"Ododo Wa" Community Dialogues

Background and Timeline

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) exhibit "Ododo Wa / Our Stories" focuses on girls’ experiences in war by centring the voices and stories of Grace Acan and Evelyn Amony. Grace and Evelyn were both abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group that fought against the Ugandan government for over twenty years. Grace was sixteen years old when she was abducted by the LRA from her school, St. Mary’s College, in Aboke, Uganda. She was among thirty abducted schoolgirls who came to be known as the “Aboke girls.” Grace spent eight years in captivity before she escaped the LRA. When Evelyn was eleven years old she was abducted by the LRA. She lived in captivity for over a decade until she was captured during a military ambush by the Ugandan army in 2005. Both Evelyn and Grace, like many other abductees, were taken to southern Sudan where they lived in the “bush” in LRA camps. Like many other girls, Grace and Evelyn were forced to marry a commander and bear children.

Both Grace and Evelyn have found sharing their stories to be central to their process of healing. They joined other women affected by war in a storytelling project and peer support group organized by Dr. Erin Baines (UBC) and the Justice and Reconciliation Project. For Grace and Evelyn, that was the beginning of "Ododo Wa / Our Stories." Drawings featured in the CMHR exhibit are from that original storytelling project. After sharing their stories, Grace, Evelyn, and other women affected by war in northern Uganda, founded the Women’s Advocacy Network in 2011 to advocate for justice and reparations for LRA captives and their children born in captivity.

Grace’s, Evelyn’s, and other war-affected women’s storytelling enabled the exhibit to come to fruition. Both Grace and Evelyn wrote memoirs about their experiences in LRA captivity. Their memoirs laid the foundation for an exhibit about women's and girls' experiences in war. 

The CMHR exhibit came together through an intensive collaboration with Grace, Evelyn, CMHR curator Isabelle Masson, York University's Conjugal Slavery in War (CSiW) Partnership project coordinator Véronique Bourget, and CSiW project director Professor Annie Bunting.

Follow the trajectory of Grace’s and Evelyn’s stories and the development of the exhibit in the Timeline below.