War-torn northern Uganda is the last place you might expect to witness a B-boy battle or catch the Rock Steady Crew teaching breakdance basics. That is, unless you are familiar with the Hip Hop Therapy Project.

Melissa Adams first came to northern Uganda in 2005 with the International Center for Research on Women. She witnessed firsthand the devastation brought by the Lord’s Resistance Army’s brutal 22-year war. Disturbed and determined, she embarked on her own campaign to bring relief to war-affected youth.

“I saw the night commuters, thousands of children leaving their village homes unaccompanied and trekking miles to town so they could sleep without being abducted by the rebels,” she said. “It was shocking, and I don’t think happening anywhere else in the world, children fleeing their homes at night just to find safety.”

Camps were eventually set up to address the basic needs of the 1.5 million displaced, which amounted to 90 percent of the Acholiland population. But unlike the development agencies working in the region, Adams sought to address the often neglected psycho-social needs of young people - using hip hop.

“The psycho-social needs tend to be overlooked,” Adams remarked. “We have a lot of organizations here working on other development needs including education and health care, but priority rarely goes to dealing with the psycho-social needs of people traumatized by war. In terms of money coming from donors, they are always going to prioritize the basic humanitarian needs like food.”

Adams befriended Jolly Grace Okot, founder of the Health Education Arts Literacy Sports Project. Okot had been abducted as a child and spent nearly two years in rebel captivity. After escaping her captors, she found the chance to play as a normal child to be instrumental in her recuperation from the trauma of war.

Okot started the HEALS Project in 2003 as an after-school program for orphans and internally displaced children. The program encompassed an array of activities, but when the kids had their first encounter with breakdancing classes from an American passerby, they could not get enough.

The classes were short-lived however, and Adams decided to set up something more sustainable. While still working with ICRW, she used her spare time to put together the Hip Hop Therapy Project as a component of the Play Therapy Project at HEALS.

“I’m into hip hop, and I’ve been looking for ways to support her organization, so I wanted to get the classes started up again,” Adams explained.

She met a local hip hop artist Abramz Tekya, who was the co-founder of Breakdance Project Uganda. Founded in Kampala in 2006, BPU offered free breakdance classes to any and all. Adams saw the opportunity to bring the dancers from Kampala, located in the country’s south, to teach children in the north.

She put together a project proposal and through her contacts at the French embassy was able to obtain financial support from SN Brussels Airlines, American Airlines, Pulse Experiential and the French government.

For many of the artists and students involved, the dance lessons were their first encounter with their polarized peers, as peace and prosperity enjoyed in the south has led to a degree of apathy concerning the problems plaguing the north.

It’s a division that dates back to colonialism between the northern Acholi areas and the southern Buganda regions.

Many of those working toward finding a solution to the conflict in northern Uganda stress the importance of promoting national reconciliation as part of a comprehensive strategy for bringing about lasting peace.

“By working with a local organization, I was trying to promote reconciliation in a sense between people in the south and people living in the north,” Adams said. “The war in the north can end, but unless you build some bridges and break down the barriers that exist, you’re still going to have that tension that was fueling the war in the first place.”

If the project’s success is any indicator, those barriers are coming down. The instructors from Kampala made a lasting impression-and were left with one.

In the weeks that followed their initial encounter, the students continued to practice their dance moves and the artists from BPU secured their own funding to return to the north.

They even managed to entice legendary breakdancers from New York’s Rock Steady Crew to travel to northern Uganda and join the fun.

Bringing together groups from the south to the north was no small feat given the fear and divisions that existed, but hip hop provided the ideal platform to bring factions together.

“If I go up to northern Uganda using the Buganda traditional dance to, you know, bring people together, that’s going to symbolize that Buganda is superior than all the tribes up there,” Tekya said. “If I use the Acholi traditional dance, it is going to be the same when I bring it to the [center]. But hip hop is something that is neutral; you know that whereby we all, if we want to be hip hop, we can all be hip hop.”

Adams completed her assignment with the ICRW and had to return to the U.S., but she was inspired to continue the work she left behind at HEALS.

She learned of a new Fulbright-mtvU fellowship for scholars using music as a global force for mutual understanding. The application process is lengthy and includes an application, project proposal, documentation plan, foreign language report (if applicable), references, transcripts, resume, and personal essay.

After her successful application, Adams returned to Uganda in November 2008 as a fellow.

In return for a stipend, she keeps a blog for mtvU. She must also submit a midterm report, multiple essays and a final report in accordance with the Fulbright guidelines.

Adams was pleasantly surprised to find a far more peaceful region around Gulu, in northern Uganda.

With rebel leader Joseph Kony on the run in neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda is approaching nearly two years without conflict. Furthermore, the internally displaced have begun leaving the camps and trickling back to their homes.

“When I first came, no one went out at night, you could hear gun shots and people running for safety, there was always the fear the rebels might attack,” Adams noted. “Now there are no more night commuters, people are safe to leave there homes and there is night life.”

Despite the peace, one lingering result of the war is the large number of orphans. It’s these victims of conflict who continue to flock to HEALS, and continue to request hip hop classes.

Adams set about fulfilling the children’s common wish - bringing the teachers from BPU back to Gulu.

With her fellowship funding, she was able to organize a three-day workshop and brought in four teachers from BPU.

In addition to teaching new dance routines, the artists began offering instruction of hip hop beats using traditional instruments.

It’s an idea Adams hopes to incorporate into her broader plan of introducing other elements of hip hop culture into the Play Therapy Program. Particularly, teaching the kids to use local instruments to create breakbeats for dancers.

In true hip hop fashion, it’s an innovation born out of necessity, as they are often without electricity.

“The whole thing with hip hop is you can take nothing and make something out of it.” Adams remarked.

For a region trying to emerge from two decades of war, making something out of nothing, that sounds like music to the ears.