Bringing the Invisible Children Movement to Trinity

Posted by admin on Nov 18, 2009 in News | 1 comment

Since 1987, the Government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) have been at war. Led by Joseph Kony, the LRA began as a movement in defense of certain groups within Uganda, but quickly became corrupt. In doing so, it rapidly lost public support and resorted to abducting and indoctrinating children to build its rebel army. Since 1986, it has been estimated that over 10,000 children have been forced into combat, and more than 500,000 people have been forced to live in army-protected displacement camps as a result of the civil war. In 2001, the LRA was officially labeled a terrorist organization by the United States.

While there have been signs of improvement, the situation is still extremely volatile. Last Christmas an attack was launched by the LRA against an opposing Congolese force. 600 were killed and 160 children were abducted for the LRA’s army.

One organization that has responded to these tragedies is Invisible Children Inc. A division of this organization, Schools for Schools, matches struggling Ugandan schools with clusters of western schools, in order to raise money and help the Ugandan education system get back on its feet. This September a team from the Schools for Schools spoke at Trinity and inspired a group of Trinity students to start the Invisible Children movement at Trinity.

The students started the Invisible Children movement on campus and have hosted a few fundraisers. Some of the fundraisers include, a campus wide bottle drive competition, a book drive, and the highly successful Beards for Peace event (which if you’re wondering entailed five especially manly men volunteering to grow their beards one day for each dollar donated). Amazingly, Beards for Peace and the bottle drive have both individually raised almost $600.

Funds donated at Trinity will be specifically working towards rebuilding classrooms for the displaced Keyo Secondary School. The new classrooms will allow the school, which has been displaced for the past 21 years due to the war, to move back to their original site.

If you want to help out, you can donate any books you have in one of the Invisible Children boxes (there’s one in Fraser, the Cafeteria and RNT) or you can donate bottles (picked up from dorms every Thursday).