Alima Sauda was a student at the Santa Monica Girls Tailoring School, but now she works as a staff member to teach other girls to weave. Here, she makes school uniform sweaters on a weaving machine. (Melanie Lidman)
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Northern Uganda is shattered. After decades of civil war and rebel insurgencies led by Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), the northern part of the country is just beginning to emerge from their struggle for survival and take stock of their enormous losses. According to a United Nations report, the LRA kidnapped up to 100,000 children and brainwashed them to stay in bush camps during Kony's reign of terror, which started in 1987.
Everyone in northern Uganda agrees that these children, who were snatched from their homes, are victims of this conflict. But these children are also the soldiers who perpetrated horrific atrocities, at times storming villages and killing hundreds of people, raping women and girls, burning down entire towns.
With international pressure, including a warrant from the International Criminal Court in 2005 and peace negotiations attempts with the government in 2008, Kony has withdrawn from northern Uganda and is now in hiding in the Central African Republic, Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo.
And as the children of northern Uganda emerged from the bush and tried to come home, the scarred communities they left struggled to absorb them. The children's presence is a reminder of the things that they did and people they killed, a reminder of impossible loss. But at the same time, the community cannot reject an entire generation of children.
