Voices of Uganda: A Cross-Cultural Experience

LOS ANGELES, CA--As co-founder of a performing arts group for inner-city youth in Los Angeles, actress Melissa Fitzgerald has helped troubled teens examine some of the toughest issues in their lives, such as racism, drugs, and violence. Working with name directors and writers, the youths then turn their personal experiences into stage and screen productions so others can learn from their stories.

Photo by: Ryan Larrance

Actor Melissa Fitzgerald leads a workshop with youth participants.

Then Fitzgerald decided on a new challenge: take the same idea to Africa—namely, to northern Uganda, where a seemingly endless guerrilla war has seen young teenagers kidnapped and turned into child soldiers or forced into sexual slavery. To launch the project, called Voices of Uganda, she and producing partner Katy Fox contacted Los Angeles-based International Medical Corps, the largest California-based humanitarian aid organization that has been working in Uganda for four years.

Together with another American relief group, the International Rescue Committee, IMC helped Fitzgerald turn her improbable vision into a cross-cultural reality that culminated with a group of young Ugandans putting on two one-act plays in front of an enthusiastic audience of about a thousand people near the northern town of Kitgum.

Just as LA teens explored their inner-city demons and dreams, so did their Ugandan counterparts confront theirs, choosing HIV/AIDS as the theme for one production and, for the other, the search for peace and reconciliation in a region torn apart by war. Fitzgerald’s co-founder of the Los Angeles project, David Ackert, helped head the Uganda theatrical program.

Drawn from informal drama groups at the Labuje camp for internally displaced persons (IDP) near Kitgum, the 14 youths were coached by members of the Voices of Uganda team to improvise situations related to each theme. New York playwright Winter Miller took detailed notes from those sessions then wrote scripts from the notes.

After an intense, two-week period, once-introverted teens were on-stage, delivering their lines before a crowd as large as many had ever seen.

Photo by: Ryan Larrance

Ugandan youths participate in the "Voices of Uganda" workshop.

“It was amazing to see these young people open up, people so shy they could not look you in the eye, become people who were confident and had something to say,” noted Ryan Larrance, International Medical Corps’ on-the-ground liaison for the project. “It was special to see that growth in the two weeks.”

Larrance praised members of the Voices of Uganda group for their ability to adapt successful components of their work with inner city youth to make them culturally appropriate for children of war in rural Africa.

“Culturally, they latched onto common elements—the need for self-confidence, for mutual respect and a (psychologically) safe space to experiment,” he said. “They made it work.”

In the wake of the early August performance near Kitgum, there’s even talk of taking the production on the road, although funding for that remains uncertain.

Fitzgerald and Fox believe careful preparation and a conscious decision to arrive in Uganda with no preconceived expectations were key to the project’s success.

“We wanted to work with what was in front of us rather than try to force what we found into our expectations,” Fox said.

For the youths themselves, it was a chance to learn about acting from successful professionals, to learn how to tell a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and to explore some of the most important issues in their lives.

They plan to convey their new-found knowledge to others in their drama groups and take their messages of peace, reconciliation and the dangers of HIV/AIDS to other nearby towns and camps, hoping they might make a difference in a region daring, for the first time in a generation, to believe peace is near. Finding that peace is currently the focus of negotiations between the representatives of the infamous Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ugandan Government.

Fitzgerald and Fox hope the project will have a broader impact beyond Uganda. The work was captured in several hundred hours of raw footage they plan to turn into a feature-length documentary they hope will generate awareness—and added political backing—as the fragile peace process begins to take hold.

Photo by: Ryan Larrance

Melissa Fitzgerald speaks with members of the community.

“This is not the moment to turn our backs on northern Uganda because conditions are getting better,” Fitzgerald said. “Now is the time to get more involved, to support the peace talks and help families as they head home.”

While in northern Uganda, the Voices of Uganda production crew also visited two IMC cutting edge programs.

At the Padibe IDP camp near Kitgum, they filmed an innovative early childhood development program involving about one hundred mothers and their malnourished children in which mental health monitoring is added to the established feeding programs.

The crew also observed IMC’s local production of Plumpy’nut, a peanut butter-like paste loaded with protein, vitamins and minerals developed by the French company, Nutriset, to combat severe malnutrition. The IMC program uses locally-farmed groundnuts as raw material and local labor in the production facility, creating new jobs and boosting the local economy in addition to helping fight malnutrition.