By Kefa Senoga
Growing up, Caeser Lubangakene witnessed the suffering that people in northern Uganda faced as a result of a civil strife occasioned by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) – a Joseph Koney-led, rebel group that waged a war against the country and its people for nearly 20 years.
As a child growing to adulthood, he experienced trauma and observed how charity organisations and people extended a hand to the affected. His primary school was attacked by the LRA. When older, he saw how his mother, a nurse, cared for victims of the LRA war that started in the mid-1980s.
“I would spend most of my (spare) time in the wards with my mother,” the Uganda Christian University (UCU) alum recalled of his teen years. “Whenever a land mine hit a vehicle, I would see bodies being ferried into the hospital.”
While the region where he lived returned to normalcy by 2006, such observations have had an indelible impact on the humanitarian worker that Lubangakene has become.
Lubangakene started school in Gulu, a district in northern Uganda. While he was in Primary Two at Negri School, Lubangakene was among those who escaped when the facility was attacked by the LRA.
His uncle, who was living in Kampala at the time, did not want to leave anything to chance, so he evacuated his nephew to Uganda’s capital, from where Lubangakene studied, until he completed a university degree. From St. Joseph’s Primary School Nabbingo, near Kampala, he joined Bishop Cipriano Kihangire, Luzira, a suburb of Kampala. After A’level, Lubangakene headed to UCU, where he pursued a Bachelor of Public Health.
Even though Lubangakene, the youngest of three children, studied in Kampala schools, during the holidays, he would return to northern Uganda to spend time with his mother, Grace Achelom, who was a nurse at Gulu Regional Referral Hospital.
When not in the wards or the staff quarters of the hospital, Lubangakene and his playmates would be busy by the roadside, admiring “big” vehicles of non-governmental organisations transporting humanitarian aid workers. It is those vehicles, Lubangakene says, that made him admire humanitarian aid work.
Today, Lubangakene, a 2012 graduate of UCU with a First Class degree, serves as the regional grants manager for a Christian international relief agency that provides primary healthcare, food, clean water, and education programs in Sudan and South Sudan. Due to the conflict in the region and the sensitive nature of his work, he prefers not to disclose the name of his organisation.
Lubangakene joined the agency upon completing a Master of Science in Global Health program at the Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he studied from 2015 to 2017. In his current role, he oversees grants management.
“Since I was promoted to the regional office, I have been supervising a team of grants managers in different offices; my role is to make sure we are applying for funding, identifying available funding opportunities or we are reporting or giving accountability on the funding that we have received,” explains Lubangakene, who has experience developing systems for quality assurance for different projects in East Africa and India.
For him, humanitarian work is more than money. He says as a Christian, he has a duty to make a difference and reduce human suffering.
Having grown up during insurgency in northern Uganda, Lubangakene says he knows full well what living in a war-affected area means.
After his master’s studies, Lubangakene was offered an opportunity to work with a research firm in the USA, but he declined, opting to work in South Sudan, reasoning that the latter provided a more hands-on role in humanitarian work.
In 2021, Lubangakene unsuccessfully contested for a parliamentary seat to represent one of the areas in northern Uganda in the national Parliament.
He is currently pursuing a Doctorate in Public Health. He began those studies in October 2024 at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
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