Evelyn Adong of Uganda is part of a traveling Invisible Children crew that stopped at Bradley Central High School to talk with students and share a new video Monday.
Staff Photo by Randall Higgins/Chattanooga Times Free PressCLEVELAND, Tenn. – Bradley Central High School students are bringing Central Africa, and the child victims of war there, closer to Cleveland.
Last year the school’s students raised $15,404 for Invisible Children, a San Diego-based international organization working to bring an end to war in northern Uganda, Congo and neighboring countries. The primary mission is to find and save children who are kidnapped and forced by rebel leaders to fight.
One Bradley Central student will be going to northern Uganda for a week during the summer to help rebuild Lacor Secondary School. Matt Cook, a junior, and freshmen Payton Griffin and Jessilyn Adams will attend the Invisible Children annual conference in San Diego.
Katrina Hughes, a freshman, will be going to Uganda. She stood before crowds of her peers Monday and thanked them for their help.
“Everything you did helped so much,” she told them.
“I first heard about Invisible at Lake Forest [Middle School],” Hughes said. “All that they do is so inspiring that I just felt in my heart that I wanted to go.”
To get the trip, she had to win approval from a panel of teachers through an interview and an essay.
Allen Alube is a Bradley Central teacher from the Congo.
“It is the entire region,” Alube said. “It’s not just one country. What the young people here are doing, and through them others in the community are doing, is very encouraging.”
Evelyn Adong was among several representatives of Invisible Children who visited Bradley Central on Monday. Adong said she became an Invisible Children employee after finishing school and being baptized. She and three others make up one of the organization’s traveling teams across the country this spring. She also is a guidance counselor for north Ugandan students.
“Most of them have been deeply impacted by the war,” she said. “Many have parents who cannot afford school.”
The Ugandan civil war began in the early 1980s. In 2005 the International Criminal Court based in The Hague announced arrest warrants for Joseph Kony, leader of the Lords Resistance Army, the rebel group accused of kidnapping and abusing children and forcing them to fight.
Next school year, other Bradley Central students will raise money again to help their peers halfway around the world go to school and be free from war, world history teacher Bonnie Cretton said.