If you haven’t heard about Joseph Kony by now, I feel like you must not read any sort of news or watch any tv. It seems to be everywhere as it keeps popping up in what I am doing being in Thailand. Last I read, the video had been viewed more than 75 million times. If you haven’t seen it, I’d strongly recommend you go find it on vimeo or youtube and take the 30 minutes to watch it.
Why am I blogging about Joseph Kony while in Asia? Why does it matter? Here is why it matters in my world. I wrote about visiting my compassion child Maurine. She lives literally 7 miles from the Democratic Republic of Congo and 25 miles from South Sudan. Joseph Kony still operates within a 30 minute drive of a person I have now met and know.
But, it goes far beyond that. Maruine is my compassion child because she is from a single parent home whose mother cannot support her. Why? I have my guesses. Was her father killed during this uprising? We saw the economic impact of the Lord’s Resistance Army in our day in northern Uganda. The infrastructure and economic opportunities were obliterated by the Lord’s Resistance Army. People are still recovering. But, the reality is the impact continues today and impacts the people living in the area.
Finally, on the day we were visiting Maurine, I heard the story of a kindergartner in the local public school. Because of the poverty that exists, the government has mandated that a child cannot be turned away from a public school because they cannot pay the school fees. Many students sit in school with no meal for the entire day trying to learn. That is hard enough.
But, the government has chosen not to financially support these schools adequately and so most class sizes range between 200 and 600 students. Nope, I did not add an extra zero. In the US, we get upset when our elementary class sized are greater than 25 and our high school class sizes are greater than 30. Can you even imagine how hard it would be to learn in a 2nd grade classroom of 300 with a single teacher. What does that even look like?
It leads to unintended consequences like the story we heard. A kindergartner left the classroom to go use the bathroom. The bathrooms in most of Uganda were outhouse squatty potties. This means it is basically a hole in the floor of an outhouse. The small child fell in and ended up drowning. The most horrific portion is that it took the teacher over 3 hours to even notice the child was missing.
These are the unheard of consequences of the Lord’s Resistance Army’s reign of terror in Uganda. The area is so economically depressed that students are underserved and tragedy strikes. Was it Joseph Kony’s fault? Not directly. But, I can say without a doubt that in Sudan and Congo people are dying daily. Congo is the rape capital of the world for a reason.
In church while we were in Rwanda we heard a woman testify about her children who were on a bus traveling in the Congo. They had been pulled over by a group of Lord’s Resistance Army members, marched off the bus, and lined up on the side of the road. They were preparing to be executed when troops came over the hill and the LRA fighters were forced to flee without killing the people from the bus. They escaped. How many more have not?
This is why stopping people like Joseph Kony is important. I have heard the stories. I have seen the results. Would you take the time to watch the video and make a decision? Joseph Kony is not the only person like this. But, if we start with him, we have the opportunity to give a voice to the voiceless and hope to the hopeless.
