The Worst Place on the Earth to be a Child Today!

Henry

Vanesa

Before I go into ANY projects, I go through a lengthy process of investigation. It was about a year ago when I was first introduced to the "commuter children" of Uganda. If you put "Invisible Children" in your search engine, you will find a few links to these. However, on YouTube, I saw all of the video installments that the 3 students put together. It is eye opening. That was a year ago. I read several pieces about the LRA and the child soldiers, & even saw an hour long feature on some news show (I can't remember which one now).

I am going to give you one more tidbit that I read on "The Huffington Post", and say one more thing before I sign off on this subject:

Northern Uganda is the worst place on earth to be a child today, says a former United Nations Under-Secretary General for Children in Armed Conflicts. According to Oxfam, the rate of violent death in northern Uganda is three times worse than Iraq's. Since 1996, the government has herded more than 1.6 million people in northern Uganda into the internal displaced persons (IDP) camps. The WHO reports that in northern Uganda over 1,000 people die each week of starvation and preventable diseases. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) describes the level of suffering in northern Uganda as "an emergency out of control." As a Catholic missionary priest who has worked in northern Uganda for half a century describes it, "everything Acholi is dying."
In the January 2006 edition of Vanity Fair, in a piece titled "Childhood's End," Christopher Hitchens proclaims to expose the cynical politics behind one of Africa's greatest nightmares: the twenty-year war in northern Uganda. For those of us dedicated to bringing the humanitarian catastrophe in northern Uganda to the attention of the international community, any exposure of the conflict by a high-profile journalist such as Hitchens is welcome. But Hitchens's account of the two-decade-long war is dangerously misleading.
Since 1986 the Ugandan civil war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. Over 25,000 children have been abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and forced to kill their friends and relatives. Each night a terrible saga is played out when approximately 40,000 children flee their homes in the rural areas to escape abduction, torture, or murder by the LRA. These are northern Uganda's "night commuters" or "invisible children."

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniella-boston/genocide-in-uganda-the-af_b_21150.html

***Back to my writing. The other part of working with Kate is she has provided penpals for all of the KCCW children. The pictures above are the pen pals that Jaden and Morgan chose. Morgan chose 4 year old Henry: He is in baby class and is 4 years old. His favorite thing to do is play soccer.He lives with his parents, who are too poor to pay for his school supplies. They work in the stone quarry, breaking rocks all day long for under $1/day. His ambition is to become a lawyer.

Jaden chose Vanesa: She is P.1 and is 7 years old. She lives with her mother, who is often sick and is the breadwinner of the family. The father abandoned the family and they are really strugling. Vanesa loves to read, and her ambition is to become a nurse.***