Normalizing Conflict

What continually amazed me in Gulu was how people seemed to move about life as though nothing had ever happened to them. One woman named Ana told me how her sister had lost both of her husbands to the rebels. One had been murdered in an ambush. Soon after her sister remarried her second husband was "hacked to pieces" in front of his parents whom he had been checking on. Ana told me this as though it was just another every day occurrence. This wasn’t a unique conversation to have with someone in Gulu.

Is it possible for people to normalize conflict? It seems as though if people want to move forward in life, then they have to separate themselves emotionally from what has happened or is happening. If they think about it, they will not be able to move on. They seem totally accustomed to the horrors they experience. What is this phenomenon? It’s disturbing, yet it seems necessary on so many levels. Ryszard Kapuscinski describes it better than I can...

“It is a beautiful and heartening thing, this obstinate, heroic human striving for normality, this almost instinctive searching for it – no matter what. Ordinary people here treat political cataclysms –coups d’état, military takeovers, revolutions, and wars – as phenomena belonging to the realm of nature. They approach them with exactly the same apathetic resignation and fatalism as they would a tempest. One can do nothing about them; one must simply wait them out, hiding under the roof, peering out from time to time to observe the sky – has the lightning ceased, are the clouds departing? If yes, then one can step outside once again and resume that which was momentarily interrupted – work, a journey, sitting in the sun.”