Posted on 08/20/2006 5:49:47 PM PDT by TheConservativeCitizen
Matt Tarka speaks with the confidence of the faithful.
Discussing a trip he will soon be taking to Northern Uganda to spread the word of Christianity, the details roll off his tongue like he’s describing an upcoming camping trip, with enthusiasm and confidence. He and four other missionaries—representing three Fort Collins churches—have flights booked, itineraries mostly finalized and contacts in Uganda awaiting their arrival. They’re working out their ground transportation, gathering aid supplies like clothing and toys, and hosting fund raisers to pay for the mission’s considerable expense.
But most importantly, they have their goals firmly in mind.
“We want to bring a message of hope,” says Tarka, a local mortgage broker, “that God is a loving God. We can do that by bringing some food, clothing, whatever, but we want to give them something not only physical but spiritual to help them as well.”
It’s only when he’s asked if he is concerned for his personal safety that Tarka’s confidence flickers, albeit briefly. There is a pause and then a nervous laugh.
“That’s a good question,” he allows. “For the most part, no. But there are sometimes I’m sitting with my children and they ask me, ‘Daddy will you be OK?’ and I have to say yes and trust the Lord.”
There’s a lot of trust required. By practically any measure, choosing to be a missionary in a war-torn Third World country is a choice to undergo a great deal of hardship. But in Northern Uganda, the very nature of the mission poses a unique danger; the region has been under the dominion of an unusually brutal rebel group for nearly two decades, one that says it gets its inspiration from the same source as Tarka: God.
And it remains to be seen how welcoming the members of the Lord’s Resistance Army will be to a distinctly different message of God than the one they’re used to preaching, often at the barrel of a rifle.
***
It’s easy to understand why Tarka says Northern Uganda is off the radars of most missionary groups. Security in the region is grim, and has been for some time.
Founded in the late 1980s with the ostensible goal of overthrowing the government, the Lord’s Resistance Army has always been steeped in cultlike mysticism that, although proclaiming to be Christian in origin, is often more like witchcraft in practice. In 1986, the government experienced a coup d’etat that removed then-President Tito Okello from power. Okello was an ethnic Acholi, the dominant group in the north, and the Acholi feared not only their loss of power in the government and military, but reprisals for the army’s actions stamping out a counterinsurgency earlier in the 1980s, a long-running operation estimated to have cost the lives of up to 300,000 people.
Among the many popular insurgency groups formed after the coup was the Holy Spirit Movement, led by Alice Auma, a local Acholi spirit medium and healer who was said to have been possessed by a dead Italian army officer named Lakwena. The spirit directed her to become a military commander and to overthrow the capital of Kampala. The Holy Spirit Movement was initially very successful and was led by a vanguard of different spirits, all of whom possessed Auma at various times during the campaign.
Although the rebels were soundly defeated on the edge of the capital by government forces in late 1986, the insurgency’s initial successes led to a boom in those who suddenly claimed the ability to channels spirits for military purposes. One such practitioner was Joseph Kony, who claimed possession by the spirit of Juma Oris, a former government minister under former President Idi Amin, the dictator believed to be responsible for the torture and murder of as many as half a million Ugandans since the 1970s.
Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army has since become one of the most singularly brutal regimes in modern military history, as its effort to institute a government based on Kony’s interpretation of the Ten Commandments has left in its path a bloody and crippled region filled with terrorized civilians. Kony is among five LRA leaders wanted by the International Criminal Court on 33 charges that cover practically every crime against humanity ever committed, including murder, enslavement, sexual enslavement, rape, inducing rape, pillage, intentional targeting of civilians during military campaigns and enlisting child soldiers into the ranks of the rebellion to the degree that it likely wouldn’t exist if not for the number of kidnapped children who have since become brainwashed soldiers.
It is this last charge that has brought a new measure of infamy to the LRA in recent months, including here in Fort Collins. The LRA’s practice of abducting children into its ranks—and immediately desensitizing them to violence by forcing them to kill other children—has resulted in a unique phenomenon. Each night, hundreds of children as young as 5 years old “commute” from their outlying villages into more populated cities to reduce the risk of being kidnapped from their homes by the rebels. They spend the night wherever they can find space, often crammed together side by side on the hard concrete ground of basement rooms, the hallways of the local hospital or the veranda of the local bus station. These so-called “night commuters” are featured in Invisible Children, a documentary that was recently screened at the Lincoln Center by a local woman who was so moved by the film that she paid the expenses of the event out of her own pocket simply to raise awareness of the situation.
Tarka and the other missionaries had already planned their trip to Uganda prior to the screening of the film, but he says it opened his eyes to the depth of the need in the region. And it reinforced his determination to go.
“I learned about the documentary and said, ‘Wow, there’s a huge need there that I was unaware of,’” Tarka says.
Not the least of which is spiritual, he says.
***
Tarka’s group will be traveling under the guidance of Mike Wangolo, a Kampala-based minister who traveled to Fort Collins recently with a group of performers and ministers called Afritendo, who performed traditional songs on Old Town Square and gave presentations about the need in Uganda to area churches. Wangolo and Tarka have known each other for years, and Wangolo has hosted missionaries from Fort Collins in Uganda in the past; when Wangolo invited Tarka to participate in an unprecedented trip to the LRA-controlled north, Tarka says he felt an immediate impulse to say yes.
“He said I’d like you to come to Uganda and see what’s going on,” Tarka says. “He proposed going to the area of Northern Uganda and gave me a heads-up that many foreign ministries don’t like to go to that area because of the security issues.
“My wife wasn’t too thrilled about the idea,” he continues. “At the same time, when Mike mentioned it to me, I just had a stirring in my heart to say, ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’ I wanted to bring some other people and see what we could do in this area. I invited a handful of other people I knew who have been on mission trips before, warning them that this is maybe a little more edgy, a little more intense.”
Tarka’s team—which includes Brenna Bickle, Kierna Erlandson, Susan Smith and Dan Erdkamp—hopes to accomplish several goals. They will purchase aid supplies like food and clothing in Kampala to distribute in and around the northern city of Gulu; they will transport toys like soccer balls and Matchbox cars from the United States to give to children; and they will scout out the possibility of using a portable well-drilling rig to install new freshwater wells in remote villages.
But their main goal, he says, is to show the people of Northern Uganda that there is a different message of God than the one they’ve heard from Kony and his rebels, one steeped in peace and love, not violence and death.
“Here’s a leader who’s admitted to being possessed by spirits,” Tarka says of Kony. “There is a twisted view of God in that area, and the message I’m bringing is that God is a loving God and he has not authorized anyone to put guns into your hands or to steal these children or turn them over to prostitution. … If this is how he lives it out, I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to know a God that way.
“I have to bring a message of hope to their soul and a message that says Jesus Christ does not believe in this, and maybe begin with that message removing some of these impressions they have of God,” he says.
As for the potential danger of delivering that message, Tarka admits that he doesn’t know what to expect or what will happen. He’s simply leaving it in God’s hands, he says.
“I think it takes a little effort and determination of heart to trust that God will take our hands and guide us to a message of love,” he says. “At times I have concern; however I also have a deep peace with God that we will all be safe.”
***
To learn more about Tarka’s mission, visit www.floodthenations.blogspot.com. The group is planning several fundraisers and presentations to churches, including free screenings of Invisible Children on Aug. 24 and Sept. 7. They are accepting monetary donations—their goal is to raise $12,000—as well as donations of sports equipment, toys and other supplies. See the site for full details and contact information.
Prayers for your friend.
A friend of mine from the Denver area was considering working at a mission in LRA territory this summer. I haven't head from him in a while. I should call him tomorrow.
Maybe your friend should practice somewhere a bit safer - say Harlem, El Paso, East St. Louis or East LA before going to Uganda.
Quite the leap of faith anyway.
Pray for this group. Its highly likely that this will end up in their death.
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