Stacy Nelson throws a pitch in the 9th inning during the Gators' 1-0 win against North Carolina in 2008.
Editor’s note: This story contains graphic details.
At a crossroads in northern Uganda, locals and travelers are met by 28 names on a memorial.
Stacey Nelson, a former standout softball player at UF, said she graduated in 2009 and saw the memorial in Uganda about two years later.
Nelson said she encountered stories and people that brought her back to Uganda in April and will likely bring her back in the fall.
At the memorial, a tour guide told the story of how the Lord’s Resistance Army kidnapped 28 people and took them to the crossroads, where they would soon be pushed into a hole of smouldering charcoal.
After the murders, soldiers proceeded to desecrate the captives’ bodies and use them to spread fear, Nelson said.
“That was the mindset of this army: Just strike terror into people and kill or be killed,” she said.
She originally made the 2011 trip to answer one question: How did the chaos affect the availability of jobs?
By the time she was forced to leave, she was determined to make sure the availability of jobs would never be in question again.
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Nelson was first drawn to Africa by its aura of mystery.
Dreams of visiting the country began during her years at Los Alamitos High School in Southern California, Nelson said, and the desire only grew with time.
“The mysterious, the awe-inspiring, the forbidden fortress that was ‘Africa’ kept glowing in my mind,” she wrote in an entry on her blog. “Stacey-san goes to Uganda.”
When she wasn’t busy becoming the most decorated pitcher in UF softball history, amassing the most career wins (136), most career strikeouts (1,116) and lowest career ERA (0.99) of any player to ever wear orange and blue stirrups, Nelson could be found studying in the classroom.
“She was different than most athletes in that she was academically inquisitive… She was more than good in class.”
As a philosophy major, Nelson said she was particularly interested in existentialism.
As she defines it, existentialism is “the theory of why people are here on Earth,” and Nelson chose to spend her time on Earth as a helper.
In college, she volunteered for a basketball team comprised of children with disabilities at Gainesville’s Sidney Lanier Center.
With the help of UF history professor Steven Noll, who coaches the basketball team, Nelson explored the issues facing Africa and its child soldiers.
It was a subject the duo knew little about, but an independent study course provided an opportunity to feed their curiosity.
Nelson went on to study law at Loyola Marymount University, and she now works to improve jails in Los Angeles County, California.
Nelson’s professor said her ambition for learning was equal to her passion for playing softball.
“She was different than most athletes in that she was academically inquisitive… She was more than good in class,” Noll said.
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“She’s always looking in a positive way to try and see how things can be better, both for the people that she’s looking at and also for herself.”
Before she first visited Uganda, Nelson played professional softball in Japan.
Her affinity for the landlocked African nation eventually outweighed her love of softball, and a microfinance and social entrepreneurship program brought her there in 2011.
“It’s the place I want; it’s the subject I want,” Nelson remembered thinking to herself. “Goodbye professional softball, I’m going.”
She arrived in northern Uganda and worked with Friends of Orphans, which trains former child soldiers and orphans to find employment.
The goal, Nelson said, was to study the organization’s alumni and determine if they were finding jobs.
The results were grim.
Disheartened but not discouraged, Nelson channeled a do-more spirit that professor Noll said is all too familiar.
“She’s always looking in a positive way to try and see how things can be better, both for the people that she’s looking at and also for herself,” Noll said.
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From the ashes of her study, the Hope Bread Factory was born.
Located in Pader Town Council in northern Uganda, the factory will employ several dozen people after its completion, Nelson said.
The factory, she said, will hopefully create more than 100 jobs by helping the region make its own bread and allowing farmers to begin growing wheat.
However, Joseph Kony — the subject of the “most viral video in history,” according to Time magazine — previously used the land to recruit children for his army and coordinate a devastating civil war.
Kony’s soldiers would ask people if they wanted to laugh, Nelson wrote on her blog. If someone said no, their lips were sewn shut, leaving them unable to laugh. If someone said yes, their lips were cut off, leaving them with a permanent “smile.”
It becomes hard to count how many people watched their family die or how many people were forced to kill their own family, Nelson said.
Hopefully, she said, the factory will help heal their wounds.
“They’re still not getting access to such basic things (like education and healthcare),” Nelson said, “and yet, they are so resilient, they’re so giving, they’re so smart and hardworking.”
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“I don’t know why I have such a strong calling to go there and stay there, but it’s an undeniable calling — something I’m so certain of."
“What would you do if (Kony) ever came back?” Nelson remembers asking a group of locals.
Nelson said the answer epitomized her motivation for visiting Uganda.
“Everyone simultaneously looked at me and answered, ‘We would forgive him,’” she said. “We’re Christians.”
Ugandans often focus on the community rather than themselves, she said. Nelson’s friend Geoffrey recently offered her four acres of land and a hut.
Nelson plans to accept Geoffrey’s proposal and return to Africa by the end of 2016. Though she can’t give up American beer and family forever, Nelson will stay in Uganda until it feels right to leave, she said.
“I don’t know why I have such a strong calling to go there and stay there, but it’s an undeniable calling — something I’m so certain of,” she said.
Nelson is raising money to build a Ugandan factory. She can be contacted at stacey.nelson@lls.edu.
