Listening to stories of children forced into being sex slaves and soldiers, about 200 Boston University students put their world on hold Saturday night to witness the historic troubles of Ugandan children.
“Walk Out of the Darkness: BU Students Take a Stand,” hosted by the Multi-Ethnic InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter, aimed to raise awareness and funds for Ugandan children who are sold as sex slaves and trained as child soldiers.
Ugandan guest speaker Annette Champney, a humanitarian aid worker, spoke to the Jacob Sleeper Auditorium audience about her experiences living in Uganda and her recount of knowing kidnapped Ugandans.
“Every day in high school, soldiers would come into high schools and abduct children,” she said. “Boys became soldiers, and girls became wives.
“[The situation] has been going on for over 20 years,” she continued. “You try to understand why. Why would children have to go through such peril?”
The event included a presentation of clips from the 2003 documentary Invisible Children, a film about three college students who visited northern Uganda and witnessed the danger the region’s children face from the Lord’s Resistance Army, a Ugandan rebel group that kidnaps children.
The country’s army turns boys into soldiers and girls slaves for older soldiers, said event co-coordinator and IVCF member Rae Lathrop.
“After viewing the documentary Invisible Children, we wanted to help bring awareness to this situation of invisible children,” the College of Arts and Sciences sophomore said. “It’s a great deal of a humanitarian effort to help the cause.”
The event raised $1,130 and IVCP members said it will be donated to the Invisible Children Inc., an organization that works to improve quality of life for war-affected Ugandan children by providing them with education.
Champney asked audience members to make use of online technology to spread more information about the child abuse in Uganda.
“I’m confident you will make the children of Uganda visible,” she said. “We need to use YouTube, MySpace, Facebook to make these children visible, and no one can stop you.”
The BU community is labeled as apathetic about human rights issues, said IVCF campus minister Paul Joyal, a 2000 College of Communication graduate.
“You’ve chosen to be here on a Saturday night,” Joyal told the audience. “You’re making BU a better place by coming here and helping to peel that label off.”
College of Fine Arts freshman Taylor Ashbrook said she attended the presentation because she is “worried about world issues like this.”
“Coming here gave me a good opportunity to see what was going on with this issue,” she said.
Joval ended his speech with a quote from Gandhi, urging attendees to “be the change you wish to see in the world.”
“The change I would like to see most is for more North Americans to take the cause of helping the poor and oppressed,” he said. “As more of our voices form together, our voice becomes bigger.”