| ||||||||||
|
HOME > INTO AFRICA: Alumnus heeds call to aid in Uganda INTO AFRICA: Alumnus heeds call to aid in Uganda
by Karris Golden ’98 photos by Dr. Neil Mandsager ’78 A troubled phone call from a friend deeply affected Conrad Mandsager ’75 of Nottingham, N.H. The friend, Ian Lethbridge, an international humanitarian aid expert, told Mandsager the situation in Uganda, Africa, was the “most horrific” he’d ever seen. “That was pretty significant for him to say, given his background and the things he’d seen in his career,” said Mandsager. Lethbridge said thousands of children had been abducted and forced to fight as child soldiers or serve as sexual slaves. Mandsager researched the Ugandan conflict. In 2005 while returning home from Ghana, Africa, he stopped in the United Kingdom to visit Lethbridge and his family. “I asked him what he’d done about the situation in Uganda,” Mandsager recalled. “He said, nothing; he had been so overwhelmed. We decided we’d spend a day brainstorming a concept that might work.” As the two devised a plan, they decided they’d implement it together. For some time, they had talked about doing something together. Maybe this was it .... They dreamed of a long-term residential care facility for former child soldiers—a village based on rehabilitation, education and reconciliation. Shortly after Mandsager returned to the United States, Lethbridge’s wife called to say Ian had died suddenly. “I lost a friend, and I was left with the burden of this project,” Mandsager said. “I didn’t feel I had the humanitarian aid background to take this thing forward. I prayed, telling God I was not experienced enough.” For most of his professional career, Mandsager worked as a consultant, assisting underserved and underrepresented people, especially at-risk children. One of his tasks was to create a mentoring project for the U.S. National Guard, which is now the second largest program of its kind in the country, next to Big Brothers/Big Sisters. His work was a natural extension of his upbringing. His parents were medical missionaries in Cameroon, a central African nation on the Gulf of Guinea, where the family lived for 10 years during his childhood. Yet despite these experiences, he felt overwhelmed and ill-prepared to meet the needs of the Uganda project. He’d never even been there. Mandsager began calling nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other humanitarian relief agencies in Uganda, in part to tell them of Lethbridge’s death. He also asked questions about the Uganda situation and told people of the project he’d sketched out with Lethbridge. “I realized I had met one of the women I had to call before when she was the Uganda director for Feed the Children. I had met her in Kenya. She told me, ‘Come to Uganda; it’s bad. What you have described is what we need.’” He convinced his son, the Rev. Nathan Mandsager of Calvary Tabernacle in Schenectady, N.Y., to go with him.
They traveled to northern Uganda in March 2006, the hotspot of the nation’s civil unrest. There are large refugee areas called “internally displaced person” (IDP) camps. Villages had been burned to the ground. Each night more than 40,000 children were leaving IDP camps and rural villages and walking to cities to sleep because they feared abduction. “It’s like going into a wasteland,” said Mandsager. “Over 600 NGOs are registered in that district alone, and the military is everywhere. Nathan said, ‘This must be what Bagdad is like.’” Mandsager visited with different aid workers there and tried to convince them to take on the model he’d developed with Lethbridge. Some NGOs dismissed it as “too dangerous,” a few said it would breed dependency and others said it was exactly what was needed. Eventually the Mandsagers met with the bishop of the Church of Uganda (Anglican). The bishop had stayed home from church that morning to pray for the nation’s children. “We said, ‘That’s why we’re here; we have a plan.’ We … talked for hours,” Mandsager recalled. “They asked, ‘What do you need?’ I said we needed land and lots of it–a minimum of 100 acres. I felt like God was giving us the green light, and we’d find other organizations that would pick this up.” Mandsager remained adamant; he could not take up the mantle. Yet Nathan told his father, “You’re too passionate about this not to lead it.” “As you can guess, God didn’t take this responsibility away,” Mandsager said. In April 2006, he launched ChildVoice International. “I came to that name because when we talked to these kids who had been abducted, they couldn’t speak about what had happened to us,” he said. “A mark of our success will be evident when their voices have been restored. Our tag line is ‘restoring the voices of children silenced by war.’”
Among the ChildVoice board members is his brother, Dr. Neil Mandsager ’78, of Johnston, Iowa. Nathan is a volunteer staff member. Both Conrad’s wife, Kathy Osterbur ’75 Mandsager and Neil’s wife, Kathryn Cooper ’79 Mandsager, are actively involved as volunteers. While ChildVoice currently works in Uganda, Conrad Mandsager said its mission is to create a network of global advocacy. “This situation isn’t unique to Uganda,” he explained. “There are 35 other conflicts around the world where children are being used as soldiers. Over 300,000 are being used as armed combatants today. We must build capacity for a global intervention.” In June 2006, he returned to Uganda. The goal was to expose key players to the situation and create shareholders in the vision, said Mandsager. It was imperative to involve churches that wished to move beyond short-term mission trips. “We’re challenging churches to commit to us for a decade,” he explained. Such a partnership allows churches to experience the full impact of the relationships to be built, Mandsager added. Through a selective process, ChildVoice has developed nondenominational partnerships with Baptist, Lutheran and Assembly of God congregations around the U.S. On his return trip, he met again with the bishop. There was good news: Land was available at Lukodi, a village 19 kilometers north of the city of Gulu. The bad news: Lukodi was the site of the worst massacre of the war. In spring 2004, 7,000 were chased from their homes. The village was burned to the ground and several children were abducted. “When he told me that was where we were going, I knew we’d never convince our board and our donors to go to a place like that,” said Mandsager. “Out of courtesy, we went out and met with the village elders.” During that meeting, Mandsager’s “heart turned,” he said. When he asked the elders how they could ever support a program that provided sanctuary to some of the child soldiers who may have been perpetrators in the Lukodi massacre, they told him they had a responsibility and a desire to forgive and begin the reconciliation process. Their response showed restorative justice is the key to reconciliation and peace. Many Acholi elders believe such reconciliation can be achieved through mato oput, which in the Acholi language means “drinking the bitter root” of the oput tree. Through the process of mato oput, conflicting parties accept the bitterness of the past and promise never to taste such bitterness again. Compensation can be made to the victim(s) for the harm done, but mato oput doesn’t aim to establish guilt. Rather, the goal is to re-establish the community’s harmony, according to Pambazuka News.
“Mato oput … is an amazing reconciliation process,” said Mandsager. “This is one of the few cultures in the world that can really see reconciliation. People of the Judeo-Christian faiths have a lot to learn about justice from these people.” The conversations with the Lukodi elders led ChildVoice to locate its first initiative there. According to ChildVoice, the plan includes creating a sustainable and replicable long-term village at Lukodi for refuge and care of children affected by war. The village will include a boarding school, nontraditional educational programs, a vocational center and spiritual and emotional counseling for former child soldiers and others affected by the war. The long-term lease of the land at Lukodi will eventually allow ChildVoice to provide education to as many as 1,000 children. In the interim, ChildVoice has renovated an abandoned school now called Lukodi Center, where it operates a pilot program for 30 women who were abducted as children to serve as “wives” for rebel commanders. The women are now mothers of 40 children. At Lukodi Center, the women have resumed their education and are learning vocational skills. As part of their commitment to the community, ChildVoice also constructed and opened a new Lukodi Primary School. The school opened in February, and more than 500 area children attend. The students had been out of school for several years due to the war. The Punena Health Center is another ChildVoice effort to support return and resettlement efforts in the Gulu District, said Mandsager. The clinic was built in 1998 by the Canadian International Development Agency and Canadian Physicians for Aid Relief, but never opened because of the war. Opened and operated by ChildVoice, the clinic now offers a variety of laboratory services and provides health care and medications to the residents of Lukodi and surrounding rural area. Since the clinic opened in June 2007, an average of 1,200 patients per month have received treatment there, said Mandsager. Primary health issues range from malaria to childhood immunizations. During summer 2007, four generations of Mandsagers assembled in Uganda to continue the family tradition of humanitarian aid. “My father, who is in his 80s, was there. (Nathan) and my grandson were there. My brother, Neil, an OB-GYN specialist, was there,” said Mandsager. “My dad remarked that it was not unnatural for his children to turn back to Africa.”
| ||||||||||
|
|
© Wartburg College - 100 Wartburg
Blvd. - Waverly, IA 50677 - (800) 772-2085