NHS Students Meet ‘Invisible Children’

By Eliza Hallabeck

For a brief time on Wednesday, October 15, Newtown High School students found themselves facing students from across the world who have been suffering from conflict within their country for their entire lives.

Representatives of Invisible Children, a nonprofit organization that is sending out representatives across the country to raise money for schools torn apart by war in Uganda, came to NHS last week armed with a film called GO.

The documentary followed three students from the United States while they spent a summer in Uganda. The students were chosen to go to Uganda as representatives of change, but as the students realized, the summer changed them more than it could ever affect the people they met in Uganda.

Students at NHS looked on as the lives of Gloria, Pepita, and Lillian were unveiled through the friendships they formed with the students from the United States in the documentary.

“It went really well,” said Sam Kent, a junior at NHS who brought Invisible Children to the school.

Rachel Caldwell-Powell, a representative of Invisible Children, gave a short presentation for NHS students before she started the film.

“This movie is about students your own age,” said Ms Caldwell-Powell. She explained Invisible Children is a company based out of San Diego, Calif, that is sending representatives across the country to schools to raise money for schools in Uganda. The program is called Schools For Schools, because each school in the United States that signs up to raise money is partnered with a school in Uganda.

The representatives of Invisible Children that visited NHS have been driving in a van since the beginning of September. They are one of 13 groups that have been assigned an area of the country to cover, and so far NHS has raised the most money of the schools they have visited, according to Sam.

An Outpouring Of Support

After viewing the documentary NHS students were encouraged to donate $1, the cost of one coffee, as Jay Harvey, a representative of Invisible Children, pointed out. Sam said instead of $1 bills many students had donated much more.

“It was amazing,” said Sam. “There were $20 bills people put in [the jars].”

NHS students have donated more than $1,000 to the cause, and, according to Sam, the second highest raising school in New England has donated $480.

“These conflicts started the year I was born,” said representative of Invisible Children Jay Harvey, who moved from Australia to work with Invisible Children. “Which means, these students have been experiencing this for their entire lives.”

Gloria, Pepita, and Lillian, the students from Uganda in the documentary, had three different stories to share with their friends, and in turn all viewers who watch the film GO.

Gloria disappeared the day after she made friends with a student from the United States, and the teachers at the school they were visiting told her new friend, Amanda Mitchell, the main student in the documentary, not to go looking for her.

Gloria is sick, Amanda was told a number of times by teachers at the school. She was also warned not to go looking for her friend.

Meanwhile, the two students who befriended Pepita and Lillian were growing an interest in seeing the displacement camps where their friends lived. Each day students in Uganda travel from the displacement camps to their school, which is a fenced area for the students to study safely.

The displacement camps were a product of the war that has been fought between the Government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel militia that grew from a following based on a woman who believed she heard the Holy Spirit tell her to overthrow the government in Uganda. The war has been ongoing for 23 years, according to Invisible Children.

In response to increased attacks from the government, the rebel movement abducted children and added them to their ranks. Children, according to the film, were trained to fight against their country. Invisible Children claims more than 90 percent of the troops fighting for the Lord’s Resistance Army were abducted as children.

As the Lord’s Resistance Army increased its attacks on villages, according to Invisible Children, the Ugandan government evicted thousands from their homes and relocated them to crowded camps for protection. More than one million people still live in the camps today, and, according to the film; most have been living there for over a decade.

NHS students watched as Amanda and her two friends decided to enter the Internally Displaced Camps, despite warnings of the potential of them being abducted, raped, or murdered themselves.

Amanda found Gloria, but she found her sick under a blanket. Amanda tried to cheer her friend up, but Gloria eventually told her that this was not the first time she had been sick since finding out she was HIV positive.

Pepita told his friend that his father had been killed, and the rebels had taken his sister.

“Being inside the camps was worse than I ever could have imagined,” said Amanda as she narrated the documentary.

Lillian, who enjoys singing and could relate to her friends from the United States with pop music, shared with her friend that her father had died in battle and her mother had abandoned her. Lillian lived with her grandmother in the camp, and her grandmother would soon die from illness.

A Transformation

As the summer came to a close, Amanda, as the narrator, said each of the students who had gone to Uganda felt changed. They wanted to do more to help, she said, and they did. Amanda and her friends with whom she had traveled to Uganda took one more trip together. They went to Washington, D.C., to speak to Congress to urge them to pass a bill that would send $17 million to fund the reconstruction of Uganda.

“The war is not over,” Amanda said at the end of the documentary. “It’s time to ask yourself, how far would you go?”

The representatives who worked with Sam to bring the film to NHS are traveling for three months across New England, according to Ms Harvey. They are not being paid, and if they do not find people to share a home with them for a night, they will sleep in their van. Ms Harvey said they have not had to sleep in the van since the start of the journey in September.

She said the trip has been amazing, and students at each school they have visited have been really warm.

“We have kids in the crowd that we don’t even know we met,” said Ms Harvey, “and we’ll get an email that night about how we changed their life.”

Ms Harvey said it is the random acts of kindness and encouragement that make life on the road possible.

Sam, who brought Invisible Children to the high school, said she was working on doing something for the past two and a half years.

During her freshman year at NHS she volunteered as an activist for the crisis in Darfur, and another film by Invisible Children was showing. Sam said she told herself that, “I need to be able to do something with this.”

Sam said she brought the idea to her sociology teacher last year, and together they brought the idea of raising money to the curriculum at NHS. Every year students will put an effort together to try and raise money for a school in Uganda. Sam said she and Invisible Children set the date in February for the showing of Go.

“I have some big plans for this,” said Sam. She said further efforts to raise money for Invisible Children will be happening in Newtown in the future.