Child Soldiers
In a Time for Peaceby Nancy Brink
A Time for War and a Time for Peace
Akumu Beatrice joined the group of female students dressed in their red and black school uniforms. They conversed together in excited anticipation. They began to wrap multi-colored cloths around their hips—the ones normally used for strapping their infants or wrapping around their heads to carry heavy loads.
It was a time to dance, a time for joy.
The music started—the unique rhythm of the Acholi people of northern Uganda. Two foot diameter half-gourds (called calabash in some areas) were struck with empagi (modified bike spokes). Recorder-like omukuri and adong (primitive harps) were added to the symphony. The girls’ feet and hips agitated in time to the rapid beat of the gourd. Their voices raised in the characteristic high-pitched, undulating screech that revealed their joy.
Such jubilationwas not always so, and it is not always now. There was a time for war, rather than peace; a time for killing, instead of a time to heal.
Akumu Beatrice (name changed), age 16, has just recently started dancing again. She is one of 65,000 children abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), commanded by Joseph Kony, since 1987. Kony currently seeks to overthrow the Ugandan government with his own warped version of the Ten Commandments by forming a rebel force made up of his own people.
Beatrice was only ten years old when she was taken from her school by soldiers not much older than herself. She was forced at gunpoint to march 30 miles to an LRA outpost with a group of other prisoners. She was badly beaten and forced to carry heavy loads.
Beatrice and the other children were trained to use machetes and guns to kill and maim villagers along the way, as part of Kony’s brainwashing process. Once the abducted reached the camp, they were further taught to raid villages for food and more children. On one of these trips, they arrived at Beatrice’s home village, where she saw her family again. However, this was not a welcome home party—instead, Beatrice was forced to kill members of her own family that had survived.
Had she refused, Beatrice’s only other option would have been death.
A Time to Uproot
And then after a period of two years, Beatrice escaped. This did not happen before even more torture—she was given to an LRA commander as his “wife” and she conceived a baby. The guerilla warfare continued with looting and skirmishes, and with government troops and with killing and marching.
A Time to Search, a Time to Be Born
Beatrice’s return home, as a former child soldier, was a harrowing one. She was not sure of the way. She continually met other children roaming in the bush who mistrusted her and threatened to kill her or turn her in. She barely avoided rebel reconnaissance troops. Then, as Beatrice turned twelve years old, she delivered her seven-pound baby boy alone in the bush, with no medical tools or personnel.
Beatrice began to search out God, seeking to be reborn herself as she had nowhere else to turn and no one to help.
A Time to Be Silent and a Time to Speak
At first, Akumu Beatrice lived in one of the many refugee camps in Northern Uganda. This one was built on the site of her former village, which had been burned to 
the ground by the rebels. Conditions were horrendous. Thousands of people live in mud huts with no land to grow food and no sanitation.
Eventually, Beatrice was accepted to the emergency assistance and pilot program of ChildVoice International, whose mission it is to restore the voices of children silenced by war. Located in the village of Lukodi, Gulu District, the ChildVoice Centre is housed in a former primary school building. Ironically, this was the site of one of the worst massacres of the rebel war in 2004. Now 30 “child mothers” and their 38children are safe and fed, counseled, taught school subjects and trained vocationally, all in a supportive Christian community.
Twenty Ugandan staff are joined by only two Westerners in the daily life of Lukodi Centre. Some are administrative workers, others teach and counsel, still others work at the ChildVoice medical clinic nearby. College-aged interns volunteer in areas like income generation projects, child care and nutrition education. Others come from the U.S. and southern Uganda to work on construction projects, advise on farming techniques, form medical teams, and share the gospel.
A Time to Embrace: Where We Come In
In recent months, I have had the privilege of joining teams of both InterVarsity and Campus Crusade student workers who are seeking to learn about life in Lukodi and the issues facing the child mothers there. My role has been one of medical and personal support of the mothers breastfeeding their babies. Those students arriving at Lukodi are touched by the simple life there, the immense need to restore these mothers in so many ways, and the transformation going on before their eyes.
Two teams from both campus organizations are headed to Lukodi this summer. Students will work alongside ChildVoice staff to serve the children and to be exposed to such issues as HIV/AIDS, poverty, corruption and war. InterVarsity’s program, New England Global Issues Internship, seeks to help students “view the world through the eyes of the oppressed and the poor” and to mobilize them to initiate change in cultures of both Uganda and their campuses. This is also the beginning of a five-year partnership with FOCUS, the InterVarsity equivalent in Uganda.
Akumu Beatrice knows that there is a time for everything. Now she is experiencing a time for love, a time for healing. But her life in Lukodi is not one of pure bliss. She has the scars of someone victimized by the LRA, and these are difficult to deny. Her rescue by ChildVoice is also rare. Thousands of girls just like her are still suffering as rebel slaves and as former child soldiers rejected by their communities.
May we respond to their cries in prayer to our heavenly Father, lifting our voices for the children of Northern Uganda.
Nancy and Tom Brink have worked with InterVarsity in New England for nearly 30 years. They have led students and church folks on missions to Asia and Latin America, and with ChildVoice International to Africa.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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