Unsure what to expect in a village he abandoned a decade ago, Ernest Odongo decided to go home with his two wives but leave their 14 children at Awer camp in Gulu District, northern Uganda.

"We left the children at the camp because they can access education, medication, security and safe water there," the 49-year-old father said. "The rest of us are living in what remains of a home we left on 10 December, 1996. Our family is a divided affair."

Odongo is one of the thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in northern Uganda who have decided to voluntarily leave the camps they have lived in for years and return to their original villages.

However, they are returning to homes overgrown or sometimes destroyed – especially in the Acholi sub-region, the centre of more than two decades of fighting between Ugandan government troops and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

"We fled Amilobo village for Awer camp after the LRA camped in the next village and the UPDF [Uganda People's Defence Forces] shelled indiscriminately from the opposite hills," Odongo said. "We were in the middle."

Aid agencies provide resettlement kits to support IDPs who voluntarily want to return home. "They are given some agricultural seeds and tools, then some food for three months to help them cultivate their gardens," said Lydia Wamala, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) information officer in Uganda.

Bai Mankay Sankoh, head of the WFP office in Gulu, said most returnees are provided with 50 percent of their daily food needs, while the "extremely vulnerable people" receive most of their food needs.

"When the three months resettlement rations are exhausted, an assessment will be made to determine the new demands," he added.

On 7 August, more than 3,000 households in Awer received maize, peas and oil from WFP. According to the agency, up to 122,630 IDPs were expected to leave the camps in Gulu and Amuru districts by the end of August. Another 75,000 were to leave the camps in Pader district and 36,000 in Lango sub-region by October.

Challenges of return

Odongo, who is also the village leader in Amilobo, said the returnees experience many challenges back in the villages, from food supplies to security threats.

"We are faced with uncertainty in food availability; the food we have planted is not yet ready for harvesting," he explained. "Feeder roads are not there, health and education facilities are non-functional and schools were all displaced."

A lack of agricultural tools and seeds has been another impediment to regaining self-reliance, he added.

Other IDPs in Awer also raised concerns, citing uncertainty over the on-off peace talks between the Ugandan government and the LRA in the Southern Sudan capital of Juba.

Analysts, however, say the Juba peace process offers the best chance yet for a peaceful resolution to the northern Uganda crisis.
 
"Many of us still fear that the peace talks will fail, preferring to wait here until a treaty between the government and the LRA is signed," Benjamin Oballim, 78, camp leader at Awer said.

People, he said, were also nervous of local thugs known as the "bokech" and the presence of live ordinances in the area.

"Recently in the village of Pakiri, some people unearthed two objects when they were digging and called in the army to remove them," Oballim said.

"We fear that more are still lying somewhere. In Amilobo, for example, there was heavy fighting for several days and we believe these things are still there,” he added. “All the areas should be surveyed before we can return."
 
The Ugandan army spokesman in the region, Lieutenant Chris Magezi, said up to 300 pieces of bombs, mines and other live ordinances have been recovered across the region, and that signs warning of the dangers have been put up.

"We have recorded some incidents of blasts involving IDPs – a recent one being in Lira, where a bomb inside scrap metal exploded, killing four people and injuring six others," Magezi said. "The army’s engineering unit is on standby to answer any calls about any suspicious object."

Security remains one of the biggest worries for IDPs. Grace Adoch, 45, said the possibility of their children being abducted and recruited as child soldiers haunted her.

"When we came here, we had very few children, but now we have more and we fear that they will be abducted if we return," she said. "If they signed the peace agreement today, we would immediately start going back because life in camps is not pleasant at all."
 
At Awer camp and the neighbouring villages, many IDPs say they want to resume their 'normal' lives back home.
 
"If I was to have direct talks with Kony [Joseph, LRA leader], I would tell him as a mother, ‘listen to the suffering people and come back home. We have suffered enough’," Perusi Ladok, 52, said.
 
With the help of her six children, she has built small grass thatched huts at her village, Obul Okano, three kilometres from Awer camp. "My message to President Yoweri Museveni is that ‘your government should negotiate with the LRA and not just reject whatever the LRA asks’.”

Ladok has tried to convince other people to follow her back to the village, but said they were afraid of the peace talks failing.

Like Ladok, 50-year old Regina Robongoye moved from the camp to a nearby village. Carrying her nine-month-old granddaughter on her back, she walked almost five kilometres to her new home with 30 kilogrammes of maize meal balanced on her head.

She left some of the food she received from WFP at the camp with her children, who go to the school there. "I am hoping to survive on what I am carrying until the harvest in September," she said.

At the village, her husband Peter was busy clearing the grass in the compound of their newly erected grass hut. There was nothing inside but a papyrus mat and a blanket, a bicycle and a sack full of groundnuts – the first harvest since they returned home.

"If we continue receiving enough rainfall in this area, we should be able to meet all our food requirements by March next year," Ladok said. "But unless social services are brought closer to the villages, families will continue to be divided – which will have an impact on the behaviour of the children."
 
Aid workers said up to 1.2 million people are still living in camps dotted across the vast region and these will continue to require relief aid.