In April 2013, Article 25 sent me to Uganda to photograph an education centre at a displacement camp for former child soldiers. Someone had mentioned that I had, by accident, been in Cairo during the Arab Spring uprising. Apparently, that made me the right man for the job.
Patongo is only 250 miles north of Kampala, but the roads are bad, and the neighbours are South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, overland travel is unwise. Instead, you fly in a light aircraft operated by Christian missionaries.
There will be no phone signal. Electricity will be scarce. Safe water will be something you can’t take for granted. Then, there is the matter of inoculations—Diphtheria, Hepatitis, Poliomyelitis, Tetanus, Typhoid, Yellow Fever. Malaria is a given. Rabies a possibility. Once you arrive, the only way out is that same missionary plane, which comes when it comes.
Patongo is deep in the Acholi region, a place that has seen war for years and bears the scars. It is home to one of the largest camps for displaced people. Many, as children, had been soldiers, taken by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. His logic was brutal but effective: children aged 13 to 16 were old enough to carry a weapon but too young to resist. Younger ones were useless. Older ones fought back. All had seen things they could not speak of.
The camps gave them nothing—no skills, no training, no future, no hope.
Article 25 had experience with difficult projects, and they knew how to build something that worked in a place like this. Henning Stummel Architects designed a set of four low buildings around a central courtyard—open but secure. The walls were made of interlocking soil blocks, cast on-site. The roof trusses were eucalyptus, cut locally. The people of Patongo built it themselves. It was simple, unfinished, but it was theirs.
My task was clear enough: take the necessary photographs. Show the buildings, their function, their construction techniques. But the rest was Patongo—the dust, the people, the lives they had to build from nothing. This was their town, their place, their future. Or at least, the start of one.
It was an important commission. I think of it often.
