Counting Child Soldiers

10,000.
25,000.
50,000.
These are the estimates I’ve seen for the number of children abducted in this war in Northern Uganda. This morning I met with Robert, Program Director at GUSCO, Gulu Support the Children Organization, who said 25,000 was most likely accurate. GUSCO, he explained, has already worked to rehabilitate over 7,000 returning children. World Vision, he also knew, has seen more than 9,000 others. 50,000, he thought, was far too high an estimate. But the dozens I saw scattered through GUSCO’s reception center this morning would be too many even if they alone were the only such children in the world.

In a single fenced compound, about one hundred yards wide and fifty deep, one massive white canvas tent housed bunk beds for scores of boys, another held the same for as many girls. The tents sagged under a thick brown layer of dust; United Nations was printed on the side. International aid was apparent elsewhere in the compound, which included a small building housing a kitchen, storehouse, and office, and another little structure for classrooms. Boxes of vegetable oil marked USA were stacked in the corner of a room otherwise filled with sacks of rice from the UN World Food Program.

Yesterday I asked a group of men in the community of Layibi what the most effective aid organizations in the area were. I’d expected them to answer with the name of a local outfit that would necessarily know the communities and culture better, or perhaps with a large international nongovernmental organization like World Vision, which should have a clear mission and focus. In addition to all the negative press on the UN coming from the US right, many of my left-leaning friends who work in international development have been exasperated by the hulking bureaucracy’s inefficiencies. But without hesitating the men said World Food Program. That’s the United Nations’ World Food Program. They were quick to point out why they believed it’s most effective: “Because they have the most money.”

That’s a decent point. In a region where over 1.5 million people have been displaced over twenty years of sporadic fighting, it takes a lot of resources to feed everyone. Many people still work to farm plots near their temporary huts, and even more commute many miles on foot everyday to farm near their previous homes, but they must hurry back before dark. Some people are now too far from their homes to make the commute, and most have seen their food production drop with the daily hours dedicated to walking, so the UN is supplementing these – over 1.5 million – innocent civilians.

And among those supplemented were the children at GUSCO, where two toddlers looked at me quizzically from the edge of the girls’ tent. I asked Anthony, the social worker I spoke with there, why children so young would be abducted. He told me they were children born in the bush, children whose mothers were abducted to be the wives of rebel soldiers in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

Yesterday I met three other children born to an LRA soldier in the bush. Their father is the wanted war criminal and rebel leader Joseph Kony. The oldest boy, 7, clearly had his father’s eyes. But the similarities end at facial qualities. When he wasn’t shyly turning away he was smiling kindly. Their mother, Lilly, now worries mostly about how she’ll support the kids. She was in the bush for fourteen years. She was trained as a soldier at the age of 8, became a teenager, was selected to be one of Kony’s many wives, had three children, and was captured by the Ugandan Peoples’ Defense Force in November of last year.

The Ugandan Amnesty Commission gives returning abductees 260,000 Ugandan Shillings to get their lives started again. That’s about 130 US Dollars. GUSCO’s rehabilitation program typically lasts 21 days, with three follow-up visits through the following year. And some of the returnees receive vocational training. Lilly hadn’t yet received any training, but was hoping for a 9-month business course. The effectiveness of that strategy seems questionable, even if it comes to fruition, as she hasn’t had any formal schooling since she was abducted at eight years of age. For the time being, she said, she had used some of the money to rent a hut and was using the remaining part for a small business selling charcoal.

The situation here is clearly stark. That’s part of the reason why the American college students who founded the Invisible Children movement have received such a strong response: young people know injustice when they see it. The three guys who started Invisible Children filmed a documentary about child soldiers here and began showing it in the states in June 2004. The audience pressed them for ways to address the issues, and over the last three years Invisible Children has developed into an international service and advocacy organization that is sponsoring over 300 children in school here and raising awareness about the issue internationally. They’ve shown the film to US Senators, State Department officials, and USAID representatives, and they continue to press for more resources on the ground and more international pressure to end the war.

Part of the genius in the Invisible Children movement is how effectively they’ve embraced youth idealism through existing organizations. They started with churches – many of the core group members are Christian – and they’ve now shown the film at synagogues, mosques, colleges and universities as well. Young people are literally dropping everything and traveling around the world because of the film. While I was talking with three Invisible Children representatives here they received a visit from Amy Hampton, a twenty-ish woman from Dallas, Texas, who had seen the film in a friend’s dorm room at UT-Austin.

She tried to volunteer to work for Invisible Children here. But they’ve been backlogged – they currently have four people in a San Diego office dedicated almost exclusively to answering emails, and their inbox still almost never drops under 1,000 messages. She felt, strongly, she’d been called as a Christian to take action. So she didn’t wait. She found some missionaries working farther north and has arrived “just to do whatever I can, to love them, serve them, do Christ’s work in the world.”

Heads nodded up and down around our table. The idea of Christian service has been central to each of their journeys to Gulu. But, they agreed, the movement as a whole has been careful not to be exclusively Christian. Adam Fink, Invisible Children’s Education Director, said that he was able to show the film to friends who wouldn’t have viewed it if the focus has been exclusively Christ-centered. And the movement, the purpose – helping these children – has benefited from their pluralism. Katie Scott, Invisible Children’s Gulu Office Manager, said that one of her biggest supporters is a Jewish woman who was moved by the film. She provided financial sponsorship for Katie’s work.

A call to service is central to the presence of most – if not all – of the white people in the area. I showed the Invisible Children film on Pitt’s campus in March. Peter Otika-Okema, a Pitt graduate and former resident of this region, introduced the film. Megan Young was in the audience, and she decided she would do whatever she could to help this summer. She teamed up with Peter, who is also the founder and director of the Africa Project, a Pittsburgh-based effort to raise awareness about the war and offer sponsorship for children to complete school in Gulu.

Megan is now in here, writing reports for GUSCO, collecting abductees’ stories for a book that Peter is assembling, and documenting the effects of the war. Megan paid for her plane ticket, bought candies and soaps to share with people she meets, and personally decided to give each interviewee about ten dollars for their trouble, which is a substantial economic boost here. Megan is not rich. Like many young Americans, she’s fully saddled with over $20,000 in student loan debt.

But here it is clear that we all have a great deal, and a great deal to give. Another group initiated by American college students, UgandaCan, lobbies for more effort to end the war and help these children. Please visit their website at www.ugandacan.org if you’d like more information on the policy side. If you’d like to support Peter and Megan’s work to increase awareness and raise funds for education for young people in Northern Uganda, please visit http://www.africaproject.net/page4.html for donation information. To learn more about Invisible Children, check www.invisiblechildren.com, or GUSCO: www.gusco.org.