The Three Pillars for 2021

As the SSLCD organizing staff and leaders of the Mungula and Olua refugee settlements in northern Uganda come together this month to set goals for their work in 2021, they are not only facing the challenges of Covid and other endemic diseases, they are also thinking about how to build a sustainable community as refugees in a foreign land for at least a generation.  Prospects for stable peace in South Sudan are slim in the foreseeable future, making return unlikely.

Based on refugee experience world-wide with long-term settlement in another country, the highest priority must be finding a way to share resources and build community with their Ugandan neighbors.  Toward this end, peace building will be a major goal for the year.  This will be accomplished through training of peace builders, especially women, who will help resolve conflicts and prevent violence in every block of the settlement, and also with neighboring Ugandans.

Given the proliferation of natural and man-made disasters around the world and the extreme demands on UN and other agencies to feed the resulting refugees, greater self-reliance for food is also extremely important.  This goal must be pursued in a way that will at the same time enhance peaceful relationships with Ugandan neighbors.

While peace and food self-sufficiency are fundamental to survival for the refugees, it is increasingly apparent that these goals can only be achieved by fully involving women.  This will be a major challenge in a society where women are almost entirely uneducated and illiterate and speak only their tribal language, making communication in the broader community extremely difficult.  But this challenge must be met if they are to achieve any of their goals.  Women work in the fields, harvest the crops, and prepare food.  They also play a crucial role in peace building.  They have relationships with other families in their neighborhoods, enabling them to intervene in family conflict situations and mitigate community-wide conflict and violence.  At the community level they bring a focus on the needs of children and vulnerable adults as well as direct painful experience of the results of conflict to peace-building efforts.  The failure of past peace efforts led by men in South Sudan and many places around the world demonstrate the fundamental need to equip women to lead future peace-building efforts.  Accordingly, SSLCD will make training and empowerment of women a fundamental goal in 2021.