There were 53 of them, all teenagers, many of them shivering in -16 C, walking 10 km from their Toronto school to the city's downtown core.
The Grade 8 students from Annette Street Public School planned the walk for weeks, and when they set out on that icy day in February, they joined a growing number of Canadians supporting the fledgling GuluWalk campaign in support of the war-ravaged children of northern Uganda. It's a movement that's inspiring young people to help end the suffering of the so-called "night commuters" in one of Africa's trouble spots.
The night commuters
Every evening, an estimated 40,000 Ugandan children, some as young as four years old, march along dirt roads into larger communities in a desperate attempt to avoid capture by the rebel soldiers of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). They are the casualties of a 20-year civil war that has seen thousands of them kidnapped by the LRA and forced to become child soldiers or sex slaves.
Their childhoods are stolen and battered in unimaginable ways. The LRA is accused of raping its young victims, slicing off their noses, ears and lips, forcing them to become sex slaves and ordering them to kill even their own siblings. But the LRA isn't the only villain. The Ugandan military, supposed to protect the 1.5 million people forced into Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps for their own safety, is also accused of abduction and torture.
And so the children of northern Uganda walk each night, barefoot and hungry, from their villages or fetid camps into nearby towns such as Gulu where they sleep in relative safety in shelters, hospitals or under trees. Then they return home the next morning, attend school, if there is one, and as the sun sets, walk into the darkness again.
Compassionate youths
The child victims of a bruising civil war are touching the hearts of children in this country, and Canadians are responding.
"My students feel powerful and believe they can educate the grown-ups around them," says teacher, Lisa Klug, who participated in the first-ever GuluWalk last October and shared the experience with her class. It was the students, she says, who insisted on getting further involved. "They said 'We need to do something,'" recalls Klug.
A local art show called Creative Soles was the springboard. The teens built a huge foot out of plaster and wire, painting it brown to match the skin of the northern Ugandan children who are forced to trudge up to 12.5 km each evening to escape the conflict. And then, on the day of the art show, they walked 10 km from their school to Toronto's Metro Hall to raise awareness about the plight of kids their age who are living a nightmare.
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