years and life was returning, but tens of thousands of people were still in the camps, and many more carried the physical and emotional scars of what they had lived through.
My house was about three kilometres west of town. My neighbours lived in grass-thatched huts neatly arranged like an African village, and every morning I crossed a wide open field on my way to the office. It reminded me of my own childhood walks to school, on a field back home that has since been swallowed by development. The neighbours' children reminded me of my own, and people often asked why I was there alone. I had planned to bring my family during the school holidays, but a teachers' strike upset the calendar. On evenings when the power went out, which was often during the rains, I sat outside with those children, looking at the stars and listening to their laughter.
I had read a great deal about the LRA before travelling. But nothing prepares you for meeting the people who lived through it: the mothers rebuilding homes, the young men searching for an identity after war, the elders trying to hold their communities together again. Everyone I met carried a story of loss, and also a strength that humbled me. They did not speak about theory; they lived it. I quickly realized that my peacebuilding education was not something to "apply" to Uganda. It was something to unlearn, reshape, and deepen alongside the people living the realities I had only studied.
A street in Gulu town, 2013.
Two Placements: TASO and the Refugee Law Project
I began my internship at The AIDS Support Organisation (TASO), which serves people affected by both war and HIV and AIDS in a region where infection rates were above the national average. At first I worried I would learn little there, since I came for peacebuilding and they focused on health. TASO was large and bureaucratic, and like many popular placements it had more interns than meaningful work for them. Yet some of my most important lessons came from those weeks.
On clinic days I helped the counsellors. Most of the clients were women, and many of the girls and women I met had been sexually assaulted during the war and were still living with the consequences, often in deep poverty with few options. I also travelled with the Care and Counselling team to five rural schools to deliver uniforms, books, and school fees to orphans and vulnerable children. The schools were remote, with poor roads and no clean water nearby. Children told us how the LRA had attacked their schools and turned them into training camps for abducted children. Yet new huts were going up in the villages, and families were starting small businesses, hoping the mayhem would never return. I noticed that TASO staff insisted on handing support directly to each child, who signed for it. At first this seemed slow and wasteful. I later understood that it was the only way to make sure help reached the child, because so many accountability systems had failed before.
Near the end of my time there I came down with a vicious bout of malaria. I had stopped taking my antimalarial pills, thinking my body still remembered how to fight it. It did not. That fever reminded me how quickly we forget the risks of home, and how fragile life is in a place like Northern Uganda.
I then moved to the Refugee Law Project (RLP), a respected organization working on transitional justice, conflict sensitivity, and community empowerment. I worked mainly on two projects. The Beyond Juba Project II looked at how communities torn apart by the LRA conflict could be reconciled and how the peace process begun in Juba could be carried through. The Advisory Consortium on Conflict Sensitivity worked through radio and media to help communities and policymakers understand conflict. I supported research and policy analysis, reviewed project reports, helped redesign a newsletter, and drafted a monitoring and evaluation guide for the radio programmes. RLP placed the voice of victims at the centre of everything, pushing me to see justice not only as prosecution but as restoration.
There was no "observer role" for interns. I took part in community dialogues, helped draft advocacy documents, and contributed to discussions on how survivors' needs could be built into national policy. One of my most demanding tasks was helping develop parts of an advocacy strategy, a responsibility I never expected to be trusted with so early.
Understanding the Realities Behind NGO Work
Before Gulu, I imagined NGOs as well funded, streamlined organizations. The reality was far more complicated.
Resources were limited. Staff stretched themselves across many roles. Interns were not on the sidelines; we were part of the daily work. And the administrative side, the reporting, documentation, and data entry, was not glamorous but absolutely necessary. It kept the doors open, satisfied donors, and made community programmes possible. I came away with a new respect for the people who do that work.
Mentorship and Professional Growth
At RLP I worked under Stephen Oola, the Head of Programmes and an experienced practitioner in transitional justice. Even when he was in Kampala, he guided my work through feedback, conversation, and constant encouragement to think critically about each task. I accompanied him to a meeting with the Northern Uganda Media Council, part of an evaluation of RLP's radio work requested by the donor, where journalists who had covered the war for years told us plainly which programmes reached people and which did not.
Through this mentorship I became more confident in my writing, clearer in my analysis, and more thoughtful in my approach to peace and justice. I learned that well-intentioned ideas must also be politically and economically realistic if they are to become policy.
Connections and Conversations That Mattered
My work took me to meetings with civil society, government, and academia. At a workshop on transitional justice organized by RLP with Oxford University at the Dove Nest Hotel, lawyers argued for prosecution through the International Criminal Court, while others defended traditional justice, amnesty, and forgiveness as the surer path to healing. I attended a student forum on constitutionalism at Gulu University and a special council session of the Gulu District Local Government, which had been rated the best performing district in the country and was hosting peer learning with councillors from Mbarara. The council session was broadcast live on radio so citizens could follow and respond. It reminded me of the people-to-people tours I had once designed at CRS, and of a lesson I learned the hard way there: peer learning works when participants shape it, not when it is designed for them.
I also met the Acholi War Debt Claimants, war victims who gathered outside the district offices day after day to pursue compensation for livestock lost during the insurgency. Their struggle showed me that even when governments agree to repair harm, getting that repair to ordinary people is long and difficult work.
Some of the most important conversations happened far from conference rooms. In mid November 2013 I joined a village meeting in a rural area near Gulu. We walked across open fields to meet people who had gathered to talk about justice, land, and the long shadow of displacement. There were no microphones and no formal agenda, only people speaking carefully and honestly about what they had lived through, their grievances, and their hopes. The conversation moved slowly, and I was there to listen, not to observe from a distance. Sitting in that circle, I understood that much of peacebuilding is quiet work, done through patient presence rather than visible results.
At a village meeting near Gulu, November 2013. Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame.
These conversations gave me insight into how different groups think about peace, and they still influence how I approach this work today.
Two Encounters I Carry With Me
Two encounters stay with me more than any meeting.
One evening I took a boda boda home from work. I had been told that many of the riders were former LRA child soldiers or abductees who had missed school during their years in the bush. As we rode, my driver told me that the rebels had forced him to kill his own family. When he came home, his community rejected him and some wanted him dead, and he came close to taking his own life. An NGO and local churches eventually helped him find his feet. I got off that motorcycle with a question I still carry: how does a community live again with those who were both its victims and its perpetrators?
The other was in Lukodi, a village about 17 kilometres from Gulu where the LRA massacred civilians in 2004. I went with the RLP team as families exhumed loved ones who had been buried hastily during the attack and laid them to rest with proper rites. It was a heavy day. The reburials were not a formality; they were acts of healing. The elders' speeches called for forgiveness and unity, but they also carried resentment toward a government many felt had abandoned them during the war. Hope and hurt were spoken in the same breath, and I came to see that transitional justice has to make room for both.
A Personal Transformation
Living and working in Gulu held up a mirror. I became more aware of my own assumptions, shaped by my Kenyan background, my education, and my worldview. Uganda and Kenya share a colonial history, a border drawn by European hands, and even some of the same peoples, yet their wounds differ. Uganda's came from armed rebellion and a deep divide between north and south; Kenya's are largely electoral and communal. For a long time I had equated peace with the absence of violence. In Northern Uganda I learned that peace without justice is incomplete, and that building relationships, essential as it is, must go hand in hand with structural justice.
Living in a community so different from my own, I learned to listen before speaking, to question my assumptions, and to approach every encounter with humility. Above all, I learned that healing is not a concept; it is a lived journey.
Looking Back, Moving Forward
I came to Uganda with theories and frameworks. I left with questions that no textbook could answer. What does justice look like in the eyes of a grieving mother? What does reconciliation mean to a child who never knew peace?
That season was a defining moment in my life. It strengthened my desire to pursue a career in peacebuilding, not because it is intellectually interesting, but because it is human work that matters. It prepared me for the roles that followed, including my later work in Kenya, and it continues to guide how I think, work, and hope to contribute to peace.
I am grateful for Gulu, for TASO and the Refugee Law Project, which welcomed me, for the people who trusted me with their stories, and for the change that took place within me. It remains one of the most meaningful chapters of my life.
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