Lech Szporer

The Uganda Project (Uganda, 2022)

The Uganda Project (Uganda, 2022)

The Uganda Project involves a series of ongoing collaborative experimentations with new kinds of trauma-informed art therapy sessions. Since the founding of our nonprofit Give Kids Your Instruments in 2011 and The Haiti Project in 2014, I have been researching and developing group art therapy programs for young people in crisis and displaced people emerging from conflict.

These clinical interventions are conducted for research, analysis, and program development. All clinical trials in Uganda in 2022 were done in collaboration with locally embedded community social workers and the sessions themselves were client-driven. By combining contemporary art practice, allegory, and clinical therapy, we produce conceptual artworks, social sculpture, and absolutely joyful happenings.

The goal of these art projects is twofold: to produce conceptual works of humanitarian art, while at the same time using art in a very practical way, to help transform the painful sense of alienation felt by many traumatized kids into a sense of belonging. And art-making is a great way to get people to express themselves and to build communities.

Uganda, considered the youngest country in the world with 50% of the population under the age of 15, is known as Africa’s primary refugee host. For these reasons, Uganda was our top choice for working with underserved children.  

My team and I focused on three main groups of youth: South Sudanese and Congolese refugees residing in two separate settlements in northern Uganda, west of the Nile, and child sacrifice survivors, as well as young victims of rape, abuse, and radicalization, at a rehabilitation center in Kyampsis, an hour’s drive outside of Kampala.

In Koboko and Yumbe in northern Uganda, we worked alongside our friends at Community Empowerment for Creative Innovation. In Kyampsis, we worked alongside our friends at Kyampisi Childcare Ministries. We also conducted interviews and extensive research with various government, judicial, and municipal actors for an upcoming feature film.  

Over time, art therapy projects such as this, along with face-to-face counseling and encouragement, help survivors emotionally reconcile with the trauma in their pasts. Art making helps us acknowledge our power to transform the world before us. This can be an important lesson, especially for young people who may not have adequate structure in their upbringing due to the loss of parents or their home, or the breakdown of their society through civil war. They will need introspective tools to better understand themselves as self-defining and self-actualizing individuals as they grow up. It is about instilling personal agency and social reciprocity.

Refugee Settlements (Northern Uganda)

Doing art therapy projects in refugee camps is a necessary challenge. Refugee camps are comprised of vast domains of traumatized people, most often living in critically underfunded and underdeveloped remote locations.

84% of refugees in northern Uganda are women and children. Many of these children flee battle scenes barefoot, without food or money, and cross the border as unaccompanied minors. Uganda has one of the world's most compassionate refugee policies, which grants at-risk migrants from it’s neighboring countries land to self-build homes and ID cards to start new lives. But simply having a safe place to start your life over is not always enough. After having lost everything, people also need a reason to go on living. They need to heal and reconcile with the trauma, grief, and dislocation that fractures self-identity. They need hope. They need encouragement. And they need our respect and support.

Below are 7 interventions with young survivors of war recently displaced by neighboring wars in South Sudan and in the DRC: 1. Salaam Radio, 2. Bidibidi Dance Party, 3. Collective Painting of Radio Studio, 4. Bidibidi Feet Prints, 5. Drawing in Bidibidi, 6. Bidibidi Heart Shape, and 7. Drawing in Lobule

Salaam Radio (Bidibidi Refugee Settlement Section 3, Yumbe, Uganda, 2022)                                              

Salaam Radio, the first and only radio station and tower at the Bidibidi Refugee Settlement, was in disrepair and unable to serve one of the largest refugee settlements in the world. The project was completed in April of 2022 in collaboration with Community Empowerment for Creative Innovation who initiated the project. Following the completion of Salaam Radio, the keys were handed over the Bidibidi community who will run the radio station as they wish, autonomously.

Bidibidi Balloon Triangle Dance Party (Uganda, 2022)

We created a huge triangle of balloons attached to the radio tower and threw a dance party with music and watermelon for the inauguration of Salaam Radio.

Collective Painting of Salaam Radio (Bidibidi Section 3, Yumbe, Uganda, 2022)

The older kids in the teens and twenties were given the task to paint the walls of Salaam Radio. Upon our next return I look forward to hearing what DJ King Coco, MC Song, and MC Getto have cooking.

Human Body Heart Shape (Bidibidi)

The formation of a heart shape with over 200 South Sudanese child refugees living in the Bidibidi Refugee Settlement in the district of Yumbe in the northern Uganda, bordering South Sudan. Project was done in collaboration with Community Empowerment for Creative Innovation, a refugee-led nonprofit organization in northern Uganda.

Survivors’ Feet Prints/ Feet Prints of South Sudanese Civil War Refugees (Bidibidi Section 3, Yumbe, Uganda, 2022)

Bidibidi Refugee Settlement has become the unexpected home of nearly 300,000 South Sudanese fleeing the ongoing civil war in neighboring country the South Sudan.

In many countries, it is customary to include baby footprints on Birth Certificates. Not dissimilar, in most countries around the world, thumbprints are taken from those arrested and detained for a variety of reasons. Today, with high-tech phones in our pockets, digital thumbprints and facial recognition biometrics have normalized. But for children fleeing warzones, they often lose any record there may have been of their existence, to speak less of their identity.

The process of printing child survivors’ feet is about documenting their existence, giving them the opportunity to leave their trace, and enabling them to experience the thrill of making art as a collective.

Good & Bad Drawing Sessions (Bidibidi)

In this session, we have our young participants create two drawings on separate pieces of paper. On the first piece of paper they draw a bad memory and on the second piece of paper they draw a good memory. We then destroy the drawings of those bad memories in an effort to both physically and mentally overpower those bad memories.

Good & Bad Drawing Sessions (Lobule Refugee Settlement, Koboko, Uganda, 2022)

Lobule Refugee Settlement has become the unexpected home of nearly 6,000 Congolese fleeing the ongoing rebel wars in neighboring country the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In this camp, we also conducted interactive drawing sessions with the young refugees in an effort to release bad memories and celebrate what life still has in store for them.   

Child Sacrifice Survivors (Kyampisi, Uganda, 2022)

Child Sacrifice is a modern problem in Uganda. Children who become the victim of ceremonial sacrifice, if they survive, are often castrated, amputated, and scarred for life. The survivors of child sacrifice are the most resilient children I have ever met and this has much to do with the team at Kyampisi Childcare Ministries. All projects were collaborative and involved the participation and leadership of the children and the staff of KCM in 2022.

245 Flutes (Kyampisi)

Flute Distributions are essentially audible social sculptures and sound art interventions. 245 Flutes were distributed to every child patient under the care of Kyampisi Childcare Ministries’ rehabilitation center. This project is similar to The Haiti Project (2014-2015) where 240 Flutes were distributed to orphans from Cite Soleil following the 2010 earthquake.

Survivors’ Feet Prints/Feet Prints of Survivors of Child Sacrifice (Kyampisi, Uganda, 2022)

This project was about documenting the existence of child sacrifice survivors in Uganda by collecting feet prints of all the children at the Kyampisi Childcare Ministries’ Rehabilitation Center.

In many countries, it is customary to include baby footprints on Birth Certificates. Not dissimilar, in most countries around the world, thumbprints are taken from those arrested and detained for a variety of reasons. Today, with high-tech phones in our pockets, digital thumbprints and facial recognition biometrics have normalized. And yet, for those abandoned by their families or their communities in developing nations, there are often no records of these children. But they exist. They are here with us, seemingly without a trace.

The process of printing child survivors feet is about documenting their existence, giving them the opportunity to leave their trace, and enabling them to become painters and to experience the thrill of making art as a collective.

Good & Bad Drawing Sessions (Kyampisi)Destroying Bad Memories

In this session, we have our young clients/collaborators draw two drawings on two pieces of paper. On the first piece of paper we draw a bad memory and on the other piece of paper we draw a good memory. We then destroy the drawings of those bad memories in an effort to both physically and mentally overpower those bad memories.

Collective Painting (Kyampisi)

In this session, the children were asked to develop a superhero character, but each feature had to be drawn by a different person. This forced them to discuss the character, the colors, the process, and the composition. Collective Painting with guidelines allows for group problem-solving and group goal-orientation. It’s about group cohesion and co-intentionality. The children were divided into two groups, older and young, and two paintings of two different characters were collectively painted on plastic UNICEF refugee tarps.

Human Body Heart Shape (Kyampisi) 

A heart shape made of 44 child sacrifice survivors and 4 staff members in collaboration with Kyampsis Childcare Ministries.

Acknowledgments: This series of projects involving working with hundreds of children in remote parts of Africa could not have been possible without the help of my fabulous team, namely, my assistant producer/brother Abdou Touray, Jack Kirungi Mwanyi who was our driver and also assisted with the kids, and Issac Mwesige who assisted with cameras as well as inner-city politics. We also would not have been able to do these projects without the guidance and support of our friends Benson Soro and Rashid Taban of Community Empowerment for Creative Innovation (CECI) and our friends Peter Sewakiryangi, Harriet Mamubiru, and the rest of the amazing staff at Kyampisi Childcare Ministries (KCM), two of the most fantastic grassroots organizations on this planet!!! We also want to thank our friends Malish Bonjira and Jennifer Jagun at South Sudanese Refugee Association (SSURA) and Community Development Initiative (working in the refugee camps with young women). And lastly, we want to to thank all the government officials who assisted us in maneuvering through the Ugandan system.