You can help a village live again

from the Guardian

Katine in Uganda has twice been robbed of its cattle, and its young men have been driven away. Our readers have already pledged more than £500,000 to an appeal offering fresh hope

John Vidal

Ten young farmers sit outside on worn wooden chairs debating whether to club together to buy an ox. A few chickens play on a bicycle parked beneath an acacia tree and Chadwong, the village dog - his name means 'lots of poverty' in the Ateso language - lies asleep in the yard. You can hear a cow munching in the pea field 30 yards away. Life is very slow and extremely quiet in Katine.

But this sprawling community in northern Uganda is not at all isolated, stagnant or inward-looking. The asphalt runs out nearly 20 miles away, the rudimentary electricity supply disappeared when raiders stole the copper wires, and many of the wells need rebuilding. But there is a far greater traffic of people to, from and through Katine than there is in most rural towns in Britain, and the village has known far more drama than cities 100 times its size.

Katine may be one of the few places in the world that has had to start again completely twice in 20 years. Sam Emolu, in his fifties, remembers when Karamojong cattle-raiding parties from near the Kenyan border descended in 1986. 'They came with guns and took every animal we had: cows, goats, sheep, chickens. Katine lost tens of thousands of animals. If they found you, they killed you. We all had to leave for three years. I had 100 animals and lost the lot.' Then the Lord's Resistance Army came from Sudan in the north in 2003: 'They arrested all the young men and took them away. We fled again and lost all our animals.'

Many people have still not returned. Instead they live in Soroti, the local town, biking or walking up to 30 miles a day to tend their fields. 'People come to farm in the day and then go back at night', says Oriokot Charles, a teacher.

'This whole area relied absolutely on livestock. People had large herds of cattle, sometimes 200 or more. A man would sleep on the floor and own nothing but he knew he had money. All he had to do walk into his kraaal and all around he would see it', says one off them, Okiror James. 'Life now is less certain, land is now people's only asset.'

'Because we lost our cattle, we cannot plough the land, so any money we have goes to hiring oxen,' says Opuna Joseph.

'We are just beginning to see that we have hope. We have a huge resource in the land, but we need to make it earn,' says Orone John Justine.

Dozens of groups have set up in Katine to insure each other against hard times. People club together to raise money for school fees and burials and exchange notes about everything from beekeeping to goat rearing and orange growing.

As security returns, education is increasingly seen as the only way out of deep poverty. But as all the best secondary schools are in Soroti, children such as Angou David have to board and find rooms in the town, so must also leave the community for weeks at a time. It raises their expectations but because almost all the work in Katine is farming the price of education is that the village's best educated students may not return.

'Migration is now a part of life in Katine. People go where they think they will do best,' says Sam Agom, a clinician in the health centre and one of several professionals who now live in the village. 'Education is their greatest hope.'

When people come or go, they take the big red main road that brings drawbacks as well as opportunities. These days there is an exodus of animals to Sudan. International money has flooded into Darfur and created a thriving market for cattle, cars and food. The price of animals in Katine has gone up, 75 per cent in just a year or two, at a time when the village is trying to restock.

Mostly the road is fortunate. It brings people in, it allows people to trade and people come here to buy. But it has a bad side. It brings in prostitutes, money lenders and the middlemen who exploit the illiterate farmers' ignorance of prices.

'Katine? It's home, but it's a hard place to live right now', says Sam Emolu. 'We have gone from being a prosperous community to a poor one, not once but twice. That's life. Now we are starting again.'

So far there have been 1,965 one-off donations to the project, totalling £112,805. There have also been more than 1,048 people who have signed up to direct debits. Over the three years (allowing for 10 per cent cancellations per year) that gives us a total so far of £532,391. Barclays is a partner on the Katine project. It is giving £500,000 up front and will match readers' donations up to a total of £1m.