“It belongs to the people later.” (Participant, UNM Participant Discussion, 2019)

 When the exhibit launched in Uganda, the audience discussed how "it belongs to the people" and "tells the story […] to the generations to come." In the Ugandan context, the exhibit encouraged reflection on those caught up in the conflict and those who felt distant from it. In those dialogues, nation and kin were central to queries about overcoming hardship and trauma.

The language used in these dialogues show how kinship and sharing stories, through drawings, artefacts, and oral testimony, were an important part of the responses to the exhibit – for example, as participants referred to Acan and Amony as "our sisters" in the Ugandan National Museum participant discussion. 

“I was interested in the skirt. And, it tells the story, to me, to, to the generations to come (…) In the next fifty, hundred years, something which, which I was trying to reflect it, is it going to be, um that same skirt to come back again?”(Participant, UNM Participant Discussion, 2019)

Questions about artefacts featured in the exhibit, and whether they would return to Uganda, also demonstrate how the exhibit spoke to the political and social climate in Uganda. The political will to address survivors' needs has waved and waned over time. The current political and social climate and the traveling exhibit facilitate timely and urgent dialogues on transitional justice for girls, women, survivors of conjugal slavery, and those returning to their communities. The audience in Uganda pointed to artefacts, such as Amony’s green skirt and the grinding stone, as national symbols of survival and of overcoming hardship.

These responses to the artefacts, their meaning, and Acan's and Amony's stories, led to reflections about representation, belonging, and the need to support other survivors' storytelling.