AU students raise awareness for children in Uganda
Staff report / Opelika-Auburn News
May 1, 2006
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In support of the children of Uganda, some 50 Auburn University students sacrificed a night in a warm bed Saturday to camp out at the Eagles Cage, as part of a national movement to raise awareness for those forgotten in Africa.
Thousands of people across the country slept outside Saturday on behalf of the "Invisible Children" of Northern Uganda, who have been forced to forgo childhood to fight in a war that doesnt make any sense to a mind too young to know what killing really means.
In an official statement, Jan Egeland, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs stated: "Its a moral outrage to see thousands of children that have been abducted, that have been maltreated. They are going through the
most horrendous torture by the rebel movement and that same group is now being neglected by the whole international community. I cannot find any other part of the world having an emergency on the scale of Uganda with so little international attention."
In 2003, three young American men fresh from film school decided to travel to Africa in search of a story to tell the world and found it in Northern Uganda. Jason Russell, 27, Bobby Bailey, 24, and Laren Poole, 22, found more than they bargained for. They have since turned their travels into a documentary entitled, Invisible Children, and have formed a non-profit organization, based in San Diego, Calif., to help raise funds to give the children in Uganda a fighting chance to live a life free of oppression.
They are determined to end the 20-year war in Northern Uganda where children are abducted daily and forced to fight with the rebel army as child soldiers.
Living in fear of being hunted by the Lords Resistance Army, these children commute on foot each night to find safe places to sleep. They sleep in bus stops, hospital hallways and building basements. To date, more than 30,000 children have been abducted from their homes and forced into war. Since 1986, children as young as five, many of them orphaned by the AIDS epidemic, had been abducted by a rebel group and forced to kill or be killed, according to the United Nations.
"Even in this moment, in Uganda, children as young as 8 years old are methodically kidnapped from their homes by a rebel group," stated Russell in a Christian Networks Journal. "The abducted children are then desensitized to the horror of brutal violence and killing, as they themselves are turned into vicious fighters. Some escape and hide in constant fear for their lives. Most remain captive and grow to maturity with no education other than life in the bush and fighting in
a guerilla war. This war is producing a generation without hope. We have the possibility of doing extreme good. We have had an amazing response from high school and college students across the nation."
For more information about Invisible Children, visit www.invisiblechildren.com
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