Worldwide Focus on the Children of Gulu and Northern Uganda

GuluWalk: on foot for the children of Uganda
Forty-thousand children in Uganda walk 11 km to safety every night in order to escape the rebel army, and on Oct. 22, thousands of people around the globe will walk the same in a world-wide movement for peace.

By Chloë Schama
HappyNews Citizen Journalist

Every night in northern Uganda, tens of thousands of children from rural villages flee their homes for distant urban centers, driven by fear of abduction and forced conscription by rebels who, for the past 19 years, have waged a bloody civil war against the Ugandan government.
After sleeping in makeshift shelters, these "night commuters," as the children are called, walk home, only to repeat the journey the next evening. Moved by the children's plight, uNight, a group of New York activists, has organized an event that they hope will draw attention to this often overlooked conflict.

On October 22, demonstrators will walk from the outskirts of 40 cites, scattered across the United States and the world, into the various city centers. Organizers hope that this global demonstration will focus attention on the issue and increase the level of U.S. and UN intervention in the region.
The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group that seeks to overthrow Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, is largely responsible for the violence that ravages the northern part of the country.
Harrowing testimonies of rape, abuse and child conscription have emerged from the region over the years, yet Museveni's government has failed to provide adequate protection for the area's inhabitants. Up to 1.4 million people have been displaced from their homes, and over 20,000 children have been kidnapped by the LRA over the past 10 years, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The UN estimates that over 40,000 children make the nightly commute to safety.
GuluWalk, the name of the event, takes its name from the Ugandan city of Gulu, located approximately 150 miles north of the capital, Kampala, where over 20,000 children from neighboring towns and villages spend the night. The event is the second stage of a larger campaign, begun this past summer by two Canadians, Adrian Bradbury and Kieran Hayward, who carried out a month-long simulation of the children's commute by walking from the outskirts of Toronto into the city center.
The New York group is a mix of idealistic 20-somethings and older professionals. Ochoro Otunnu, one of GuluWalk New York's central organizers, was born in Gulu and has worked for Oxfam America and the Africa AIDS Initiative. He lived in Uganda until he was 11, when his family fled the country to escape the regime of the Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin.
After living as a refugee in Kenya for three years, Otunnu returned briefly to Uganda after Amin was overthrown, but he soon left to study in the United States where he now lives. He sees GuluWalk as "a commitment to speak out for the people of northern Uganda," an attempt to restore to the children of northern Uganda the innocent pleasures he enjoyed as a child.
Daniella Boston, a recent college graduate and another central organizer, wrote her undergraduate senior thesis on Ugandan politics. Though she traveled widely through Uganda during the course of her research, she was frustrated to find that, as she put it, a "huge chunk of the country" was inaccessible. Daniella hopes that GuluWalk New York will unveil at least part of the atrocities committed in the region.
"The first step towards resolution of this humanitarian catastrophe is to put northern Uganda back on the map," she said.
Other participants have comparably diverse backgrounds. Jonathan Gross, a Masters candidate at the School of Public Health at Columbia University who once lived in Uganda, feels that a moral imperative drew him to the campaign.
"I had no ethical choice but to be involved in the campaign," he admitted. "These are children."
Anthony Bailey, a Jamaican-born New York entertainment lawyer, said he is tired of the feeling of helplessness and impotence that overcomes him when he sees starving and maltreated women. The project offers him the opportunity to actually do something that may have an impact.
For more information about GuluWalk, please visit their Web site. To learn more about the campaign in New York or to get involved, please contact Daniella Boston at daniella@unight.org or visit Unight.

This story was produced by Happynews Citizen Journalist, Chloë Schama. Schama lives in Washington, DC and works for The New Republic magazine.
For more information on contributing to Happynews, click here.

Urbane Encouragement: This is a great cause, and could become a regular awareness-raising event in urban centers around the world. For the locations of the October 22 event, click here. For information on what's happening about this in Seattle, click here.

Learn more about the documentary Stolen Children,Hidden War and get active on behalf of children caught up in the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet - happening this night, and every night - in Uganda.

And thanks to Happy News for covering this story - it is a situation crying out for awareness - and coverage in the mainstream media. It is a cause that activists on both the Left and Right can unite in their concern to bring a cry of outrage against the regime of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni for neglecting.