Reuniting lost children
| As security improves and people return home in northern Uganda, the Red Cross expects its tracing workload to increase rather than diminish.
The Red Cross has played a vital role reuniting families torn apart by conflict in northern Uganda over the last two decades.
“As people begin to go back home, the camp itself has become displaced and so it will become harder to find people and tracing will become a bit more intense,” said Remy Mbaziira, Ugandan Red Cross tracing programme officer. | | |  | |
| He described how many children either became separated or ran away from their families as they fled during the conflict.
“Some have become street children in the trading centres where they do menial work or have to beg to survive,” Remy said. “The children range in age from as young as six to 18. When we identify the children, they usually know which camp they came from. Then our volunteers start distributing messages to try to trace their families.”
Missing
A squad of 13 motorcycles run by the Ugandan Red Cross (URC) collects and delivers messages to help trace missing relatives across the north and north-east of the country.
The URC also works closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) exchanging messages between family members and detainees.
Around 160,000 people have returned to their villages in Lira district since the start of the year but this has created more work for the Ugandan Red Cross tracing team.
Vincent Odoch, URC branch secretary for Lira, said they received tracing referrals for more than 1,000 children in 2006 alone.
“In June 2006 we registered 149 street children, up from just 20 in Lira town the year before,” Vincent said.
Counselling
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 | | | When children are traced they are taken to centres where they can be reunited with their families and are offered counselling and support. However, once a child is traced the task is far from over, as Remy explained.
“We reunited quite a lot of families in Lira but some of the children ran away again,” he said. | |
| “Sometimes the parents reject the children because their return means an extra mouth to feed and some of the children run away because they had been earning their own money, doing odd jobs etc.”
As peace talks hang in the balance, the future for northern Uganda remains uncertain.
“We have been hopeful about the peace talks but the future is still a bit hazy, so for now we will continue working to bring families back together,” Remy said. | |
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