Joanne Norton’s “The Soroti Project”

In 1987, a man named Joseph Kony emerged in northern Uganda as the head of a rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA. While fighting and rebel armies in Africa are nothing new, Kony brought a new level of barbarity to warfare – killing adults and capturing children for both soldiers and sexual slaves.

The LRA’s activities went on until 2006, when a truce was worked out with the Ugandan government and the LRA seemingly disappeared toward the Congo or (some say) Sudan. In between, an estimated 100,000 people were killed, 20,000 children abducted and 1.5 million citizens forced to flee, many ending up in what were called “IDP camps,” or the refugee sites of “Internally Displaced Persons.”

The statistics contain sufficient horror. The individual stories describe the horror in human terms that bring the statistics home. But while there was the horror, there was also hope. And that is the story told by Joanne Norton in The Soroti Project: A Heart-Filled and Heartless Story in Uganda.

Norton had worked as a missionary in Uganda previously, and she eventually found herself called back to a place to which she thought she’d never return. She found the horror and the tragedy, and she found the hope.

Just as she did in her book The Annie Project, Norton writes her story as fiction, combining both her own real experiences (and some actual photos) with a fictional technique. But the stories are real.

The story focuses on one IDP camp, located northeast of the capital of Kampala near the town of Soroti. Norton and fellow missionaries live there for a time, working with the people, local churches, and friends. She leaves little to the imagination about the living conditions the missionaries experienced – ongoing worries about the food and water; mosquitoes and malaria; threats to personal safety; and the conditions of latrines.

An IDP camp

But these pale in comparison to the stories she tells.

Children who were enslaved but managed to escape. A man who the LRA thought it killed three times, until the soldiers threatened to kill their captain if he tried again. The teenage boy Boniface, who died in the arms of his sister. The pastors who risked their lives to serve the refugees and victims. The good humor and laughter of the people in spite of what they’ve endured. And the growth and spread of Christian faith.

The Soroti Project is a deeply moving account, not only for making the experience of millions of people real but also for the hope that’s always there.

Related: My review of The Annie Project.

Image of Soroti Rock (top) via Wikipedia, used with permission under Creative Commons license. Map of Uganda via InfoPlease. Public domain photograph of an IDP camp via USAID.

Joanne Norton’s “The Annie Project”

Many novels contain events, scenes and people taken from the author’s life. “Write what you know” is a familiar dictum from editors and critics, and most writers, even those who write fantasy and science fiction, take that advice to heart.

But it’s not often that one reads an introduction to a novel an admission that the author is two of the main characters of the story. Right at the beginning of The Annie Project, Joanne Norton makes that statement: “I am two of the main characters. My official name is Carolyn Joanne, although I’ve been only called Joanne since birth. So, in the book, I am ‘Cary’ and ‘Annie.’”

What that statement does, of course, is tell the reader that while this is a novel, it is also something of a memoir, something of an autobiography, and, in Norton’s hands, something of a testimony.

But most of all, The Annie Project is a story, a big story, the story of how an elderly woman’s concern about a young girl next door leads to the redemption of a family.

Cary Nolan is a recent widow, a former missionary, a mother and a grandmother. After her husband’s death, she moves to a small town called Newton to be closer to her children. And next door is a mother who drinks herself in an alcoholic stupor, a teenaged boy constantly in trouble with the law, and a 12-year-old girl named Annie who’s angry at the world. They’ve been abandoned by the father.

Norton on a mission trip in Uganda

Cary looks at Annie, and Cary sees a lot of herself. Perhaps too much of herself.

So Cary decides to do something. She has enough wisdom to know that reaching out to Annie won’t be an all-or-nothing proposition, but more of a little bit here and a little bit there. And it won’t be all victories.

Things happen in The Annie Project. Lots of things. Annie’s mother disappears. The father returns. Annie’s brother gets into more trouble. Cary goes on a short-term mission trip to Uganda (and, I suspect, an event in the novel that is clearly autobiographical).

Norton writes with passion. She is passionate about Annie’s story, because she is passionate about her own story. She knows the meaning of grace, both receiving and giving it. She’s passionate about sharing the grace she’s been given.

And she knows that while this may be Annie’s/Cary’s/Joanne’s story, it is also our story.