Imagine being kidnapped from your residence hall in the middle of the night, marched into another country, and forced to kill your fellow citizens. For Grace Akallo, these events are all too real.
On Tuesday, Akallo, a former child soldier from northern Uganda, told her story to a Boston College audience that listened in silence. Akallo was kidnapped from her high school at age 15 by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group in northern Uganda. She was taken to Sudan, where she spent seven months as a child soldier for the LRA before escaping and returning to Uganda.
Akallo chronicles her experiences in her book Girl Soldier: A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda's Children. She has testified in front of the U.S. Congress and Amnesty International and has appeared on Oprah, as well as in colleges and high schools across the country. Akallo is currently in her senior year at Gordon College.
Uganda, a nation arising from a patchwork of different tribes, has been embroiled in civil war for 18 years. In 1986, Joseph Kony, the leader of the LRA, claimed injustice against the northern Ugandans and tried to overthrow the government. Without enough support though, he turned to kidnapping children for his army. The LRA uses Sudan as its sanctuary and source of weapons. The conflict has displaced 1.5 million people into refugee camps, and over 26,000 children have been snatched to become child soldiers. The situation is so bad that parents send their children into town at night instead of keeping them at home to decrease their chances of being kidnapped.
Akallo's story began on the night of Oct. 9, 1996, Uganda's Independence Day. "It was actually the very day our independence was taken away," she said. Ordinarily, the girls at Akallo's school would run and hide at night, but they chose to stay in their dorms on that fateful night. Members of the LRA captured 139 girls from the school. Akallo's abductors were actually even younger than she was, but they had guns. The girls had no choice but to obey them.
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