Girl Soldiers -- The Cost of Survival in Northern Uganda

UGANDA -- It had been 11 years since my feet had touched the dusty rust-colored soil of Uganda. My first visit had been particularly remarkable as it had been the first time the long, black barrel of a gun had been pointed within centimeters of my face.

In a national effort to expel a swelling and beleaguered Sudanese refugee population from the country, an eager soldier of some sort had stopped our matatu (mini-van) in the middle of the night. He awoke me -- at gunpoint -- demanded my passport, and told me to get out of the vehicle. Within a few minutes, about 10 or so of us re-boarded with two less people -- a Sudanese woman and her daughter.

On that night, little did I know that somewhere, kilometers away, an 11-year-old Lucy Aol was sleeping in the thick Northern Ugandan bush hoping that she wouldn’t be awoken in the same fashion. With one thin mattress below her, and one covering her, her dark chocolate skin was swallowed by the night as she hid from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group that was not only largely supported by the Sudanese government but was enthusiastically amassing an army of children to torture, kill and steal from the area’s Acholi people.

Her luck would last two more years. At 13, this Acholi girl would be abducted and issued a gun so that she could protect herself while she pillaged homes for food and clothing at the behest of the LRA. Within days of her abduction, she would be made a “wife”, a position she would keep until, at the age of 16, she would understand that death was a small consequence if she were caught escaping.

“I’m not going to risk much,” she negotiated with herself. “I have to escape.”

She would walk cautiously and quietly for more than 24 hours, without rest, through bush so dense a cat would find it difficult to claw its way through. When she would finally reach Gulu, the second largest populated town in the country and home to a military base against the LRA, she would immediately enter a rehabilitation center, where she would be told the unimaginable: She was pregnant. A teenager so traumatized, Lucy had never even had her first period.

The Lucy Aol who I didn’t know existed 11 years ago, I return to meet in 2008. Now 22 years old, Lucy delivers a handshake so cotton-ball soft that even a ballerina would feel brutish in her company. Her voice is quiet, her smile gummy, and her laugh affable. What you don’t see, however, is the gallery of torture on her body -- a shrapnel scar on the heel of her foot, the panga (type of a machete) and stick scars on her buttocks from being repeatedly beaten by soldiers in the bush.

But there is a reality that neither a smile nor clothing can mask: When you meet Lucy, what you see is a girl -- wanting to be a woman -- and desperately trying to extricate herself from her experience as a child soldier of yesterday, while anxiously trying to safeguard her child from the stigma of being tomorrow’s rebel soldier.

Lucy is among more than 60,000 Northern Ugandan children abducted by the LRA during its 21-year-long civil war against the Ugandan government. Organized by former Catholic altar boy Joseph Kony, theoretically, the LRA was founded to protect Northern Ugandans from the National Resistance Army, which had staged a military coup in 1986, and was exacting revenge in the north, the home of many of the soldiers that tried to resist the coup. It didn’t take long before Kony began attacking, rather than protecting, the Acholi people -- which, ironically, was his own tribe. As they began to fear him, he accused the Acholi of betraying him and he wanted them dead, all the while bolstered by the messages he claimed he received from the “holy spirit.”