Invisible_Children

Brittanee Loomis English 101 Dr. Cunningham 04/21/12 Invisible Children About a year ago, I was at a normal Sunday church service at The Crossing Christian Church. At the time I was seventeen and attended the youth service. However, on that particular day, the service was different. They had all of the kids watch a special presentation from a group called Invisible Children. They showed a movie called Tony. That movie opened my eyes to one of the most tragic living conditions I’ve ever seen. In places like Uganda, there is currently an army of child soldiers known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) run by an evil dictator, Joseph Kony. He captures children from their homes and families and forces them to become soldiers in his despicable forces, teaching them how to fire weapons and cause havoc throughout the country. Consumed with fear of being abducted by the dictator, children resort to hiding places at night with the hopes of avoiding the terror that continues to wreck the lives of so many African families. “Once one has been to these challenging, terrible places, they’re always strangely drawn back because there is nothing that can compare to seeing the raw reality of the basic need for human survival, it disgusts and inspires.” –Dan Eldon. For twenty years, Joseph Kony has been at large. He terrorizes every place that he goes to and steals the most precious things from a family, their children. Who is Joseph Kony though' He is the self-proclaimed distant cousin of the woman who started the Holy Spirit Movement, Alice Lakwena. In 1986, the president of Uganda was Yoweri Museveni (leader of the National Resistance Army) and he was enduring skepticism from the Acholi people. He, “launched a brutal search and destroy mission against former government soldiers throughout the north,” leaving many innocent Acholi people dead. As a result, many resistance armies were formed, but only one survived. The LRA persevered, destroying thousands of homes and lives. Alice Lakwena was believed to have been a messenger of God and the spirits. It was her ideas that led to the governmental resistance. Joseph Kony, her supposed cousin, took the reins in her army. He named it the LRA and began to continue her work. However, he was unable to obtain all of the necessities to keep his army intact. Instead of giving up, he decided to start robbing homes for food and abducting the children. Young children were being pulled from their beds from age five to twelve and forced to either kill their families, watch them be killed or be killed themselves. He then loaded the children with brutal visions and violent memories of murder and torture. Finally, he gives them a weapon or two. Children will be carrying anything from a machine gun to a machete and be forced to kill upon sight. The young girls he captures are often forced to be sex slaves for his officers and endure the same brutal conditions as the boys. Suffering from exhaustion from lack of food and sleep, these young kids try their best to survive or escape, but most have no such luck. As the kids in his army die, he simply takes more and more to keep his army going. It is estimated that Kony, “abducted more than 30,000 children in northern Uganda.” Invisible Children is an organization that brings awareness to the movements and actions of the LRA and Joseph Kony. Their hopes are to influence the United States government to take, “action in the central region of Africa.” Founded in 2004, this passionate group of young adults travels around America each year talking to the high schools and churches to help raise money and awareness for their cause. They do so through intense videos and speeches by their talented team and even from some of the survivors from Uganda. The media age has taken over in recent times and they use those tools to draw in the young people who will one day have the influential power to stop Joseph Kony and his army of child soldiers. One of the group’s first movies is basically an overview of the history of the war and focuses on the children who have been abducted or fear being abducted. In the movie Tony, the story follows a young man who is in the middle of the fight for survival against the LRA. Each night, Tony and a few of his friends travel to a safe house that is supposed to shelter them. The living conditions in this place are nothing short of a nightmare. With water and bugs everywhere, the children do their best to sleep on wooden mats and do their homework with little utensils.