For more than twenty years, civil war in northern Uganda has claimed women and children as its primary victims. It is estimated that the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has abducted as many as 66,000 youths, wrenched them from their families and forced them to become soldiers, porters and sex slaves. Up to 80% of the LRA rebels are children below 20 years of age. Led by psychopath Joseph Kony, an Acholi who claims to defend the rights of all Acholi people by waging war against the Ugandan government in the name of the Ten Commandments, the LRA has instead inflicted grotesque carnage and senseless chaos on them. Yet, whilst protecting the population of the north, the Ugandan military has perpetrated it’s own share of massive human rights abuses. At the peak of the conflict, spread out over 80% of the region, two million Ugandans lived in massive squalid camps, lacking access to basic sanitation and resources, and hundreds of thousands still subsist in these camps today. Tens of thousands of defenseless civilians were butchered and cultural traditions were severely weakened. After years of stalled peace talks, failed military attempts to apprehend Kony (now indicted as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court), and Kony’s subsequent retraction and insurgency into other regions, northern Uganda may no longer be officially at war, but neither is it psychologically at peace.

Beginning in the fall of 2005, McClintock lived in northern Uganda for just under a year, initially pursuing a desire to focus on humanitarian relief work through a photography program run out of Kampala. She felt trapped in a life where she wasn’t able to convey the passion and range of emotions that she felt about the world, and it is a delicate balance to convey both passion and rage, whilst not being sterilized by respectability and conformity. So she began weaving very tenuous threads of a new way of life, which led to months of travel throughout the northern part of the country where she learned firsthand of the ongoing civil war.