KAMPALA, Uganda -- In this decade alone, Utah has resettled more than 6,000 refugees from more than 20 countries, holding out a promise of safe haven and opportunity. Do we deliver on that promise? A package of stories that concludes in today's newspaper suggests some of the refugees we initially embrace are doomed to a life of poverty in Utah.
    My journey to Uganda this spring showed me how few choices refugees have before coming to America. I had a glimpse of lives filled with unimaginable harshness.
    Uganda, home to camps that harbor thousands of refugees from Somalia, Rwanda, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and the Central African Republic, for now is more stable politically than its neighbors. But it also has a history of volatility and extreme violence. Ugandans, like other Africans, tend to view America as the land of hope and prosperity.
    When Winston Churchill visited Uganda he dubbed it the "pearl of Africa," as he surveyed fertile green savannah, lush forests, misty mountains and sparkling glaciers. But life for many of its friendly, generous, forgiving people is not so jewel-like.
    Here are some of their stories.
   
    Lillian
    Lillian greets us on the steps of her home in the capital of Kampala as darkness envelopes the city. She gives us a warm "Ugandan hug" usually reserved for friends and family.
    We meet her daughters, full of smiles. Her husband is more reserved and smells of alcohol. He shakes our hands, then excuses himself to do some work. My colleague Paul Henri, an editor with Congressional Quarterly, and I don't know it yet, but his absence is meant as an insult. He does not want Americans in his house.
    Our "home visit" was arranged to introduce us to the lifestyle of an ordinary family in Uganda's capital city.
    Lillian and her family aspire to be among the middle class, which in Uganda, as in other developing nations, is small. A civil servant, she works as a management specialist. Her husband is a retired public schoolteacher.
    They have lived in their new home for a month or so. It has been under construction for more than nine years - but still has no electricity or running water. It seems to embody the family's hope, determination and hard work.
    We sit knee to knee in the tiny living room with a chatty Lillian, two of her girls, a cousin, and Clare, her niece and our guide for the evening. Lillian has five children and has taken in two of her late brother's children. It is a story we hear often in our short visit in Uganda - one family raising the children of another because a family member is sick or has died.
    Lillian has prepared a traditional feast - a variety of root vegetables, chicken, rice, cooked mashed plantains, ground nut sauce and fresh fruit. Special for the Americans is bottled water.
    I marvel at how Lillian and her girls could prepare all this with no electricity or running water.
    Her husband comes in and out, along with his sons, to fill their plates and disappear. Each time he is a little more loaded, a little more agitated and a little freer with his observations about white Americans in his house. His "work," it seems, is drinking with his sons and some neighbors around an open fire in the back yard.
    After we eat by candlelight and flashlight, the girls bring out scrapbooks. They seem so happy and proud to share photographs of school, family parties, graduations and weddings. It is easy to catch their excitement.
    Then their father returns. He says again that he has never had a white woman in his house, let alone an American. He wants to shake hands, then hold hands, then hug. He talks on about life and politics in Uganda, about how he and his family have to live after years of toil and hardship. Like this, he says, swinging his arm around the shadowy, crowded living room. I hear the frustration. The disappointment. The anger.
    He says his wife supports the government. He doesn't. How could he, he asks. How could she? All the lies, the corruption.
    Lillian and the girls grow silent, never challenging the man of the house. One of the girls heads for her bedroom, crying.
    He finally sits down. Then he's up again. I have a message for you to take back to your president, he says, your president who supports dictators. And take this message to the American people because they elect and support this President Bush. If you back a dictator here, we will fight you. Understand my message, he repeats, his voice rising, understand what I am saying. We will fight you.
    Several days later, Lillian comes to see us. In the spacious, immaculate, lavishly furnished hotel lobby, she asks us to excuse her husband. He is sick with HIV. When he mixes drink with his medicine, it makes him a little crazy and despair bubbles up.
    The morning is hectic because we are leaving for the airport. In a rush of people and suitcases, I lose track of Lillian. She has left the hotel - gone without a hug, without a thank you, without a promise to stay in touch. Gone without the hope I wished so much to share - but which for her may have been a lie.
   
    Eva
    Eva Turyastte did everything she could to get her husband to take anti-retroviral drugs for AIDS. He refused. He was too proud, thought himself too manly. She watched as he grew sicker, thinner, weaker - then died. The bush village schoolteacher left his pregnant wife with a 13-year-old daughter, Patricia. When her baby was born, Eva named him Blessing.
    She already had lost two children to unknown diseases. It could have been malaria, which kills thousands each year in Uganda. Or dysentery, tuberculosis, whooping cough, Ebola virus or any number of illnesses common here.
    Uganda's fertile land and abundant rain mean its people usually have enough to eat, but medical care is scarce. Reports on the doctor/patient ratio range from one doctor for every 13,000 people to one doctor for 45,000 people. The actual number is probably somewhere in the middle.
    So new health-care initiatives focus on disease prevention.
    Eva participates in the Rakai Health Services program, which gathers villagers from throughout the rural Rakai District to discuss how to prevent HIV and other communicable diseases. The program pays participants a few shillings to carry the health-care message back to their home villages and to people along the way. Eva comes from the village of Lyantonde, about 35 miles west of Rakai.
    Eva says God told her to talk to me after a group of American journalists were introduced at the village meeting. Tell the world about us, she says. Explain who we are and how we are living.
   
    Anthony and Jane Frances
    Anthony and Jane Frances sit with other children on a bench along the outside wall of a Rakai field clinic. They, as all the children here, are AIDS orphans and HIV positive.
    At 17, Anthony is the oldest but one of the smallest of the kids. He looks to be about 8. His mom died of AIDS; his stepmom didn't want him around. So he has lived by himself in a tiny hut on the edge of a bush village for the past eight years. He has been truly alone since his dad died six years ago. When he talks about his parents, his great brown eyes fill and spill over.
    Anthony says he likes school and the idea that he could become a businessman. He cruises his village to capture wild chickens and hidden eggs to trade or sell. It is a good job for him. Without the slightest hint of a smile, he says he wants to expand this business so he can have a few things.
    Jane Frances, at age 13, is also alone. Her story sounds familiar. Her dad died, and her mother's new husband doesn't want her. She stays in a room at a rural schoolhouse or sometimes with an older sister. Both she and Anthony are receiving anti-retroviral treatment for AIDS. Jane Frances is responding, but Anthony is not.
   
    Col. Ochora
    Col. Walter Ochora tells stories too obscenely violent to repeat, stories about rebel outlaws who abduct children and force the boys to be soldiers and the girls to be servants and sex slaves.
    This is not a new story for Africa, but it is an awful one.
    Uganda has not had a single peaceful transfer of power since its independence from Great Britain in 1962. Hundreds of thousands of Ugandans were killed in ethnic retaliations during the rule of Milton Obote and Idi Amin Dada.
    The current president, Yoweri Museveni, came to power in a coup in 1986. Twenty-one years later, the Lord's Resistance Army led by Joseph Kony is still active in the north, and still abducts children. Estimates run as high as 20,000 kidnappings over the years. In May, the LRA carried off more than 100 children from southern Sudan, Central African Republic and the Congo.
    Ochora, himself once a rebel and later a commander in the Ugandan army, is now a district commissioner in the area most torn by insurrection. He has tried eight times to negotiate a peace agreement with Kony. But he believes the rebel, who he describes as messianic and delusional, will never give up because he fears retaliation for his atrocities. Kony killed the first negotiators who came to him, terrorized his home village and killed his own father.
    Ochora describes vulnerable, captive children reared in the bush by the rebels. They are berated, beaten and forced into acts of extreme violence, acts so horrendous as to dehumanize. The girls must submit to soldiers in any way demanded. The boys are made to torture, maim and kill, sometimes their siblings, their parents or their villagers. They can't go home and they can't leave the army. They can't do much other than what Kony and company condition them to do.
   
    Norah
    Listening to Ochora describe his experience with Kony, Norah Phoebe Okello quietly weeps. She has lived her own horror with the LRA. She only reluctantly shares her story on the chance it might help some other mother, some other daughter.
    The LRA abducted her 14-year-old girl in 1996. She did everything she could to get her back. She went to village leaders, government agencies and nongovernmental agencies. She traded sexual favors to get information and organized other mothers of stolen children.
    Nothing worked. In fact, it made things worse. Her captive daughter was treated even more harshly. Word of Norah's activities always got back to the LRA.
    She and other mothers took to following the army around. They were harassed, beaten, raped. And the bush can be very dangerous. There is the heat and disease, the search for food, stray rebels, snakes and rivers of deep, rushing water.
    A weary Norah finally returned to her village. One day - eight years after she was taken - her daughter came home. She carried a 2-year-old on her hip and was pregnant with another.
    Norah does not ask her daughter about the nightmare she lived, not even how she broke free. Still now, four years later, they do not talk about it. The girl remains quiet and isolated and neither sleeps well.
    But it is enough for Norah that her girl is back. She will not ask for more.
    ------------
    Nancy Conway is editor of The Salt Lake Tribune. Contact her at nconway@sltrib.com or 801-257-8700.