“We live in a world of scarcity,” Moses said to us after our first day at Boli Stock Farm. We would soon come to understand what he meant in ways we couldn’t have predicted.

Boli Stock Farm is a camp for internally displaced people (IDP) in northern Uganda. We were a team of five from Denver, Colorado. We were serving with a local organization called the Concerned Parents Association (CPA), which had been organized after 150 girls were abducted from a boarding school by rebels. Our purpose was to work alongside the CPA and try to bring a few moments of hope and healing in the midst of incredible suffering.

Awareness of the humanitarian crisis in northern Uganda has grown in the United States in the last few years. One vehicle has been the documentary Invisible Children, which tells the story of the “night commuters”—children who walk sometimes for hours each night to sleep in protected centers. Otherwise they risked being abducted by The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), as were the boarding-school girls, and forced to become child soldiers or sex slaves.

The LRA is a rebel paramilitary group, run by a self-proclaimed spirit medium named Joseph Kony, which has been fighting for two decades to install its own state based on a combination of African animism and quasi-Christian mysticism. The conflict has displaced an estimated 1.6 million people, 80 percent of them women and children. The LRA has been accused of widespread human rights violations, including mutilation, torture, rape, and murder; and Kony has been indicted on war crime charges.

The Multitudes

Months after watching Invisible Children, we found ourselves thousands of miles from home in an IDP camp, talking to Moses.

Moses works with an offshoot of the CPA called the Concerned Children and Youth Association (CCYA). He and Max, both in their late teens, led the group; and they informed us they had been trained in “making the fun.” We spent  the afternoon with 20 of the CCYA staff, receiving our own training in making the fun. Our contribution was “Goat Goat Chicken” in Luo, the local language (a hybrid of “Duck Duck Goose” because goat and chicken were the only two words in Luo we could pronounce). Our training concluded with dancing to a Ugandan favorite, “Where is the Love?” by the Black Eyed Peas.

We had traveled to Uganda with three large duffel bags full of art supplies, stickers, bubbles, balloons, candies, soccer balls, and soccer jerseys. Our plan was to work with children and youth in various IDP camps. We estimated supplies and snacks for a total of 200 children in any one camp, and we planned on focusing our efforts on 50 kids each day.

On our first day at Boli Stock Farm, one of the smallest IDP camps we would visit, almost 300 kids showed up. Word spread through the camp that munus, a Luo word for white people, had arrived. On our last day close to 1,000 children sat in rows waiting for us to give them one piece of candy and a single sticker.

Our three duffel bags felt like two little fish and a few slices of bread, with thousands of people hoping for lunch. The moment we realized that what we had to give was not enough was also the moment when we began to pray for the multiplication of crayons and construction paper. Every crayon we had would be broken in half and each piece of paper torn into two.

We would visit four more IDP camps in northern Uganda in the next two weeks. At every camp we visited we would blow bubbles over the children’s heads and toss balloons into their sea of hands. We would paint a mural in one camp and give the soccer jerseys and balls to a selected few.

We gave everything we had and were left looking into the eyes of children who exist in what the Ugandans call “suffocating poverty.” There were moments when no matter how hard we tried to summon our American-Christian-Western-capitalistic “you can make it better” attitudes, we looked out at hundreds of hungry, destitute children. The only Scripture  that came to mind was “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you” (Acts 3:6, NIV).

Not Enough Duffel Bags

We were not the only munus in northern Uganda, although some days it felt as if we were. We could walk down the main road in town and not see another white face. But over the next two weeks, we met a handful of people from the United States. Some were there, like us, only for a few weeks. Others had been in Uganda for several months or even years. All had come because at some point they had learned of the humanitarian crisis and, like us, wanted to give what they could.

The veterans understood the world of scarcity more than we did. Eventually it became clearer. The most important thing any of us had to give to the children of Uganda was our attention. We couldn’t bring enough duffel bags to end the poverty, illness, and suffering. What we could bring was ourselves.

I asked one of the women working with the children in a night commuter center what she thought about the munus being here. She said any help that anyone can bring is good. She said she is thankful to God for hearing the prayers of the country of Uganda and that people are now waking up to the tragedy that has been occurring.

To be honest, now that I am home in the United States, I too often think the stuff in the duffel bags is the solution. Yet Moses’ words are still rolling in my head: “We live in a world of scarcity.” He’s right. We all do. It’s just that some of us have to go to Uganda to realize it.

Jared Mackey is Ministry Core Pastor at The Next Level church in Denver.