|
 GULU, Uganda (AP) - They are called "the night commuters" — hundreds of children who hike through the heat and dust, clutching mats and blankets as they pour into this northern Ugandan town for a night's sleep and protection from a rebel army that has given a whole new meaning to the term child abuse.
Every evening they leave their refugee camps and family mud huts to bed down on verandahs or in shelters set up by Gulu's aid agencies. The alternative is to risk being kidnapped and forced into military servitude by an outfit that calls itself the Lord's Resistance Army and has been waging Africa's longest-running civil war.
At one of the shelters, 16-year-old Jimmy sits on a woven mat and describes being abducted and then deprived of food and sleep for weeks.
|