Ellen Rose Lalam can't remember the exact year her when her husband was hacked to death with a panga blade in a raid on her village.

"2001," the group of villagers surrounding her murmurs when she can't come up with the date.

"Eeeehhhhh," Ellen says, tilting her chin towards the gray sky. She wears a strand of yellow, white and burnt orange beads. But, like most things in northern Uganda, there's never enough to go around, leaving the threadbare string exposed where the beads are finished.

"I don't care about the rebels. I just want this over," she says.

It's been a long and bitter conflict, but many people from the Acholi tribe in northern Uganda - the people who have been most affected by the conflict that's been wreaking havoc on their lives for more than 20years - think that a bitter drink is the solution to the problem.

They're ready to solve the problem and go home. But is anyone listening to them?

Saturday July 14 marks the one year anniversary of the Juba peace talks. These efforts have so far been the most successful of many failed efforts at creating peace between rebels from the Lord's Resistance Army and the Ugandan Government. However, the talks hinge on five agenda points, and point three - accountability - is the most contentious and the most important.

People in Uganda's north would prefer "mato oput", a form of traditional justice, which literally means to drink a bitter potion made from the oput tree.

The ceremony often involves other components, breaking a raw egg and exchanging livestock, and drinking the bitter brew is the culmination.

But the International Criminal Court and the Ugandan Government are pursuing arrest warrants for LRA head Joseph Kony and some of his commanders. The LRA says it will not sign any peace accords until the warrant is dropped.

Meanwhile, people in the north feel this kind of justice is unnecessary.

"We drink and we are finished," Lalam says.

Mato oput isn't the only thing people are doing to try and bring peace. They're building four memorials with inscribed names of the dead, and forming community justice committees where people come together to give a verdict on the accused and set punishments in a group setting.

And finally, they're trying to go home.

"Until and unless the people reconcile, the country will not be in peace," says Livingstone Okello Okello, a member of parliament from Chua in northern Uganda. "We need to reconcile ourselves and... we have to find out who has done what and who has wronged who."

Okello recommends, in addition to traditional justice, something similar to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Committee or Rwanda's gacaca courts, in which the community comes together to serve justice to the persecutors.

"You have to compensate someone for something," he says.

Other forms of traditional justice are being demanded by different tribes affected by the conflict. In the Lango region, kayo cuk is the method of traditional justice that the people Langi people feel will right the balance of all that has gone wrong, so they can make peace and go home.

People are indeed ready to go home - and they are on the move, in droves. It's not entirely by choice, however, and many can't go back to their original homes.

A government edict at the end of 2006 declared that crowded camps for internally displaced people should be "decongested." People have been moving out of these sites to smaller camps near their original homes, but not to their actual original homes.

For most people, those original homes no longer exist.

Lalam's house was burned along with 20 other huts during the raid on their village.

While there were as many as 2 million people in camps at the height of the conflict, there are still about 1.6 million people living camp life.

Some regions have seen many people return home. Though only 1 percent of the Acholi are homeward bound, about 90 percent of people in the Lango and Tesso regions have returned home.

"People have had a long experience of watching this government engage in a peace process that has had the opposite effects. People are careful, and vulnerable," says Chris Dolan, director of Refugee Law Project, a Ugandan research and advocacy organisation that offers legal aid to refugees.

"They're malnourished, they're sick, their land is overgrown and needs clearing, and they need to rebuild houses. The difficulties of going home are substantial," he says.

Lalam wants to know: "What is waiting for me? When will there be peace?"

After a year of talks, and little agreement on contentious issues, no one has answers for Lalam or her neighbours, and few seem to be listening to what they want.

Mato oput could solve the problem for them, but the government isn't ready to concede to such a bitter solution.

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