Not Only Boys are Solidiers

When we hear child soldiers we imagine boys with guns. I would have never thought about girls being obligated to fight for the rebel groups. I read an article in the WorldArk magazine titled "Never the same" by L. Lamor Williams, where a woman named Grace Akallo tells her story about her abduction in the LRA. She was abducted by the LRA from her High School in Northern Uganda. Akallo dreamed of being the first person to attend college but her dreamed vanished when she was kidnapped in Oct. 9, 1996 beside other 138 girls. She marched with the LRA into southern Sudan where she saw many children being killed on the way with sticks, axes, bayonets, and machetes. The children were killed and abandoned in the forest. She learned to use a gun and the hunger tought her to hunt. She battled against the Sudan People's Liberation Army in Sudan. She was obligated to kill those girls who tried to escape or refuse there husbands, so she was repeatedly raped by an LRA commander on countless occasions. Akallo finaly saw her chance to escape in April 9, 1997 when she fainted from thirst and hunger and was buried by the LRA in a shallow grave. She walked for 2 weeks and was rescued by sudanese villager who handed her to the Uganda government then to her parents. Akallo finaly got the chance to go back to St. Mary's College and graduated. Now she is a graduate student at Clark University near Boston Studying international development she is now 29 years old.