Invisible Children, Pt. 1
Posted by Dave | Filed under events, film
Last Saturday I attended an event for the group Invisible Children, called The Rescue (hit the link for a short film about the children). The movement formed to spark awareness of the Ugandan civil war and human rights tragedies associated with it, specifically the abduction of children into slave labor as soldiers in armed conflict. The children are forced to kill, mutilate and otherwise terrorize both each other, family members and civilian villages.
The Rescue was an event here in Tempe, AZ - and in several other cities around the world - where youth gathered and marched to recreate a “night commute,” where thousands of Ugandan children move into urban centers to congregate for protection against rebel forces that would otherwise abduct them at night. The college students set up camp on the lawn at ASU to spend the night, waiting to be “rescued” by local media and cultural leaders (in our case, Steve-O of Jackass fame). The hope was/is to lobby for pressure by the international community to force the leader of the rebels into giving up the deadly conflict.
I don’t care to get into any social/political discourse on the conflict, but I highly recommend the film for anyone willing to gain some perspective on their life and reexamine their own purposes. A short video will be coming in the following weeks for Part 2.