"Ododo Wa" Community Dialogues

"Ododo Wa" means "Our Stories"


"Ododo Wa" means "our stories" in the Acholi language of northern Uganda. 

On 23 October 2019 the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) launched the "Ododo Wa: Stories of Girls in War / Filles en temps de guerre" exhibit. It focuses on girls' experiences in war and the issues of abduction for forced marriage in conflict situations. It centres the stories of two girls, Grace Acan and Evelyn Amony, who were abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army. Acan and Amony, co-founders of the Women's Advocacy Network, are now grown women, mothers, researchers, activists, and authors. They survived years in captivity, escaped to freedom, and now they advocate for justice and reparations for survivors of conflict-related forced marriage and sexual violence.

Ododo Wa started as a storytelling group hosted by the Justice and Reconciliation Project for survivors in northern Uganda. In the storytelling group, survivors worked together and shared their experiences following their return from captivity.

Sharing experiences with other survivors was a healing process that led to the development of the Women's Advocacy Network.

Advocacy work surrounding the making of Ododo Wa as a community initiative contributes and engages with the global grassroots and judiciary network in support of survivors of conjugal slavery.
The Ododo Wa exhibit came together after years of collaboration between curator Isabelle Masson, Grace Acan, Evelyn Amony, Conjugal Slavery in War (CSiW )project coordinator Véronique Bourget, and CSiW project director Dr. Annie Bunting.       



Dr. Bunting explains that the exhibit has a long history and took years to develop. It began when Isabelle Masson came to Toronto and met with CSiW partners. That is when they started the process and began to grapple with “how to communicate the complexity and the urgency of the issues around reintegration for women, men, boys and girls who had been abducted in conflict situations, not just in Uganda, but also in Liberia, northern Nigeria, in Eastern Congo, and in Rwanda during the genocide” (Bunting, 2019).




Dr. Bunting and Grace Acan had previously met in 2011 in Freetown at the special court for Sierra Leone during a conference about abduction for forced marriage in conflict situations. “We were looking at the different situations in our partner countries and trying to have a sense of how international law and national reparations programs might respond to the needs of survivors in post-conflict situations" (Bunting, 2019). Evelyn Amony was also involved with organizing for peace and justice in east Africa as she held an essential role as a facilitator for discussions at the Juba peace talks which took place in South Sudan from 2006-2008. Acan and Amony both work now as researchers. Acan works as an archivist and researcher with Refugee Law Project. Amony is the chairperson of the Women's Advocacy Network and is involved in child tracing research.

Acan and Amony explain that the storytelling group hosted by the Justice and Reconciliation Project helped them process what they had been through and they each decided to write memoirs about their experiences. Their memoirs, which are available to purchase, were also foundational to the development of the exhibit. Dr. Bunting adds that the storytelling group, which was the space where drawings featured in the exhibit were created, was not “initially intended to be a public display of their stories. It was meant to be part of a healing process” (Bunting, 2019). Acan and Amony, who were both involved with the creation of the drawings, agreed with and supported the inclusion of the drawings in the exhibit. As Bunting explains,

“we've learned through their stories, reintegration in a post-conflict situation needs to respond to all of those complexities of the experiences of what happened during conflict and if we're not attentive to that, those programs will fail. If we don't actually pay attention to the hierarchies and the complex relationships that took place during war, then our post-conflict programs will not work” (Bunting, 2019).


It is through a survivor-centred lens that the fullness and complexities of conflict, transitional justice, and reintegration come into view.       

A traveling version of the exhibit, titled "Ododo Wa: Ododo pa anyira ikare me lweny," launched in Uganda in December 2019. The traveling exhibit, supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Connection Grant, was developed to facilitate community dialogues about justice, reparations, and the needs of survivors, their families, and communities in their local, regional, and national contexts.

Follow the journey of the traveling exhibit through the StoryMap.

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