There’s no toilet. There’s no paved road. There’s no guarantee you’ll be alive tomorrow. Welcome to Uganda.
On Wednesday, Sept. 17, Stony Brook University hosted UNICEF Campus Initiative: Child Slavery. The event hoped to inform the incoming class of 2012 about the atrocities against humanity during a lecture in the Union building.
Global Studies, one of the six Undergraduate Colleges for first year students, invited Invisible Children to speak to an audience of nearly 200. Invisible Children volunteers are divided into regional groups that cover schools from Maine to California. The lecture was targeted towards the Global Studies Undergraduate College freshmen students.
The northern region of Uganda has not received as much attention as its neighbor to the north, Darfur, but its conditions are hardly better. The stark differences on the two sides of the Nile that cut through northern and southern Uganda are poignant and reprehensible.
The Invisible Children Organization, an awareness-raising group, has a mission to improve the quality of life for war-affected children by providing access to quality education, enhanced learning environments, and innovating economic opportunities for the community.
During this program the documentary “How Far Would You Go?” was screened to 200 students.
As the audience watched six high school students transform from naive Americans to honorable citizens of the international community, they knew that as a collective group they too could raise money to build a school in Uganda.
The six high school students were chosen from all around America for raising the most amount of money in their respective schools. Once they arrived in Uganda, their perspectives changed and they discovered a third world country that had more to offer than what any industrialized country could. The more they interacted with Ugandan students the stronger their resolution became to build another school to educate another 300 desperate children. This school would provide a shelter where Ugandans can invest to better their future, their families, and inevitably the future of a whole nation.
Currently, members of the GLS Fellows have submitted initial paperwork proposing a Schools for Schools club through Undergraduate Student Government. For more information on the efforts of the Invisible Children Organization, and how you can make a difference, please visit: www.InvisibleChildren.com.
