Through Murky Waters: What about the children?
The horrible ligt of the Ugandan ‘invisible children’ should make our tiny little problems disappear
By Alex Sirney, senior writer
Posted on January 25, 2007

It’s a long walk from your apartment to class in the morning this time of year. Actually — admit it — the last few days even the walk from Potomac to Festival or your equivalent has looked daunting.

This grumpy trek to breakfast or that 8 a.m. class pales in comparison to what thousands of children in northern Uganda make every night just to find a safe place to sleep, as more than 200 JMU students learned Monday. Those students will never look at their walk to class the same way again, and now it falls to them to take action against the atrocities committed against these children.

The documentary “Invisible Children,” shown by Center for Multicultural Student Services Monday night, revealed the hellish life of children in the civil war-wracked Ugandan town of Gulu, an area where the Lord’s Resistance Army has kidnapped kids since 1994. These kids are then forced to watch as their friends are killed out of hand, they are beaten and they are left in the desert and taught about weapons. What emerge are bloodthirsty killers, aged 8 to 14. Rather than leaving themselves vulnerable to these abductions by staying in their homes in outlying villages, the children who remain walk into town to sleep in hospital hallways and any other place they can find shelter. Conditions are predictably miserable.

Misery and human suffering are nothing new to the world, however. What is unique in Uganda is the horror of what is done to these children — a horror that was brought home to the students who saw the movie not by any stuffy lecture, but by a video self-described as having an “MTV beat.” This video is another in the new wave of socially aware productions — productions that are easily accessible and easy to relate to.

JMU students were riveted to this video, and rightly so. The narrators were college students who ended up in Uganda almost by accident and stumbled on this hell on earth for children. These are normal American kids who have to listen as a boy who looks like someone’s little brother tells them, through tears, that he wishes he were dead because of how bad it is.

Let there be no doubt — it is bad there. The violence had somewhat abated during recent peace talks, but these are proceeding at a painfully slow pace. There is hope in Uganda for peace, but even after the violence ends there will still be hundreds of thousands of refugees to resettle, as well as the untracked and unrecorded thousands of children hiding from the rebels.

Seeing a movie like “Invisible Children” should only draw out the best in an audience. It’s hard to tell what the JMU reaction will be, but the reaction should be one of humility. It becomes very difficult to think that what clothes to wear, where that lost JAC Card is, or any of the other hundreds of daily crises actually matter when confronted with the horrors in other parts of the world.

The filmmakers say that they get the reaction of, “well, that’s Africa,” from some people who hear about the war in Uganda, and they recoil from such a response with justifiable horror. This attitude cannot be allowed to take root — it is in Africa, but no one anywhere should have to walk 10 miles to sleep, packed in a back room or flooded hallway, for fear of abduction and torture.

This is another in a long list of worthy causes, but it begs you to find something that matters to you and do something about it. If seeing or hearing of thousands of children suffer doesn’t move you, you can send me your resignation from the human race.

Alex Sirney is a senior anthropology/SMAD major.