For 21 years, the people in Northern Uganda have been at war. Only this war is not their own. The LRA (Lord's Resistance Army)began with Alice Lakwena, a spirit-posessed woman, who believed that it was God's will for her to overthrow the Ugandan government. Kony, the current leader of the LRA, claimed to be her cousin and followed her as leader of the LRA. Since the adults have grown tired of war, the LRA began kidnapping children as young as 5 and forced them to become soldiers. These children experienced violent indoctrination, brainwashing, and were forced to witness murders and commit violent murders as well. The LRA chose to abduct children that small because they were big enough to carry a gun, yet small enough to sneak into villages and homes and kidnap other children.
In effort to keep their people safe, the Ugandan government gave the people 48 hours to leave their homes and commute to an internal displacement camp, where thousands of people would live together. However, this temporary solution has not only turned into a permenant living condition, but it has also become one of the worst humanitarian crisis ever. Children die every 15 seconds from malaria. Thousands of people die each year from diseases that are caused by the water. The solution is simple: Give them back their homes, give them clean water.
On April 28th, tens of thousands of people traveled to 15 different cities all over the United States to make a stand for those living in the displacement camps in Northern Uganda. While there, the Invisible Children crew filmed a variety of things, including the group holding up banners, that put together will form a poem. This video will be edited to form a video petition that will be shown before the Senate in a couple of weeks. More than 67,000 people left their homes for one night to sleep outside in cardboard huts to represent the tens of thousands that have been living in horrific poverty for 10 years.
When we arrived, we were to turn in our water and crackers, which would later be rationed out. During the course of the evening, we wrote our Senators, we called 5 people who don't know about the invisible children to explain it to them, we had 21 minutes of prayer and silence for every year that Uganda has experienced war, and there were various video clips informing us of the situation in the IDP camps. Jacob, a former child soldier, was our keynote speaker and did an amazing job of sharing his heart and the importance of the event.
Just because these people are thousands of miles away does not mean that your voice can't have an affect on the way that they live. The place that you live should not determine the way that you live. Please go to www.invisiblechildren.com for more information. Educate yourself on the situation in Uganda and use your time, money and talent to do something about it.
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