Invisible Heroes

When I picked up my 11-year-old son from his friend's house on Monday, both boys told me about an amazing video they had just seen on YouTube that showed a really bad man named Joseph Kony who forced children to become soldiers. As a result of the exponential attention the Invisible Children Kony 2012 video is getting, you are probably hearing a lot about Uganda, Joseph Kony, and his horrific tactics. Kony is unfortunately alive and well (you can even track his actions), and it is indeed crucial to stop him from brutalizing more children. For me, the biggest issue the video leaves open is what happens to the children who survive Kony. At UUSC, we believe it's crucial to consider what happens to those children soldiers once they are freed or escape, as thousands have.

Since 2008, UUSC and our partner Caritas have helped over 20,000 of the Acholi people in northern Uganda rebuild after the brutal war between Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army and the Ugandan government. When these people returned to rebuild their villages after the war, they faced the challenge of what to do with the thousands of abducted children who escaped or had been released. The true tragedy of this war is that Kony made children murder and mutilate others in their villages precisely to guarantee that their communities would reject them, making his army their only refuge. The amazing story of heroism is how so many of these returned child soldiers have been able to draw on their resiliency not only to escape but to try to rebuild their lives in the face of initial rejection by their own people.

With the advice of our partner, UUSC found that the best way to help these former child soldiers gain acceptance was to integrate them into community activities, not treat them as a separate group. When I first visited Acuru in 2009, a formerly abducted soldier refused to sit in the circle of villagers or even attend the meeting, because he felt so shamed and rejected. One year later, in the same village, he was sitting in the back row — but he was part of the meeting. He was also leading an oxen team and was a member of the dance troupe. "I got a chance," he said. "This kind of work helps heal me." Our experience in Uganda has taught us that people have incredible wells of resilience that can be tapped if you believe in them and see them as survivors, not victims.

Kony continues to wreak havoc in central Africa, and he definitely must be stopped. We need to understand and take on our role in that — but it's important that we also understand the key roles Ugandans and Africans have played and continue to play. In the viral Kony 2012 video, the narrator's son Joshua clearly sees his father as a hero, but we want to hold up all the invisible heroes of this war in Uganda — the Ugandan religious leaders, parliamentarians, human-rights workers, parents, and NGO workers who struggled for years to bring attention to the war, to convince Kony to release children, and ultimately to bring peace to northern Uganda. As Semhar Araia says in the Christian Science Monitor, "We also know that young people's minds are open and hungry. They should be inspired by knowing Africa is empowered, saving itself and working with partners to remove Kony. That is the real story."

Check out more on UUSC's work with Caritas in Uganda: