Recently, a four-day event took place in Los Angeles, California at the UCLA campus. This event was called Fourth Estate Summit. During this conference, 15,000 young adults attended to listen to several inspirational speakers such as Jay Naidoo, Jolly Grace O. Andruville, Maryam Elarbi, Jamie Tworkowski, Jason Russell, Jedidiah Jenkins, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, and Dale Partridge. What was so inspirational? The organization entitled Invisible Children. This organization is dedicated to the eradication of the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda and bringing the LRA's leader, Joseph Kony, to justice for his crimes.
In 1986, a woman named Alice Lakwena of the Acholi tribe in northern Uganda gained support for an uprising against the government under Yoweri Musevini called the Holy Spirit Movement. However, when Lakwena was exiled, the HSM had no obvious leader. Joseph Kony, claiming to be a distant cousin of Lakwena's, claimed and enforced his leadership.
Soon after Kony came to power over the HSM, he changed the name to the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). With little support of the LRA, Kony began to steal food and children from villages to supplement his army. These children who are abducted from their homes are forced to serve as child soldiers- trained to kill the enemy, no matter if friend or family- and the girls are used as sex slaves for Kony's officers.
Because of the threat of Kony's abductions, the children are forced to leave their homes at night, when the abductors come, and flock towards cities and hospitals for safety.
It was this world that Jason Russell, Laren Poole, and Bobby Bailey discovered when they went to Sudan to document the war and society. When they found out about the children having to leave their homes at night- night commuters- the three young college students interviewed them and promised to come back and stop the LRA's destructive practices.
Today, because of the combined efforts of the three young men, the organization Invisible Children has been able to hamper the LRA's progress and reunite the abducted children with their families.
On March 5 of last year, Invisible Children launched a 30- minute video called Kony 2012 that caught the attention of the globe. because of it, there has been an increased desire and effort to bring Kony and his commanders to justice and free the women and children that have been displaced and abducted because of him.
Now, Invisible Children's new project is called #zeroLRA. Their goal is to have as many LRA defects as possible through radio broadcasts and dropping flyers in Central Africa. As of August 6 of this year, 96 members of congress signed on to #zeroLRA and committed to the eradication of the LRA.
"Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army have been abducting, killing, and displacing civilians in East and central Africa since 1987. We first encountered these atrocities in northern Uganda in 2003 when we met a boy named Jacob who feared for his life and a woman named Jolly who had a vision for a better future. Together, we promised Jacob that we would do whatever we could to stop Joseph Kony and the LRA. Invisible Children was founded in 2004 to fulfill that promise." ~ invisiblechildren.com
For more information on Joseph Kony and Invisible Children, go to http://invisiblechildren.com/. To donate to this cause, visit http://invisiblechildren.com/donate/. To help support #zeroLRA, go to http://zerolra.invisiblechildren.com/.
