Turning Fear Into Joy: How a Community in Uganda Has Found Healing Through Climbing

The Recreation Project Uses Climbing to Address Trauma and Foster Resilience

By Rob Kyte | December 21, 2021

“People have lost so much hope, the way I did so long ago. In northern Uganda, everyone has gone through adversity. Every time I see people come and think ‘I cannot climb,’ I see the same thing I saw in myself. As they go through our training, they realize that it is a simple thing. And slowly, they make it. When they finish [our] programs, they say, ‘I’m going to make it out there. Nothing can stop me.’”

When Acellam Denish came to The Recreation Project (TRP), an adventure-focused organization based in Gulu in northern Uganda, he felt he had little chance to make a life for himself. 

“I was focusing on external ideas, pressure, and what people thought of me,” he said. 

Nonetheless, Denish joined TRP’s 15-week Climbing Club as a program facilitator, which uses climbing as a tool to provide experiential learning and teach life skills. Family and household dynamics, conflict resolution, stress management, and relationship-building are taught alongside technical climbing skills and safety requirements. Throughout the program, family members are invited to TRP’s outdoor center to see what the students are learning, engage in healthy dialogue to build nurturing home environments, and to climb together in a space that fosters a sense of trust, accountability, and community. The program wraps up with a wilderness excursion where students spend time in nature, learn camping skills, and safely rappel down a 50 meter cliff. 

Denish says that TRP helped him to “recover the truth” about himself.

“I started paying attention to myself, who I am, and what I can do for others,” he recalls. “Even if I don’t have parents or have enough money to go to university, I can still do a lot for myself. I realized that simple things can push you further and give you energy ... building positive connections with people in my life, that kept me on track.” 

Denish stayed on to continue working with TRP and now, five years later, he serves as their Community Program Coordinator. Denish sees himself as “proof that you can turn fear into joy.” When asked about his relationship with the students he now guides, Denish says that he is more than just a mentor: “I am a brother to them.” 

Between Climbing Club, the Primary School Program, and Children in Conflict With the Law, roughly 500 students will graduate from programs within TRP in 2021 alone. Their programs, though youth-centric, speak to people of all ages in the community of Gulu, encouraging them to invest in the youth of a region scarred by 40 years of recent violent history. 

In the early 2000s, conflict between local and government forces and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) were coming to a close in Northern Uganda. The LRA was a once-powerful Christian extremist organization whose influence spread across northern Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Between 1987 and the early 2000s, the LRA evolved into a personality cult centered around its leader, Joseph Kony, a self-declared prophet made infamous by the short documentary film Kony 2012. At its height, the LRA controlled swaths of land across Central Africa with as many as 3,000 active members, and today remains accused of various human rights abuses, including murder, abduction, mutilation, child-sex slavery, and the use of child soldiers. In a 2006 report, UNICEF estimated that more than 25,000 children were abducted or otherwise forced into servitude by the LRA, leading countless to their deaths and crippling an agricultural economy largely dependent upon plentiful labor. 

As conflicts came to a halt in the mid-2000s, thousands of displaced and abducted children began returning to their villages, but they were completely transformed by the traumas of slavery and war, and unable to be effectively reintegrated back into ‘normal’ society. 

Ben Porter, a board-certified life coach, member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, and a Licensed Professional Counsellor, was working as a psychosocial technical advisor in northern Uganda between 2005 and 2008 when he realized that things were not changing sufficiently for children returning from war. According to Hannah McCandless, who has served as the Managing Director of TRP since 2019: “There was tons of money being put toward reintegration. But so much of it was going toward putting youth and their parents in a hotel ballroom to teach them about PTSD. Ben noticed that they understood the theory, but in practice, kids' experiences in their communities were not changing.”

Porter had a vision to create an organization that could provide active healing experiences for children reintegrating into society. He went to the United States to fundraise for his vision, and returned in 2009 to co-found TRP in Gulu with Kimbal Kurtz, who owns and operates a contracting company in the Denver, CO, area, and Zach Hoins, COO of nonprofit Village Enterprise. 

During the last 12 years, TRP has created and refined a model that “provides youth with resilience education training delivered via outdoor adventure and play, opportunities to engage and give back to their community, and healthy relationships with peers and mentors,” according to their website. Additionally, TRP uses its model to provide parents and guardians with the tools necessary to support their youth and allow them to fulfill their potential. 

TRP focuses on building resilience through ‘controlled adversity,’ which McCandless describes as a combination of guidance, discipline, and transformation: 

I think that ‘life skills’ and ‘resilience’ are really diluted, especially when you look at the development space. So many programs that set out to build resilience and reach youth focus on ‘telling’ youth how they should act or behave in order to prepare them to overcome adversity. Controlled adversity and opportunities for mastery are about showing youth that they can overcome adversity. Resilience isn’t gifted. We don’t have some formula that allows us to ‘gift’ people their own resilience. Our job is just to show young people that they are resilient. For example: ‘Hey! You never thought you could climb that wall or belay someone, and now you [not only] can do it, but you do it all the time and you can teach other people to do it’… I think that more of the space around youth development needs to [involve] putting them in situations of controlled adversity in which they are safe, but have the opportunity to test themselves and learn about themselves. 

This was precisely the case for Rubangakene Godfrey, a former student of Climbing Club who now serves as Climbing Club Facilitator and Maintenance and Safety Coordinator at TRP.

“They brought me around and showed me the climbing wall and said I could reach the top. But I thought, ‘There is nothing I can do here.’ We have grown up knowing that the only way to succeed is to go to school and graduate. To me, that was the end of it,” Godfrey says. “[Now], every time TRP calls me, I abandon whatever I am doing and go to work. It is something that has made me who I am. It helps me keep thriving.

The same was true for countless others. At TRP, an activity they call “Lifeline” involves providing a space and opportunity for parents and children to openly discuss their relationship and find common ground. Lakot Faizal, one of six children, twice recalls being chased from her home by a mother who “did not look at [her] as important.” Through TRP, Faizal was given an opportunity to show her mother what she was learning at the outdoor center, who then permitted her other siblings to join. 

“I feel so happy and alive,” said Faizal. “I feel like I can manage problem solving.” 

Angee Kacilina, a businesswoman who works in the Olai-long Market in Gulu and a mother of four, learned about TRP from Anena Jackie, a Community Program Facilitator at TRP. The local boys refer to Angee simply as “Mama.”

“There is a car washing bay next to the market, and the boys there were so disrespectful, so much use of vulgar language. I witness[ed] one of them stab another guy’s hand, and illegal gambling happened there too,” Kacilina explained. “So, according to Jackie’s nature of work, we thought of involving them in Climbing Club training … Seven of them came and completed the training. I have so far seen big changes with these boys. There is no more unnecessary fighting like it used to be … [and] the use of vulgar language has been greatly eradicated. They can now listen to elders when their attention is called upon, and respect is something I have seen greatly improved.”

(Left) Lakot Faizal, Climbing Club graduate; (Right) Angee Kacilina, or, to the local boys, “Mama”. (Below) Chris Bongomin, graduate of the Climbing Club Program at The Recreation Project. Photos: The Recreation Project

“Life at home is very tough. All that I want is not there, so I always struggle to survive and work for home and self-consumption.”

Chris Bongomin, a recent graduate from TRP, entered the program in search of a new life and new skills at the recommendation of Angee Kacilina. On TRP’s blog, Chris describes how he and his friends used to be vulgar, chaotic, and violent. 

“Drinking was our thing,” he shares. “When I joined the Climbing Club, I acquired a lot of skills and changes, like new friends and new experiences. I learned more about my weaknesses and strengths, problem solving, decision-making skills, and good relationship building … The parent sessions, which my mom attended, helped me fix my relationship with my parents. Now I feel like my mom respects me, and she includes me in family meetings where everyone respects everyone’s opinions; it has made me feel valued.”

When asked how climbing has been a force for change in his life, Chris said: “In Climbing Club, I learned to trust people, I started believing in myself and started making good decisions … I think climbing is very powerful in a way that it makes it easier to express myself and develop my ideas. Climbing makes you gain hope in yourself when you feel like hope is lost.” 

Still, representation in the climbing community is often marginal at best. Though climbers throughout history have come from a variety of racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds, it is not often presented as such.

“[Climbing] is a powerful thing,” according to McCandless. “And our team knows first hand that it can be transformative for everyone, but when non-white people aren’t represented, it prevents [them] from experiencing its power.” 

So why is climbing—a sport so often championed and represented in the media by privileged, Western adventurists who have the means to travel widely in search of remote crags—at the epicenter of the work done at TRP? In Uganda, little is known about the sport, and many of those who are aware that it exists view adventure as a “muzungu” activity, a word used largely to refer to white tourists. 

But at TRP, climbing—and the opportunity to climb—is used as a motivational tool to improve oneself. 

“The exposure to climbing in the community is foreign,” says Godfrey. “When you get an opportunity to do such a thing, it’s a privilege … [When I began], I started noticing a lot of changes within myself. The way they [at TRP] speak to you, the way they talk to you and encourage you … it gives you a lot of courage. Sometimes you might have left home, and no one has ever praised you. Doing things on their own gives them a lot of hope; everything becomes a little bit easier.”

For the kids, seeing that people with whom they can identify are capable, knowledgeable climbers is a launchpad for their own ambitions both within TRP and beyond. 

“In this little bubble we live in,” explains McCandless, “the climbers are Godfrey and Chris and Denish and TK; all the kids that come at this point have heard about climbing because of their friends that have done it. It seems more attainable and accessible because of that.”

Today, Uganda has one of the youngest populations in the world. Nearly half of all Ugandans living in the country are under the age of 15, and a majority of them face adversity every day. Though the ripple effect of previous atrocities still affects communities in northern Uganda, the focus at TRP is beginning to shift away from strictly addressing the needs of former child soldiers and youth experiencing conflict-related adversity. 

“This region has changed tremendously,” McCandless reveals. “When I joined TRP in 2019, we needed to re-assess how we could continue to be valuable to youth today.” 

TRP is now aiming to address a wider range of issues affecting children in northern Uganda, with plans to expand and revisit modules to make them more applicable to today’s youth. The goal is to create a rehabilitative environment equipped to support a society where adversity is no longer defined entirely by past trauma caused by the LRA. 

TRP believes that building resilience and relationships founded on trust and respect lies at the heart of outdoor adventure. While the strategy has thus far been to directly involve the community in Gulu and show them the potential for climbing and outdoor recreation to create positive change, TRP is also looking to increase their exposure level beyond northern Uganda. 

Currently, entry is free for all programs at The Recreation Project, with costs covered primarily by donors, with some revenue generated through offering paid services. Over the next two years, however, the plan is to evolve from a donor model into a social enterprise model by providing more transformative outdoor adventure programs to paying clients. The revenue from those activities will allow TRP to continue offering free programs to children in the local community who have the most to gain from these experiences. This way, those who fund TRP’s programs are not just told of the work they are supporting, but can see for themselves the impact of their contribution. 

Fundraising, increased exposure, and staff training in preparation for upcoming expansion remain areas of key focus at TRP. McCandless also noted that since there is no African-based governing body for climbing in the continent to support and advise them, TRP currently operates independently and still accepts donations to fund its programs. 

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