Tell me the story of how you started Children of Peace Uganda. What brought you to this work?
What drove me to create Children of Peace Uganda was the passion that came from my work with the former child soldiers in Northern Uganda recruited by the LRA headed by Joseph Kony. I worked in a rehabilitation center receiving the children from the military and taking them through trauma therapy, [which] is so much needed, and just generally helping them to recover to some extent before we would do family tracing to try and reunite them with families—if we could find their families, that is. So, I worked there from 2004 to 2006.
Then, from 2007 to 2010, there was an attempted peace deal between the government of Uganda and the LRA rebels, but, unfortunately, it failed. Before the peace negotiations began, the LRA rebels were given a truce by the government of Uganda to cross over to the Congo while there was going to be a negotiation. The borders were closed, so, when the peace deal failed, they could not come back to Uganda. As a person who has worked with these children on a daily basis for all those years, though, I know that the work we did at the Rachele Rehabilitation Centre in Lira was a type of emergency response. Now that the guns had gone silent, there was a high need to follow up with these youth. I kept asking myself, “What becomes of them? They’ve gone back home, they’ve missed out on education, they don’t have gainful skills; so what happens to them then?” My heart knew that I had to do something, and I kept asking myself, what can I do to create a difference in their lives? That’s how I created Children of Peace Uganda.
I started alone. I talked to whoever whenever there was an opportunity for me to speak with somebody. Then this opportunity was presented to me to speak at the International Criminal Court Review Conference (ICCRC) in 2010 in Kampala. So, that then opened a door for me to speak about issues of child soldiers not only in Uganda but throughout Africa. And not only in Africa: look at Israel, look at Syria, and see also how it affects a child, how wars impact children profoundly across the globe.
So, just going back to the early stages; you did this child therapy work with a rehabilitation center for a few years and despite moving on from the center, you still had a strong moral imperative to continue the work. What were some of the technical steps that went into establishing Children of Peace in Uganda? You mentioned tapping into networks; can you tell me more about obstacles, challenges that came with establishing an NGO?
I started this alone. Just me. There was no money, but I had the heart to do this and I had to move on. I believed that if I have the compassion and if I have the heart, that means that another person somewhere in some part of the globe will too. It may be from my community, or wherever, but I knew someone out there would have the same heart as I do and I believed I would find those people one day. For sure, I’ve been able to meet a number of them who are very passionate about the work that I’m doing.