Rights

girl soldier

A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda’s Children

FAITH J. H. MCDONNELL

AND GRACE AKALLO

© 2007 by Faith J. H. McDonnell and Grace Akallo

Published by Chosen Books

A division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.chosenbooks.com

Second printing, April 2008

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McDonnell, Faith J. H.

   Girl soldier : a story of hope for northern Uganda’s children / Faith J. H. McDonnell and Grace Akallo.

        p.   cm.

   Includes bibliographical references.

   ISBN 10: 0-8007-9421-4 (pbk.)

   ISBN 978-0-8007-9421-7 (pbk.)

1. Uganda—Church history. 2. Girls—Crimes against—Uganda. 3. Abduction—Uganda. 4. Uganda—Politics and government. 5. Akallo, Grace.

I. Akallo, Grace. II. Title.

BR1443.U33M33 2007

276.761’0829—dc22                                                                                                            2007000168

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture is taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Scripture marked nkjv is taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Photos on photo 1, photo 2, photo 3, photo 4, photo 5, photo 6, photo 7 by Sarita Hartz. Hartz, of Arlington, Virginia, has begun a new initiative for the victims of northern Uganda’s war and displacement called Zion Project. Zion Project is a grassroots, faith-based project with a mission of grace: To revolutionize war-affected communities whose needs are unmet by humanitarian aid through intimate healing, creative empowerment, and holistic transformation in the lives of the most vulnerable—girl child soldiers, child mothers, and refugees in Africa. The mission hopes to provide an after-care shelter for child mothers (a trauma center that will provide deep heart transformation through counseling) and agricultural development within a resettled IDP [internally displaced persons] camp.

I dedicate this book to my wonderful husband, Francis, and my precious daughter, Fiona, who put up with many months of my being even busier than usual. They make my world more beautiful and joyful than I could ever imagine. I realize every day how grateful I am to God for them.

—Faith

First I dedicate this book to God, who gave me the gift of life, protected me and gave me His love.

I dedicate this book to the Aboke girls who were abducted from St. Mary’s College. All these innocent children suffered under the brutality of Kony and his LRA, yet with faith they believe in God’s love and care. I pray that those whose lives were cut short will find peace in the hands of God.

I dedicate this book to Sister Rachele, who with great love risked her own life to rescue the Aboke girls. She managed to rescue 109 out of 139, and she continued to ask for help for the remaining 30 girls.

I also dedicate this book to Sister Alba, who was the headmistress at the time I was abducted. She never stopped praying for the Aboke girls and all the children abducted by the rebels. When she went to Italy, she said, Children, I am going to the mountain to pray for you and the children still in captivity. She died in April 2006, but she must have died with the Aboke girls’ names in her prayers.

—Grace

Contents

The Armies of Uganda: A Reference

Foreword by Dan Haseltine

Preface by Henry Orombi

Acknowledgments

Introduction by Faith J. H. McDonnell

1. Buried Alive

2. Stolen in the Darkness

3. Hope or No Hope

4. Fire of Martyrdom

5. Safe Times with Grandpapa

6. A New Darkness Descends

7. Raid of the Cattle Thieves

8. Killing as the Spirit Leads

9. Buried Treasure in the Abyss with the LRA

10. Lakwena Seeks a New Home

11. Shoot Her!

12. Creating Killer Children

13. It Was Time to Live

14. Experiences That Leave Scars

15. Escape from the Kony Nightmare

16. Who Is Protecting Us?

17. Crossing the River to Uganda

18. Acts of Defiance

19. Learning to Live without a Gun

20. The Adults Are Not Around

21. Finding Life Again

22. Hearts Full of Northern Uganda

23. Making a Difference

Notes

The Armies of Uganda

A Reference

In the following pages you will be confronted with a number of military and paramilitary forces and movements. These usually are referred to by acronym rather than name. Use this reference to avoid confusion.

Foreword

I stood outside and cried. It was not the kind of emotional response one might have to a touching scene in a movie. It was an overwhelming sadness and confusion. Little shoes, pieces of jewelry, journals and bones filled every corner of the church—the aftermath of a genocide that the world had either ignored or watched as if it were a foreign film without subtitles. They could see the emotion but they could not understand the subtext or the reasons it should matter. The dialogue was missing.

Rows and rows of human skulls lined the back walls of the church. If a skull had a distinct circular hole in it, the weapon that caused it was a club with a nail sticking out of it. If the skull had a clean line cut into it, it was caused by a machete. If the skull was simply crushed or cracked, that was most likely due to some kind of blunt object. The perpetrators had not used military weapons for the massacre. They had used the weapons of neighbors and farmers. For it was not a military force that had killed eight hundred thousand people in less than one hundred days. It was neighbors. It was colleagues, fellow workers and friends.

I sat across the table from a pastor who bore visible signs of physical abuse on his hands, his face, his arms. He had come under the cover of night to tell his story of persecution—the story of what life was like for him as a pastor of an underground church in China. Over the course of five days, I sat and listened to many testimonies, sifted through pictures and touched the mended hands of men who had been beaten and tortured. What was I to do with this kind of information?

I have always loved and found great purpose in a particular description of an artist: one whose primary position in this universe is to look at the world and describe it. A distiller of information. A prophet to a world full of busy and important people who need the CliffsNotes versions of how the world is and how it could be. Artists get to communicate what people should care about and why they should care. Artists get to tell stories. And it is in these stories that the cold and careless words and numbers, the building blocks of information, undergo a beautiful metamorphosis into meaning.

It is in the meaning of information that people find a point of connection and the context for understanding another person’s circumstances. The artists behind the retelling of Schindler’s List gave people reasons to reconsider the lives of Jewish families in the throes of Nazi Germany. We also cared to learn about the class system that allowed only the very rich aboard the Titanic a chance for survival when the ship began to sink.

These stories are the ones born out of artists who transform information so that we can find in the characters, both real and fictitious, glimpses of ourselves. If a story about a man defending his family from brutal force does not make us think about our own families—how we would defend them and the cruel things that could happen to our own children—and if we are not able to put ourselves in the place of the story’s characters, then it is not a story but merely the careless documentation of an event.

We will not readily find ourselves in the numbers and words of information. That is why body counts and casualty figures fail to bring a true response or an impassioned cry for justice. That is why, when towers collapse in New York or a tidal wave hits Sri Lanka or an earthquake ravishes Cambodia or people make war in the Middle East, we detach and disengage as the numbers begin to whisk across the television screen.

The story of Grace Akallo is a hard one to read, mostly because she has been through things that we cannot even begin to have a context for understanding. In our psychoanalytical world, we do not see people like her as having a chance for anything close to a normal, unhaunted life. But the stories of people like Grace are invaluable because they are told in the right proportions.

Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission, an organization dedicated to saving girls from illegal prostitution and sexual slavery, said that the way to communicate the awful realities of girls in brothels is to give people 30 percent despair and 70 percent hope. He is right. Scripture tells us there are currents in motion that we will not be able to stop. Yet we see hope, and it allows us to push back against the effects of the Fall; it allows us to enter into what Dr. Paul Farmer calls the long defeat. And there is at least 70 percent hope, because the Gospel is in these stories.

For certain, in the face of such brutal circumstances, we take hope in the fact that God is working out His glorious plan in our midst. But this hope sometimes loosens its grip when we consider the blackened heart of a man who revels in administering careless amounts of pain and affliction on another man. Or when we see the minds of men conjure up a schematic to desensitize children and turn them into ruthless, broken killers.

What does the Gospel say about children killing other children? What does the Gospel say about men systematically raping and torturing women? How do we tell these stories with gloriously disproportionate amounts of hope? Where is hope in the stories of the actions of men whose moral, social and cultural restraints have been lifted, who spend their days shedding the blood and drawing out the screams of other humans for pleasure? Is there really this much hope to speak of in the face of human bloodlust?

These stories are not the ones that end with reconciliation or with an overarching sense of redemption. Yet these are the stories that remind us why Jesus hung on a cross. The Gospel tells us that Jesus came so that the stories we tell will not end with torture and abuse. He died so we can believe in a God who truly raises people from the dead. Why? Because He knew that pastors in China and families in Rwanda and children in Uganda would need to believe in such a God more than anything. He knew that the last prayer a person utters before he or she comes to the end of mortality is God, please be a God who raises people from the dead. By faith, they will wager their final breath on that being true.

And it is true.

So why do I care about these prophetic and artistic connections? Because this is a story that is still being written. Because in the beautiful and tragic land of Uganda, children are still being kidnapped and war is still raging and we are still doing so little, because we have not yet seen God or ourselves in the story of Uganda.

We are in the history of violence and corruption, in the blatant manipulation of spiritual things, in the wreckage of innocence lost and in the grip of mercy and strength evident in the lives of many child soldiers, even as the madness of war strives to snuff it out.

Dan Haseltine, Jars of Clay

Preface

The violence caused by the Lord’s Resistance Army has daily brought death to northern and northeastern Uganda for two decades. The suffering of our people is incomparable. They have lost their children. They have lost their homes and their freedom, living now in refugee camps, lacking food and the ability to live a normal life.

We commend Faith and Grace for shining a powerful and compassionate light on the suffering of northern Uganda. Although their book illuminates the evil that was set in motion long before Grace Akallo was wrenched from the warmth and safety of St. Mary’s, before Joseph Kony appeared in Acholiland to spill the blood of Ugandan children, and even before Archbishop Janani Luwum, my predecessor and hero of the faith, was martyred at the hands of Idi Amin, it is nevertheless a story of hope!

Over and over in the past few years, we have seen small rays of hope for an end to the war, only to have those hopes dashed. But heroic peacemakers such as the Acholi Leaders’ Peace Forum and Mrs. Betty Bigombe have never given up. And advocates around the world have not stopped praying and fighting to bring peace and justice to the children of northern Uganda. Now, with the help of the regional government of South Sudan, another chance has come for the Ugandan government and the LRA to seek the way of peace and reconciliation and bring this war to an end.

There is hope for Uganda because the Christ, who was born, walked our world and died as a sacrifice, is alive. He is in control of our world and has plans, as the prophet Jeremiah said, to give Uganda a hope and a future. Human events are not spinning out of control. God is with His people in the internally displaced people’s (IDP) camps in Gulu, Kitgum, Lira and Katakwi districts. No one can shut Him out, even in the camps. As the tears and cries of our people continue to rise up to God for freedom, He is with them. Just as He delivered Grace from the rebels, He will deliver them all.

It is my hope and prayer that as you read Girl Soldier, you will see God walking with a young Acholi girl in her captivity, hear Him weeping for the deaths of His children and whispering in the hearts of thousands to raise up a movement for these children. It is my prayer that you will know God, who has caused you to take notice, pray and act on behalf of His children—not just because He loves them, but because He loves you.

Henry Orombi, Archbishop, Anglican Church of Uganda

Acknowledgments

Faith

I am grateful to Jane Campbell at Chosen Books for asking me to write a book about the children of northern Uganda, and for encouraging and challenging me in many ways. I am grateful, as well, to my amazing, beautiful and brave co-author, Grace Akallo, and I love how the Lord put Faith and Grace together to write this book.

Thanks to our editor, Paul Ingram, who smoothed over the rough spots, compensated for my grammatical memory lapses and helped me to trim my frequently long sentences; all the staff at Baker Publishing Group for their patience and assistance; my father and mother, Walter and Beatrice Hooper, who taught me to love the Lord (Dad is still loving Him here, but Mom is loving Him face-to-face); and Marilyn and Nancy, my big sisters and best friends. I must also thank my soul sisters for Africa—Pauline Hildebrandt (my Uganda missions connection), who convinced me to write this book; Fran Boyle, the intrepid and passionate Sudan missionary; and Elizabeth Hankins, who selflessly helped and encouraged me in the midst of completing her own novel about southern Sudan.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things,