During the war, Angee Santa lost a lot. She lost children, family members, and her land. At one point she lost hope, and attempted to kill herself. She and her son turned to alcohol, and became addicted. Drinking compounded her mental health struggles.
The story you are about to read is told by Tessa Laing, Justice Coordinator of the Diocese of Northern Uganda. It was first shared in World Renew Uganda's December 2015 newsletter.
During the war, Angee Santa lost a lot. She lost children, family members, and her land. At one point she lost hope, and attempted to kill herself. She and her son turned to alcohol, and became addicted. Drinking compounded her mental health struggles.
I sit with her now as she calmly sorts beans under the shade of her grass roof. It’s hard to imagine the drunken chaos she describes. Santa is hard to forget. She loves bright clothing, shiny headscarves and chunky jewelry. She speaks with emphasis. Her legs are swollen, scaly, and almost elephantine due to an unusual medical condition. Sometimes it’s hard for her to walk, but her eyes always dance.
Santa is not the only member of our community organizing group with a story about alcohol. Last month, we buried Rose Lam’s eldest son. For months he wandered out of reach of his family— drinking and drinking. He failed to take his HIV medication. Rose stayed by his side in the hospital for a week while he died.
Abalo Helen looks after her struggling brother, who regularly steals her money to buy alcohol. He comes home in a drunken rage, yelling and breaking her things. Isaac’s mother, Florence’s son, Miller’s brother, Paul’s neighbor— I could go on and on.
Twenty years of violence, displacement, and loss has left so much brokenness here in Gulu. Money-hungry vultures prey on brokenness. Northern Uganda has the highest rate of alcohol consumption in the country, and Uganda has the highest rate in East Africa. There is no regulation.
Alcohol is not only sold in bars, but in every tiny shop selling everything from toothpaste to batteries. Bars are open 24/7. Worst of all, 40% spirits are sold in tiny plastic sachets of 100ml for 20c NZ. The ethanol is imported from Kenya by various Ugandan companies who add flavors and colorful packaging. They are so cheap children buy them and slip them in their pockets to take to school. It doesn’t take many to knock you out.
Where is God’s Kingdom? Where is God amongst this brokenness? So often this world seems like a Kingdom of capitalism. The king is the company and the “rule of law” is the free market. And yet Jesus teaches us to pray to our Father, “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.”
I love The Message translation of Colossians 1, which tells us that through Jesus’ death “all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe, people and things, animals and atoms, get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies.” While the Kingdom is not fully here yet, sometimes I think we can see God putting things back together. We can see the ‘vibrant harmonies’ of the Kingdom peeking through.
A couple of years back Santa came to know Jesus. God gave her the reason and the strength to stop drinking. This year she walked into one of our little churches to our group’s strategy meeting, ready to join our fight. Our small organizing group, named Wakonye Kenwa, is about finding strategic solutions to address problems facing our community. We want to be part of God’s work to put back together just one little broken and dislocated piece of the universe. Specifi- cally, we wanted laws regulating alcohol, including a ban on plastic alcohol sachets. So we tackled Gulu District Local Government.
Members like Santa walked around our community collecting data and personal stories about the impact of alcohol on people’s lives. We submitted a big report to the District Government, and lobbied till they agreed to start writing the law. As it turned out, Government can be a slippery bunch. Keeping the law-making process moving and making sure our major demand (the sachet ban) was included, proved to be the hardest part. So we started collecting signatures for a petition calling for a sachet ban. We made friends with the biggest local radio station, who let us run a six-week series featuring former alcoholics from our group and the wider community. Each week we pushed for the ban on sachets.
Part way through the campaign, Santa spent a week in the mental health wing of the local hospital. Her son, who she thought had left his days of alcohol abuse behind him, got raging drunk again. It triggered her past struggles and caused them to resurface. We visited her in hospital. Her usually spirited eyes were dull, staring blankly. She spoke about haunting voices, and an uncontrollable sorrow. The day before we filmed our short video calling for a ban on sachets, Paul’s neighbor died of alcohol poisoning. He spoke about it in the film. When Josephine’s hut was burned down by a drunken person, she told me she was thankful that at least the anti-sachet petitions she was collecting were safe from the fire. They were stored in another hut. For me, working closely with local Government in Gulu has been like wading through a bureaucratic swamp of incomprehensible headache inducing inefficiency.
Our campaign climaxed in a march through the streets of Gulu to present over 10,000 signatures we collected to the District Council. Our very own Bishop Johnson Gakumba, of the Diocese of Northern Uganda, led the march along with other religious and cultural leaders we invited. That day I got to see the members of our group proudly marching through the streets, followed by hundreds of supporters. Santa, only two weeks after returning home from hospital— struggling with her swollen legs— made it all the way carrying her sign. No one chanted louder than Santa. The District Chairman received the petition and publicly declared, as the media’s cameras rolled, that the law would be passed by the end of the year.
I believe we are starting to see moments of God’s transformation. These are moments where broken, dislocated pieces of our universe are starting to be put right. Gulu’s new alcohol law banning sachet alcohol is on its way. Santa does not define herself by the losses of her past, her disability, the drinking, or the demons in her head that still return to haunt her. She is God’s person, who marched boldly through the streets of Gulu demanding justice and praying “God, today your will be done.”