North to Gulu

Stephanie films at the Cornerstone home for girls in Gulu on Thursday.

Noah and Stephanie film Middlebury student Aylie Baker as she plays some audio recordings back for the kids at Cornerstone.

We've spent this past week in the northern town of Gulu, the center of a region that has been hit hard in the last twenty years by a war that has only recently calmed down. At the Cornerstone home for orphaned children, we were inspired by stories of resiliency in the face of so much loss, abandonment, and exploitation. We have been once again following the Peace Project of Leah, Aylie, and Vijay of Middlebury College as they record the stories of children in this area. They traveled here on Tuesday with Noah and Gordon via a seven-hour bus ride, and headed back to Kampala today to get ready for a radio broadcast tomorrow afternoon. They will be bringing some of their work from Gulu to Power FM in Kampala for broadcast on Auntie Pauline's Sunday afternoon show. Pauline brings in kids from around the city to sit in with her in the studio, so we're looking forward to filming the show and being present for the kids' reactions to these stories from the north.

It has been interesting to see the different ways these Peace Projects find an outlet: for Minh, it was constructing water treatment tanks and providing Moringa seeds to a community in Mbarara. For Leah, Aylie, and Vijay, the outlet may be less physically tangible, yet the one-on-one moment of listening to an individual's story and then the act of sharing that story and everything it embodies to the rest of the community can be one of the most powerful tools for fostering understanding and communication in a country that has endured its share of regional divide.

We bid farewell to Todd Sandler, who headed back to the States today after a visit that was certainly eventful but much too quick. We miss him already. Gordon and Noah are back in Kampala for the radio broadcast tomorrow, and Nicki, Stephanie, and Billy are staying in Gulu until Tuesday to continue filming at Cornerstone and elsewhere. We have been doing much editing and the film is really starting to take shape.

Hard to believe there's only about a week left until we fly back to the U.S. on the 19th. More to come.