A former Baylor School student and three friends are walking from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., to Washington, D.C., to raise awareness of the children affected by a 23-year war in Uganda.
Compton Fields, a 2008 Baylor graduate, and three other University of the South rising sophomores began their trek earlier this week and hope to reach the nation’s capital later this summer.
“We are walking with those children in Uganda who have had to walk miles together out of fear of the war,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Those who aren’t walking and being displaced are captured, desensitized and turned into child soldiers.”
During their walk, the students hope to speak at churches and to groups and organizations to raise money for Invisible Children. They’ll also sell beads sent to them by Ugandan children as a way to help those families.
“We don’t have a specific dollar goal,” Mr. Fields said.
Invisible Children was created in 2003 by young filmmakers with the idea that stories of the children might educate people in Uganda and surrounding countries and inspire change.
Mr. Fields said their 772-mile trek, Walk With Uganda, will take them from Sewanee to Chattanooga and then to Asheville, N.C., where they will speak at a youth conference. From there, they will hike the Appalachian Trail some 300 miles before exiting it to go to Washington.
He said they planned to make 15 to 20 miles a day and stay most nights in shelters on the trail.
“It’ll be a struggle,” said Mr. Fields, 19, the group’s photographer and publicist, “but we’ll get better at it. Any time we’re really hurting, we’ll just remember that the kids in Uganda hurt more than this.”
He said he and the other members of the foursome — Keri Bryan of Baton Rouge, La., Luca Koritsanszky of Murfreesboro, Tenn., and Reed Tyson of Cleveland, Tenn. — were moved by a presentation at the University of the South on Invisible Children and were motivated for their trip by an interest in foreign travel and foreign cultures.
TO GET INVOLVED
To contribute to or find out more about the trip, visit walkwithuganda2009@gmail. com or http://web.me.com/ kerib27.
