Auto repair shop jump-starts Ugandan child soldiers into new lives

Disir

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As a young boy chasing chickens on his parents' farm in northern Uganda, Louis Lakor dreamed of becoming a teacher. But when he finally set foot in a local primary school, aged seven, it was as an armed killer.

Abducted in a night raid, Lakor was forced to become a child soldier with the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group, which terrorised northern Uganda for nearly two decades before being driven out of the country by a military offensive in 2005.

Clutching a gun handed to him by his kidnappers, Lakor was ordered to "shoot everything you see". He did.

"Otherwise they would have killed me," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation some 20 years later, looking out on the lush countryside near his home village of Awach, about 60 km (37 miles) south of Uganda's border with South Sudan.

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The LRA, which has retreated to a jungle straddling the borders of South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, was notorious for kidnapping children for use as fighters and sex slaves.

It has massacred more than 100,000 people and displaced 2 million over the past three decades, according to the United Nations (U.N.), and its leader, Joseph Kony, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

A year since a controversial decision by the United States and its African partners to suspend the hunt for Kony, his victims are battling poverty and stigma – while their tormentor remains at large.

Lakor pointed to the school he attacked with a tormented look, amid fields dotted with mud huts. One memory stands out from the four years he spent as a rebel: he was coerced into killing his best friend when he lagged behind on a long march.
Auto repair shop jump-starts Ugandan child soldiers into new lives

One would think that with all of the investing from other countries into Uganda, or any other African countries, there would be jobs available. That might make this task a bit easier.
 

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