Giving A Voice To Africa's Child Soldiers

The standard hope for most college kids embarking on foreign backpacking adventures is to "find oneself." On one such trip, Laren Poole, alongside friends Jason Russell and Bobby Bailey, found something more: an unseen rebel conflict in which children were being adducted en masse as child soldiers.

In the spring of 2003, Laren Poole says he was looking to experience life outside the "Southern California bubble and see the rest of the world." The three friends has heard of the conflict in Darfur and with their video camera in tow, they set out for Sudan in search of a story. Shortly after arriving in Sudan, they found themselves in Uganda, where they stumbled upon the longest running conflict in African history, fueled by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army and sustained by their tactic of conscripting child soldiers.

Laren, Jason, and Bobby spent weeks in Uganda, meeting former child soldiers and capturing their journey on film.

Once stateside, the trio struggled to communicate the atrocities they witnessed in Uganda but focused on creating a film to introduce Americans to young Ugandans in hopes of personalizing the issue.

"The stories themselves are powerful, we try to make them relatable and simple and character driven," Laren said of their approach.

One of the first stories they told was about a young teenage boy named Jacob, who was abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army as a child soldier. He later escaped, forced to leave behind a brother who was killed and was the living the hidden life of many Uganda boys--the life of a night commuter. In order to avoid abduction from their homes in the middle of the night, thousands of teenage boys would leave their families each night and walk miles to the nearest urban center, to sleep in gyms or in crawl spaces, in search of safety from the LRA.

Their first film, "Invisible Children: Rough Cut," features the heartwrenching stories of Jacob and others, and left much of its American audience to wonder how they had not yet heard of this conflict.

The young filmmakers recruited 50 college kids to drive RVs across the country and screen Rough Cut at approximately 1,000 venues.

This kind of guerilla marketing, with a drive for social action, would soon become a signature tactic for Invisible Children.

Although these screenings were the official birth of the Invisible Children movement, Laren said the group still wondered "If I tell this story does anyone want to hear it?"

On April 28th, 2006, his question was answered by 80,000 people in 130 cities across seven countries who proved that they not only wanted to hear the stories, but they wanted to help. Tens of thousands of people participated in Invisible Children's first international call to action, The Global Night Commute, where they slept outside to mirror the experience of the night commuters in Uganda in order to raise awareness.

Soon after, the group landed on Oprah and their work on the ground in Uganda accelerated.

"There was this glimmer of hope after the Global Night Commute," Laren said. "The LRA started negotiations with the government which lasted two years and brought some relative peace."

Within Uganda, the organization has also implemented long-term development programs focused on initiatives ranging from rebuilding schools and rehabilitating child soldiers, to water and sanitation projects, to providing scholarships to secondary and university students.

Meanwhile, a large portion of the LRA has taken refuge in nearby Democratic Republic of Congo, so Invisible Children has expanded their work outside of Uganda and maintain that their ultimate goal is to use the power of storytelling to end the longest running war in Africa and eradicate the LRA.

"We're in it until we see the LRA disarmed and the leadership standing trial for the crimes they've committed in these areas," Laren said. "They've committed the worst crimes known to man. And for us, this is our life now."

The Protection Plan from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.

Comments

[Brian Moll]

10:32 AM on 03/01/2011

Invisible Children made me aware of the issues in Uganda. I am so thankful for their work.

There is an incredible program that educates former child soldiers and children on the margins of society called http://www.leaduganda.org

While most programs will pay school fees for a child, the education received is very, very poor (with up to 200 kids per classroom & the teacher receiving nothing more than an 8th grade education him/herself). On the other hand, LEAD UGANDA pays for the children to attend the very best schools in all of Uganda -- and these kids are performing to and above the level of the "privileged" children. I cannot recommend LEAD UGANDA highly enough!

[Jedidiah Jenkins]

04:52 PM on 02/22/2011

Hello all, I work at Invisible Children and t/f feel entitled to speak with some authority. It offends me to the core to see false and intentionally half-true words written about the tireless work we've done in Northern Uganda and now in the remote north of The DRC. In the past, when Invisible Children was nothing more than three young Americans and a few passionate Acholi wanting to put kids in school, we made a few unsustainable choices. From those days (5 years ago), we have changed as all orgs change and gone from a passion driven response to an organized articulation of sustainable and thoughtful development in partnership with the local community. 90% of our staff is Ugandan. We are far from white neo-colonists attempting to impose our ideologies on the people of Uganda. We are a partnership between the relative affluence and concern of the west and the spiritual affluence and need of the Acholi. And when I say affluence, I mean the exhaustively earned fundraising of high schoolers and college kids across the US, Canada, and the western world. I'm not talking about disinterested donors. I'm talking about young people who have made the identity of their youth 'Invisible Children' and 'global citizenship.'
And when we speak of 'discovering' a conflict, we speak of personal discovery, exposing this crisis to the mainstream western world, and speaking of it to a western news blog. This is about partnership, community, and hard work. That's it.

[xbronxchic]

10:32 PM on 02/22/2011

Thank you, I shared this and I hope others do to. I'm not sure I could go 25 hours being silent :), but I can certainly contribute and encourage others to read this story. Please don't let the crazy posters drive YOU crazy, you don't need to explain yourself to those who don't have the ability to understand. Because if they had the ability to "understand", they never would have posted such comments.
ps. what is t/f, those of us not in college and older than 30 don't speak fluently in texttalk.

[Talitha Baker]

04:40 PM on 02/22/2011

Love it.

[Thiele]

08:03 AM on 02/22/2011

Great article, but the headline is awful. We in the West do not "give voice" to marginalized communities. They have voices, they're just all too often ignored. We can, of course, help amplify those voices, but it's arrogant and wrong to think we give them their voice.

[travishammill]

04:54 PM on 03/17/2011

It's an expression. let it go.

[Operafaust]

07:42 AM on 02/22/2011

I am somewhat annoyed by the fact that while the title says 'giving a voice to africa's child soldiers' the picture chosen does absolutely nothing to further the story. Instead of, for example, a picture of an actual child soldier, or the Ugandan countryside, or some poignant scene of devastation or loss, we are presented with...a photo portrait of one the college kids.

This speaks volumes to me.

[saintpeterii]

07:37 AM on 02/22/2011

I can only wonder how this story isn't much more widely known. Praise to those who made the story of the invisible children known and for the changes they seek to make. Astonishment coupled with mystification at how our widely mistrusted misleaders have failed these children so completely. Maybe if more minerals and oil were discovered there we would have been shouting about the plight of these children, at least as a pretext to get our foot in the economic door. Citizen editorial cartoons http://www.saintpeterii.com

[BMVB]

07:15 AM on 02/22/2011

"Giving a voice to africa's chid soldiers" sheds very important light on the crisis in Uganda that's why it would have been more appropriate if the title was uganda's child soldiers & not Africa's child soldiers. Africa has 53 countries with vast diversity in languages, religions and socio-economic statuses. It is intellectually misleading to talk about a country's problem like it's a continent's reality. If this article was about a issue in Spain or turkey I doubt the headlines will say giving a voice to Europe's .........

[daltexlib]

05:25 AM on 02/22/2011

Just another group of kids from the priviliged class who descend from their lofty world for a second to make "us" understand how horrible the world really is for some people before they themselves return to their cushy world where the right connections keep them amongst their own kind. I'm sick of these stories from the Huffington Post. It reminds me of that rich, private school educated boy (Guggenheim, I think) who just made that move about how horrible the U.S. public education is...it's your class that keeps the status quo, dummy (for your benefit, no less!)

[garystartswithg]

06:57 AM on 02/22/2011

I don't know how you can compare this to Guggenheim, which was a horrible piece of propaganda that most teachers have issues with.
I'm not going to say this is a great piece of film, its not. It tries to make drama instead of just telling a story, but thats what kids might consider news given the media standard in this country. At the same time if it increases the awareness of the LRA then it might have succeeded in something.

[JSDKoeln]

08:03 AM on 02/22/2011

And if one or two of those privileged kids moved into a career to help the less fortunate as a result of this trip, then it was worth it. Never underestimate the impressions garnered in youth--even if it was a "privileged" group.

And speaking of which... do you REALLY know that all these kids come from rich parents or "privileged" backgrounds? Kind of a blind assumption, don't ya think? I did lots of trips all those years ago in my youth, and my parents were factory workers... hardly privileged at all.

[Thera Freeman]

02:04 AM on 02/22/2011

a few criticisms from someone else "on the ground" in uganda:

the fact that these gentlemen wanted to just wander into darfur with their video camera and no aid experience or skills to offer the people is incredibly irresponsible, putting themselves and any potential sudanese they would have encountered in danger.

they did not "discover" child soldiering or the lra conflict. many NGOs were already in the gulu area at the time and more importantly, local people were already on-the-job of taking care of these children. st. monica's tailoring school was housing and protecting night commuters, archbishop john baptist odama was sleeping with them in the streets.

while the movie "invisible children" DID raise awareness in the united states and other western countries, it is not the whole story. the acholi religious leaders peace initiative (ARlPI) had been and continues to negotiate a peaceful and nonviolent end to the conflict. as members of the community they have their finger on the pulse of the people and can communicate with the lra leaders directly.

there has been relative calm in the north for many years now and night commuting is no longer necessary--NOW the issue is land conflict, and getting everyone home from the internally displaced persons camps they were in and back home after 20+ years.

development work done by IC has been haphazard, ill researched and lacked follow through. wanting to help is lovely, but should be tempered a deeper knowledge than "look what we found!"

[andwhatarmy]

05:21 AM on 02/22/2011

One would have to ask why you are so bitter about these young men turning their wamderlust--perfectly understandable at that age and that time of life--into a force for good. I doubt that they are casting aspersions on the other groups helping in the region, and certainly their marketing savvy is bringing much needed attention to the problem.

Your tirade about this not being the whole story is hollow. Of course it is not the whole story; one story never is. No single one of the groups you mention is the whole story.

Denigrating the efforts described in this article is peevish, and in fact exposes those groups you mention to criticism; why didn't they market their efforts to draw in more support from outside? Or are they staffed by those more interested in making others wrong--as you do to these young men--than in doing right?

To borrow a page from your own book, wanting to criticize may be valuable, but should be tempered by offering viable alternatives rather than simply shouting "look what we are jealous of!"

[Thera Freeman]

12:16 PM on 02/22/2011

i'm not bitter about their wanderlust or about their desire to do good. my point regarding those two things are that there are much more responsible ways to express one's wanderlust and desire to do good. good intentions are not enough, and in fact can lead to more harm than good.

yes, while one story is never the whole story it is good to acknowledge that there are more facets to the story. and the deeper and more complete version of that story is that on the whole people in the region are seeking a peaceful end of the conflict--not a "hot" one as IC would advocate.

could it be, perhaps, that the other organizations/individuals i mentioned were telling the world and the world didn't listen? i totally agree that something that IC and their movie(s) have done is raise awareness with a population that had never watched the news before or couldn't locate uganda on a map and now they care--and can find uganda and lobby the government to act. and thats great. and i've always thought so (and believe mentioned in my original comment).

i am in no way jealous of IC, and would admit if i were. their publicity is fantastic--but to what end? i have seen with my own eyes and listened with my own ears to what is said about IC where they work and am merely amplifying those voices.

[garystartswithg]

07:32 AM on 02/22/2011

I think you bring up very valid points, but I don't see how you can fault anyone for trying to increase awareness.
One of the things that struck me with Invisible Children was the heavy handed added drama, but then if you watch our news you know where it came from -- he might just think its the way you tell a story like this, not because of his own doing but the way he has been fed information.

[Thera Freeman]

12:20 PM on 02/22/2011

again, i think that raising awareness is a very very important thing. and is very much something that IC has done quite well. i have zero difficulty agreeing with that. the issue then becomes learning and adapting. i can see your argument about the heavy handed nature of our news reporting--especially regarding the ages of the gentlemen when they first made the film. sure.

but after spending "weeks" in uganda at first, and subsequent time after the movie was out i would have hoped they would adapt culturally appropriate (for the culture of the people--the acholi, or ugandans or even east-africans) ways of reporting their stories, of sharing the lives of the people of northern uganda with the world in a way that isn't out of step with local culture.

[ltyr2002]

01:21 AM on 02/22/2011

Notice how the posts all have to do with the picture of the cool altruist and not what he's actually doing?

Kind of sad.

[bridgeman]

01:19 AM on 02/22/2011

Have been working with and supporting Invisible Children for 3 years...the are THE REAL DEAL!

[alisonv]

10:59 PM on 02/21/2011

Good for him. What a beautiful person...inside.

[Sean Whelan]

12:45 AM on 02/22/2011

And absolutely stunning on the outside!!

[Richcrafter]

10:43 PM on 02/21/2011

Ah yes.. A handsome white male helps us understand black, horrid, Uganda. It's all cool. Just not new. Was Bono there?

[alisonv]

10:57 PM on 02/21/2011

So what is your problem with anyone shining a light on what is happening? Bono has also used his fame to change the lives of a lot of people. What good have you done in the world lately?

[socialtalker]

11:37 PM on 02/21/2011

its using africa/black folks as a backdrop that is that folks like me are tired of. one of my goals is give africans the microphone.

[socialtalker]

11:24 PM on 02/21/2011

i thought the same thing F+F, the white man's burden image. talk about brainwashing.

[SusanX]

10:41 PM on 02/21/2011

Wow. From this resident of Northern California who rarely admires what comes out of Southern California, you guys have some guts to wander into Darfur, then the DR of Congo, come out alive, and put together something with this kind of impact. Good for you and ignore the comments about the accompanying picture....most of us get it and respect you for it.

[LegalMomma]

10:18 PM on 02/21/2011

Sounds like important work, in one of the world's most horrifying crises. Will have to look into this group a little bit. Now if I only had a job. . .