Caroline Green, senior media officer with Oxfam International, witnessed first hand the nightmare of northern Uganda’s “forgotten” conflict. Here are notes from her diary.

Monday 16 May

I’m sitting under a mosquito net in my hotel room in Kitgum town, northern Uganda, feeling incredibly lucky to have a bed to sleep in after what I’ve seen tonight.

I’ve come here as part of an Oxfam team to try to understand the devastating conflict that has raged for nearly 20 years and killed half a million people.

Africa’s longest running war is a complex battle between Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels and the government of Uganda. With peace talks currently stalled, the LRA has increased its violent attacks upon civilians in the past couple of months, and people are becoming more and more afraid.

The result of two decades of violent confrontation is that almost two million people have been forced from their homes into camps, where they are trapped without employment, land and barely enough water and food.

While hundreds of thousands of children, men and women are struggling to survive every day, most people in the Western world have never even heard of conflict.

Tonight we drove through town and saw the “Kitgum night dwellers” - hundreds of young kids sleeping on the concrete porches of shop fronts, crowded around fluorescent lights to try and read school books.

They were sheltering from the LRA, who routinely break into the camps and abduct young children to become child soldiers and forcing girls to "marry" camp commanders and have their children.

To avoid such a fate, these kids walk more than four kilometers every night, carrying their bedrolls, into the centre of the town to sleep. In the morning they get up when light breaks to walk back to the camps and attend terribly overcrowded school classes during the day, returning to the town at night.

Tuesday 17 May

We visit the Labuje camp, on the outskirts of Kitgum, populated by 17,500 people.

There is hardly room to move on the red dusty earth between the cramped mud brick thatched huts, or “tukuls”, which are each home to seven or eight people. Oxfam and other agencies have built two wells providing clean water and Oxfam has built latrines and given plastic sheeting for shelter and other equipment.

Yet as Dick Obita, the local council representative for the camp, explains to us, the needs are huge. There is one school for the entire camp and over three hundred children in one class.

“Education is a problem. We have been left behind other people in other parts of Uganda,” he told us. “So much so that I don’t know how we are going to pick up.”

His list of the troubles faced by people in the camp ranges from ringworm and diarrhea to attacks from rebels, HIV/AIDS and the loss of culture as people are driven from their traditional village way of life

“Right now the poverty level in the camp is very high,” he said.

Yet despite their hardship, Obita believes that hope is not lost.

“We believe we can have peace… To me, talking is better than the military option. We have had the military option for many years. We need to create conditions for peace and cooperation.”

Walking through the dusty camp I meet Alex Ocheng, a 50-year-old father who has spent four years in the camp. While his kids crowd around my digital camera with obvious amazement and delight, he explains he is desperate for people outside Uganda to realise the terrible situation northerners are in.

“Why can’t the world see us and take us back home? I want the peace talks to work – let me take my children home, not in the camp. Let this war end. We are losing our chance.”

While the children sit in cramped classrooms, women spend hours queuing in the hot sunshine, waiting for their turn to fill bright yellow jerry cans with precious water, which must be used by their entire families.

Most of the men, with no farms to go to and no paid employment, wander aimlessly through the tukuls, frustrated at a situation completely out of their control.

As the children flashed huge grins at us and eagerly chatted amongst themselves about what we were doing, I suddenly become aware that this is the only life that most of the youngest ones have ever known.

In the afternoon we visited the enthusiastic Fred Nyero, who heads an organization called KICWA that provides psychosocial support to children who have managed to escape from the rebel army.

The centre’s walls are covered in posters, and brightly painted pictures adorn the outside walls of the building. Fred’s staff members are currently caring for several boys and girls, a teenage mother who escaped her rebel captor, and four orphan babies who were born while their mothers were enslaved by the rebels.

They try their best to help children overcome their horrors and eventually fit back into their communities. The list of daily activities includes traditional dancing and drama with drums and costumes.

Yet Fred admits that the children have shared horrific stories with him that include being raped and forced to kill family members and drink their blood, and sometimes being made to eat human flesh.

Wednesday 18 May

It’s the crack of dawn and we rise to join the stream of night dwellers walking back to their camps. Last night we visited many of these same children at a school where classrooms are converted into bedrooms each night.

They were safe behind a big fence and solar lights built by Oxfam, and staff members from the aid agency War Child were amusing them with a puppet show and skits. As the giggles rang out in the darkness, I admired the children’s ability to laugh through such difficult times.

Flying back over the seemingly peaceful red earth and vast stretches of water towards Kampala to continue on to the next stretch of our trip, I flick through the images on my digital camera, becoming determined to tell the story behind each face.

If peace is not achieved soon, untold numbers of children will follow in the footsteps of tens of thousands before them who have disappeared to a fate too terrible to conceive.

Read more:

ANALYSIS: Fear and apathy feed war in northern Uganda

Uganda donors urged to turn up pressure for peace

FILM: 'Rebels Without a Cause'

PHOTOS: Northern Ugandans terrorised by conflict

PHOTOS: Life goes on for Uganda's displaced

CRISIS PROFILE-What's going on in northern Uganda?

QUIZ: What do you know about northern Uganda?