"There are no more virgins in Gulu." An overdose of reality.

[shereads]

What would it take to get the developed world to do something about what's happening in Uganda? If they were white? If they had oil?

From the Sunday Miami Herald, under the headline,

There Are No Virgins In Gulu

is a story about the 30,000 children in Northern Uganda who, to avoid being kidnapped from their beds and forced into slavery by The Lord's Resistence Army, walk miles from their villages every evening to sleep together in a tent city. Their parents stay behind to guard the family home. Two young girls, leading their little brother by the hand, tell the reporter that all of the girls they know have been raped multiple times. Another girl, 12, says a man woke her up in the tent city where she goes for refuge each night, and offered her 30 cents for sex. "I closed my eyes and let him. There are no more virgins in Gulu."

From Reuters News online, tonight, about this weekend's massacre:

Local officials said the LRA attacked a camp for some 4,800 homeless Ugandans on Saturday evening with automatic weapons and hand grenades and then set fire to grass-thatched huts in which people were hiding. Victims were found burned, shot, bludgeoned or hacked to death, the United Nations said.

The survivors managed to escape by fleeing into the bush and were being relocated in the town of Lira and other nearby areas, the U.N. officials said.

Lira district already houses some 120,000 people driven from their homes by the long conflict in northern and eastern Uganda, where the Lord's Resistance Army has defied repeated attempts by the army to crush its 17-year insurgency.
The U.N. team on its way to Lira included officials from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the children's agency UNICEF

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued a statement appealing "to all those at the national and international level who are in a position to stop the terrible cycle of violence in northern Uganda to do their utmost to protect innocent civilians."

U.N. officials said they were stepping up humanitarian efforts in the region, which they say is the world's largest neglected humanitarian emergency.

 

[Subo97]

none at all

There are days that the world can make you weep.

 

[shereads]

And there are people like Subo who care; that makes me smile again.

Our compassion for each other is all we really have that can't be taken away. Thank you for sharing yours, honey.

Edited to add a smile for you in return. Stolen from a post by jmt at another forum:

A man finds out he has 24 hours to live. He tells his wife that he wants to spend the time he has left making love to her. She puts on a sexy gown, lights candles, and they fuck for hours, then fall asleep in each other's arms.

Before dawn the next morning, he wakes her up to do it again.

"Look," says the wife, "I have to get up in the morning. You don't."

 

[PhoenixPrime01]

Mankind inhumanity to others is boundless and incomprehensible to me, I say that after having spent two and a half tours of duty in Viet Nam.
I won't try to justify our being there, but at least there were few outright atrocities that I'm personally aware of that those I am aware of were perpatrated by the South Vietmanese Army not the US or their allies there.
Warfare of any type is brutal by its very nature and innocent civilians are often, what today in an effort to depersonalize it, are called collateral damage.
However intertribal warfare in Third World countries is especially brutal as there are fewer of the 'conventions' our so called civilization has painted us with. The patina or veneer of civilization is far thinner so more easily cast aside.
Of course that in no way excuses the actions or behavior any more than the 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia, the Holocost, or any of the other things happening or that happened can be excused.

I don't have any solution. Wish that I did. All we can do as caring, feeling human beings is weep for them, those who know no better and more especially their poor victims.

 

[shereads]

Thank you, PPrime. And for your service in Vietnam, as well. I have a good friend who did time there and I know that everyone involved bears scars. Some make something positive out of the pain. Some never learn how to do that. Some young men - boys - were involved in atrocities that happened in the insanity of the moment, when they had faced more fear than they could handle. It's harder to understand the long-term torture of a society that's taking place in Uganda now, and being reminded that it's happened for 17 years makes me wonder how it remains so far from our consciousness.

"Ripples" of community, is the theory I read somewhere. Violence and tragedy affect us most when they happen to those who are are not only closest to us geographically, but culturally and socially. People living in tin-roofed huts in the third world are a world apart from us - the farthest and least noticable ripple in the pond - whether they're in Haiti next door or on the other side of the planet. If the same children looked and dressed like our own, I wonder if it would be so easy to turn the page and forget that they are hunted day and night.

What a strange species we are. Could we function at all if we allowed the full reality to sink in?