I hit the Internet, looking for university African Studies departments and checking out the Web sites of about a dozen. No direct specialist on Uganda to be found, though I send e-mail to a few people to see if they know of one.
Next comes one of my favorite research tricks: Call the author of the "Uganda" entry in the World Book Encyclopedia. Still no luck. No luck in library data bases, either.
Finally, at amazon.com, I type Uganda into the search field. Ta-da! Many authors' names pop up. But the most impressive is a researcher who has long followed Uganda.
I make contact with him the next day. I wish I hadn't.
He makes me realize that truly helping the children of northern Uganda will require more than just getting rid of Kony. Here's the troubled context in its barest form.
This conflict is not just about Joseph Kony, a madman who has waged war since 1987, seeking to rule Uganda by a bizarre and bloody version of Christianity only he espouses. His mythology includes bullets bouncing off him and guidance from spirits.
There have been brutes before him who have abused children as well.
It's about a minority group, the Acholi, that had power and lost it. It's about a government whose president has been widely praised by Western officials, even though his human-rights record is far from spotless: He, too, has used child soldiers.
It is about massacres, resources, riches and ego, about local, regional and world politics.
The history is critical to know. But I crave to learn more from someone who has lived through the anguish of being abducted and turned into a soldier of Kony's militia, the Lord's Resistance Army.
A local refugee aid agency official tells me of a young man who, after coming to the United States, was moved from jail to jail in York, Berks, Lehigh and Montgomery Counties while his asylum request was pending.
Bernard Lukwago was profiled in The Inquirer Sunday magazine in 2002.
