Lira, the fourth-largest town in Uganda (with a population of just over 100,000) is located in northern Uganda, 215 miles north of the capital city, Kampala.
Lira is struggling to recover from one of Africa’s longest-running civil wars 20-year conflict was led by rebel guerrilla and self-proclaimed “spokesperson of God,”Joseph Kony, whose Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) raided villages, burned homes, slaughtered civilians, and recruited child soldiers through abductions from the villages and schools of northern Uganda. Thousands of children were robbed of their childhood and, in many cases, of life itself. Boys and girls were turned into killers who became seared by the atrocities they saw and were forced to commit. Children as young as ten years old were taught to kill, often beginning with their own families. During the height of the war, an estimated 20,000 fled to Lira in search of safety from the threat of the LRA. By day thousands filled the streets looking for food or work. By night, no one was found on the streets—no one except the hundreds of orphaned children who found a safe haven from life’s hardships under the city’s storefront verandas.
In 2006, peace talks put an end to the fighting, though Lira remained overwhelmed with people who had fled there to find a place of refuge. The town was overcrowded with ten of thousands of refugees seeking protection, needing food, shelter and medical attention. The following year (2007) the government forced the closure of Internally Displaced Persons’ (IDP) camps in an effort to encourage the population to return to their homes or communities. However, since countless communities had been completely destroyed and families killed, many were left with nowhere to go and no one to go to. Orphans and widows were among the hardest hit, as they were left to fend for themselves—either on the streets in Lira or in the remains of dismantled IDP camps on the outskirts of town. www.givingway.com
