There is a bell in Palotaka. And one day it will ring again. It will ring for the child soldiers. The children of Uganda. And Congo. And Sudan. Children - tens of thousands of them, kidnapped, brutalized, turned into killers. Fighting for a cult leader. Joseph Kony - on the lam for more than twenty years - a tragic symbol of modern Africa.
One day the bell in Palotaka will ring for Sudan. For Darfur. For justice in the Nile Valley. For worldwide awareness and resolve that in Africa's Great Lakes and Nile Valley a series of wars has raged for decades. Wars of extreme poverty. Wars of hopelessness. Wars of orphans. Wars of disease. Palotaka is in Sudan - a country as cracked as the great bell of Palotaka. The country of a silent bell.
The bell in Palotaka longs to ring for peace. To ring a song of peace. To ring as beautiful people sing and dance in joy - because they now know what hope feels like. Hope. A feeling never experienced before. Hope, like love, is a verb. Why should it have to be a suppressed? Held down, never explored or experienced. Suppressed into fear, and anger, and rage.
The bell in Palotaka resolves to ring for freedom. Freedom of speech, and of worship. Freedom from want. And freedom from fear. What do those freedoms sound like? You have them. What is their song? What is their dance? The bell in Palotaka wants to ring them. The bell in Palotaka wants to know.
The bell in Palotaka knows places nearby. A wide spot in the trail called Ri-Kwangba, and a few round huts made of mud and cow dung called Owiny Ki-Bul. These places, like Palotaka, are just down a red dirt road from Juba, a town that marks a crossing of the Victoria Nile, the "White Nile" in southern Sudan. These places are where the fate of hundreds of child soldiers has been debated by diplomats. Do they know the ring of freedom? Will they dance with the children of Uganda, Congo and Sudan?
Its in the wide spots of the trail that the lives of these children will be decided. The beautiful, fertile Nile Valley provides an ocean of jungle. A bell wants to ring out into that jungle, to ring for justice and freedom in Congo, Uganda and Sudan. Across all of Africa. For children. For you and me.
Only we know that the bell in Palotaka has a sister. A bell for us. A bell that thought it was for everyone on earth. But we have hoarded that bell and kept it only for ourselves. We look at that bell in Philadelphia and only remember the celebration of freedom and justice it represents. Or do we remember the sacrifice of our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor - which made that bell ring for us?
Peace. Freedom. Justice. They are not always comfortable classroom concepts. Debating points. Prostituted on protest banners. Platitudes. Can we understand what they mean if we keep them in a vacuum?
The bell in Palotaka wants to ring. For children. And for you and me.
(Palotaka is a village in southern Sudan near the Uganda border, the jungle locations of Ri-Kwangba and Owiny Ki-Bul have been identified by participants in the Juba peace talks regarding the Lord's Resistance Army child soldier crisis in that region as the only location where child soldiers can turn themselves in. Palotaka has been the crossroads of conflict between the LRA and government regimes for many years. Even with the armies of three nations attacking the Lord's Resistance Army, a general turn-in by child soldiers to end the crisis has yet to happen.)
photo: jdscenicphotography
