Starting today, you can track the movements of the Lord’s Resistance Army in real time at LRACrisisTracker.com.
The LRA Crisis Tracker is a groundbreaking mapping tool that displays attacks committed by the LRA across Central Africa as they happen. In the 25-year history of the…
Laren Poole, please marry me. I’ll even marry Courtney too. As long as I get to see your beautiful face everyday.
Baryn rockin’ the IC sunglasses.
From one of our editors Kevin Trout, currently starting up our first Dream Factory in Uganda.
Oh by all means please go on about your break-up, job, and living family. Your problems are probably alot worse than mine.
If you have food in your stomach, clean drinking water, clothes on your back, change in your pocket, literacy, a free education, live off of more than 2.50 a day, a roof over your head, and are capable of moving all of your limbs you don’t have that much to complain about.
Can child soldiers be rehabilitated?’
I am in the process of filming a doc based around the subject of ‘the military’s abuse of children in third world countries’. I mainly want to focus on how audiences perceive the rehabilitation process of children soldiers, and I want to promote brilliant charities that not only stop rebel armies from corrupting children as young as 9 in countries such as Sierra Leone and Uganda, but actually consider the long-term effects of war and how these children can recover from such truamatic experiences. I decided that I wanted utilise my knowledge of drama to create a short documentary that is built up of mainly brief interviews of members of the public. My main interest is the rehabilitation process, as charities and various forms of governmental aid, have aimed to stop the miltary’s use of children, while inadvertly overlooking methods of rehabilitating the child soldiers that have already been brutally traumatised and manipulated by the rebel armies and forces.
I recently watched a documentary named ‘Children of War’ and took some notes. The documentary is set in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and focuses on young 11 year-old Sherieff Koroma, a former child soldier that is receiving no form of rehabilitation treatment, other than getting an education at school. It is slowly revealed to the audience, that Koroma along with thousands of other boys were regularly given doses of cocaine, to make them fight in a war fuelled by blood diamonds. I have concluded from watching this documentary that to effectively rehabilitate this boy, it is necessary for him to show signs of remorse to avoid him continuing down a path one may argue is deterministic. However the likelihood of this occurring is minor, as no active help or therapy is available to this boy to help him cope with the trauma that he has been forced to carry. His faith in God has seemed to keep him on some degree of sanity, though he has shown signs of suicidal thoughts – “I also pray to God to send somebody to help me kill myself”.
As a Christian myself, I have to say that I am disappointed at the fact that in today’s society, the belief in God has been widely frowned upon, while in developing countries that have been hit with extreme poverty, the belief in God is arguably the only thing keeping boys like Koroma sane and alive. Overall this documentary has informed me more as part of the audience and as the director of my own documentary of the cruelty these children face, and the necessity of bringing this subject to the surface of the media.
If U want to help in any way shape or form (dw i’m not asking for $£$££), or if you can direct me to some moving films or docs on this topic, plz comment.
ty 4 reading :}
