Alphabet soup.

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I’ve come to pass most of my mornings at the Kope Café, a Western-style coffee house run by the family of Jolly from HEALS. With the café’s proceeds going to help local kids through the organization, it’s become a favorite pit-stop for NGO workers looking to indulge their philanthropic impulses over coffees and curries. Partly they come to help a worthy cause; mostly I suspect they - like me - are happy to find a place in Gulu that feels close to home. With colorful murals on the walls and fairy lights twinkling over the couches, it’s just a shade removed from the sort of hang-out you’d find in any American college town. Not surprisingly, the place was conceived by an enthusiastic young volunteer from the Pacific Northwest. He’d come to Gulu to work with Invisible Children before dreaming up Kope, and he spends the better part of his days buzzing around the place, tinkering with the new espresso machine and carrying in cartons of eggs and looking for an outlet for his abundant energies.

If Kope has become the café of choice for the local volunteer community, it’s become, by extension, the café of choice for Gulu’s street kids - a place of almost boundless economic potential. They shuffle around in bare feet outside, batting their eyes and chirping “Mzungu! Mzungu!” before one of the employees shoos them away. One day a boy comes to the window and sticks his bony little arm through the bars. “Mister, please,” he says. “Do you have a storybook?” It’s the first time I’ve heard such an improbable plea in Uganda - a cry from the educational abyss that tugs at all my writerly heartstrings. The next day I bring him a copy of Journey to the Center of the Earth - a book I’d been given in Guatemala nearly two years ago - and he lets out a tiny, muted squeal. He runs his fingers over the cover, as if each crease and water stain might impart some of the secret wisdom buried inside. Other days a brazen old woman will come inside and thrust a weathered hand in our faces. Years, centuries of sorrow seem to be etched into each ridge and furrow in her forehead. Her sunken cheeks dare us to deny her. We hand her a few coins and feel bad about ourselves for a while.

It’s been a strange, tumultuous few days here in Gulu: the orphans, the refugees, the aged, the sick - a full catalogue of loss and human sorrows. And yet somehow, in spite of it all, these cheerful packs of aid workers crowd into Kope each day, their eyes lit with messianic zeal, true believers in the church of the international aid community. Working with Invisible Children, or HEALS, or - like Sean, an energetic young American filmmaker - simply coming to lend their help to the common cause. How good it must be to have faith, to be genuinely touched by the grace of good works (or, at least, good intentions).

In Kenya, I’d come to greet these young aid workers with a certain degree of skepticism: as if poor, forsaken Africa had a couple of severed limbs, and these bright-eyed volunteers were hoping to add a few Band-Aids before scampering back to their cozy Western lives. It was an unfair and reductive way to look at them, to be sure - a reflection, perhaps, of my own sense of futility. But was there any project more hopeless, I wondered, than trying to build a future on this continent’s shaky foundations? I think of the volunteers I met in Nairobi, who’d come to Kenya to rebuild a rural school built by other volunteers just four years ago. It was already falling to pieces, battered by the elements, crippled by neglect. At the heart of their futility seemed to be the very quandary of the modern aid dilemma: how many times do you have to prop a country up before it can stand on its own two feet?

In Gulu, though, I have my first close encounters with these African NGOs. I meet young foreigners full of hope and cheer and bundles of good intentions. I meet the Ugandans working to pull their people out of these endless cycles of misery. I meet boys and girls - their families ravaged by war and disease - who bravely commit themselves to whatever fickle prospects the future might hold. It’s such a sweet, sad, hopeful place, the streets lined with storefront NGOs - Alliance for African Assistance, CARE International, War Affected Children Association, Quaker Peace & Social Witness - an alphabet soup of acronyms to feed these empty stomachs. The SUVs muscle down the dusty roads, past old women on crutches and barefoot street kids and skeletal wooden shops that look set to blow away with the first strong gust of wind. And the question that keeps coming back to me, with heartbreaking sincerity, is why I should be so hung up on the problem of changing Africa, when there’s something so inherently noble and good in changing just a few African lives.

Still not willing to throw myself in with the good-works lot, I latch onto Borja as he struggles to get his photography school up and running. We have lunch at Kope one afternoon and then head to HEALS. Borja, standing with his hands on his hips, surveying the room that will become - through some miracle of faith and fortune - his students’ photo lab, has been visibly worn out by his ordeal. It’s been a year since he first visited Gulu, when the idea for this project came to him. For the past year he’s worked on raising funds in Jerez, on petitioning photographer friends to donate their old cameras, on navigating the tangles of red tape put in place by the bureaucrats here in Uganda. He’s collected boxes of equipment: a dozen state-of-the-art cameras, 600 meters of film, bottles of chemicals, stacks of high-quality paper. Most of them are sitting at the airport in Entebbe, hijacked by customs officials demanding extortionate import taxes. Borja was forced to spend an extra 500 euros out of his own pocket; now DHL is insisting that they’d only agreed to ship the parcels as far as Kampala - a claim contradicted by the wrinkled receipt he shows me, the name “Gulu” printed clearly across the top.

It’s been one hurdle after the last. Now this filthy room with the peeling paint, the holes in the wall, the corrugated-tin roof. They’ll board up the windows and create Borja’s dark room, a place for his students to blindly fumble with their film and emerge, dazed and blinking, into the light of some strange new day. He doesn’t want to teach these kids photography as a hobby, or an art-form; he wants them to take away practical skills that they can use to find work. At an assembly in the HEALS yard, where he was being introduced to his prospective students, Borja explained how they might be able to follow in his own footsteps.

“You can take pictures for the newspapers,” he said, “or if you have friends, and they are getting married, you can take pictures of their wedding. And this way you can make some money.”

There was some scattered applause from the crowd, mostly young kids in plastic sandals and oversized t-shirts who didn’t always seem to follow what he was saying. But when he circled around to take pictures they were transfixed, watching his massive telescopic lens with wide, awestruck eyes.

Now, in the photo lab, taking rough measurements of the room, Borja talks with Denis about culling a crop of potential photographers from that ragtag assembly. There are two older boys, Steven and Richard, who have shown great promise. For the ten other cameras, they’ll have to choose with care, and Borja runs through a list of qualities they have to look out for. The students have to be bright, and serious, and have a good command of English; for most, any actual skill with the camera is more or less a bonus.

Borja’s eyes sweep across the room; it’s already late in the day - a Sunday afternoon - and he wants to have the room furnished by the time lessons start later in the week. We walk through the dwindling light to a furniture shop nearby, where a half-dozen young guys are standing in a muddy yard, gathered around a few wobbly tables. They’re holding hammers and handsaws and staring expectantly at the skeletal frame of a cabinet, as if they expect it to sprout legs and do the Charleston. Borja begins to explain his order, while Denis pads his brow and struggles to translate. There’s a confused, murmurous debate, whether at the prospective asking price or the fussiness of Borja’s demands, I’m not entirely sure. Finally something is agreed on, though we don’t know just what. We shake hands and Borja agrees to come back in the morning, anxious to do something - anything - to get this project up and running.

The days drag on. By late in the week Borja’s afraid the packages won’t arrive till Monday - a possibility that would more or less render this whole trip an extravagant waste of time. Each night he puffs Dunhills and knocks back Clubs at Kope Café, hoping to hear good news from Kampala. Finally he gets a call from Jolly’s husband: the boxes are going to be packed onto a Post bus the following day. Borja laughs, hopeful, triumphant. The next afternoon, when I get to HEALS, he’s giddily unpacking cameras and lenses and rolls of film onto the floor, surrounded by a few curious kids. Later I’ll see those same kids - scruffy and unkempt, loosely outfitted in moth-eaten shirts - prancing around the yard with pricey Nikkons and Canons slung around their necks.

It seems like a bold leap of faith: to entrust these kids with cameras that cost about as much as many Ugandan families make in a year. When one girl, enthusiastically winding a new roll of film, tugs on a lever too hard, we hear a terrible pop. Borja takes the camera and fusses with it for a few seconds before his face darkens. “We have one less camera now,” he says wearily. The girl wilts into her chair. The others run wildly around the yard, ignoring Borja as he calls out to meter the light or check the F-stop. How long can this possibly last?

After two turbulent days the class has made it through their first rolls of film. They disappear into the dark room one morning: first one group, led by Borja; then another, led by a Canadian photographer, Stacy, who’s been helping out for the past few days. Already she’s been a welcome balm to Borja’s nerves, bridging the language barrier as he fumbles to teach in his second tongue, filling the gaps in his technical knowledge (and discovering, for example, that the broken camera wasn’t broken, after all). Yet at times the two of them seem overwhelmed by the task at hand. And is it asking too much to assume that the class will still function in two weeks’ time, when they’ve both returned to their normal lives?

There are squeals and peals of laughter from the dark room. Minutes later the kids come rushing out, racing and bounding across the yard, trailing long ribbons of negatives behind. They huddle around me and point to the tiny exposures of boda-bodas and bicycles, of the embarrassed portraits they took of their classmates, of chairs and desks and trees. There’s a sense of wonder at the miracles they’ve accomplished, these remarkable reproductions of their everyday lives. And they rush out the gate, chasing each other with shouts and cries, conjuring a world of possibility from the thin, twilit air.

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