Africa and its children

ALERE, Uganda -- Kasmiro Bongonyinge remembers sitting up suddenly in his bed. It was just after sunrise on a summer morning two years ago, and the old man, 87 years old and blind, knew something was wrong.

He heard footsteps and shouts outside his thatched-roof mud hut. His wife lay next to him, and underneath their bed slept three grandchildren on straw mats.

The door creaked open. "Who is it?" Bongonyinge asked.

"You, be quiet," a child's voice ordered.

The old man felt a cold gun barrel poke at his chest.

Bongonyinge fished beads from his shirt pocket, and began reciting his prayers slowly, blue bead by blue bead. He heard the intruders searching his belongings, and footsteps coming and going.

"Stand up!" a child ordered. "We want to kill you."

"I can't stand. I've been lame since birth," Bongonyinge said, lying to save himself. "And my eyes cannot see."

One young voice said to the others, "If you kill a blind man, it brings misfortune."

And then, silence. As abruptly as they arrived, the intruders were gone.

Bongonyinge bent to feel under the bed.

His fingers found just mats.

He and his wife walked outside into the early morning sun. Their hens clucked furiously.

After a few moments, their two youngest grandchildren, aged 3 and 5, ran to them.

"Where is Odongo?" the old man asked.

"Odongo is gone," his daughter, Hellen Aguti, replied from her hut across a dirt courtyard. "The rebels have him."

Years of war and collapsing social systems in Uganda and other countries have displaced millions of children in Africa, leaving them to make it, if they can, on their own. And millions more African children have become orphans in recent years as AIDS-related diseases have struck down their parents. At a time when the numbers of orphans are declining in almost every corner of the world, the trend in Africa is going the wrong way, and rapidly.

A Globe reporter and photographer spent several weeks this year with three of these children -- three who have found ways to survive, despite the odds. Their lives are full of surprises, some evil, some blessed. And they share a resourcefulness and quiet courage that seems unthinkable for any age. With every reason to have given up, they have not.

Still, their futures are far from assured, hinging in equal parts on their wits and luck.

Odongo Ambrose has a full measure of both.

A slightly pudgy, moon-faced boy with a chipped front tooth, he was 12 years old on Aug. 29, 2002, when he was seized from the family hut by the Lord's Resistance Army, a notorious rebel group that has kidnapped thousands of Ugandan children and turned them into child soldiers.

Until that moment, Odongo had seemed like many boys his age in the remote northern Uganda bush. He liked playing with friends. He respected his elders. But adults noticed something different about Odongo as well, an air of seriousness that seemed at times to overwhelm him. He turned quiet in these moments, lowering his eyes and withdrawing into himself.

Some believed it was the way he worked through the great losses in his life.

His father, Dennis Okello, a teacher, died from injuries suffered in a collision while playing soccer. His mother, Mary, also a teacher, came home from school one day, collapsed, and died that night in her bed. Her family said it was AIDS that killed her.

At age 8, Odongo was an orphan. His grandparents took him and his younger brother and sister to live with them; a fourth sibling, Odongo's older brother, was captured by the rebels in 1997 and has not been heard from since.

Odongo recalled that in those early days with his grandparents, he dearly missed the smell of his mother, the warmth of her hugs, and how beautiful she looked in her flowing, blue-print dress. "I thought so much of what we had -- the way the cupboards were organized, the bed we slept on together, and especially her dress," he said.

But he eventually grew to accept and even enjoy his life in the village of Alere, a cluster of about 25 mud-brick huts nestled amid scrubby thorn trees and small vegetable gardens. His grandfather spun long tales of their ancestors and taught him the tricks of watching over hens and goats. His grandmother gave him freedoms his mother had never allowed. He spent his afternoons playing with his friends, Tile, Omara, Kidega, and Adega, or collecting water for the family from a nearby stream in a yellow jerry can.

The children were always on the lookout for rebel soldiers belonging to the Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA. That was why he and his brother and sister slept underneath their grandparents' bed. If rebels raided their village, they hoped that the bed's overhanging sheets would give them cover.

The LRA, led by the deranged and dangerous Joseph Kony, has been fighting a guerrilla war for 18 years against the Ugandan government, displacing more than 1.6 million people, half of them children, in this country of 26 million. It is one of several brutal conflicts that have broken out across Africa in recent years, from Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Darfur region of Sudan, that have orphaned hundreds of thousands of children.

But Jan Egeland, the United Nations' Emergency Relief Coordinator, last month sought to draw special attention to northern Uganda, calling the situation the world's largest neglected humanitarian emergency. He urged countries to do more to end what he called the "litany of horrors."

Uganda, landlocked in east Africa, is essentially two countries. The south is safe and stable. Under President Yoweri Museveni, who seized power in 1986 and presides over a one-party state, the country's economy, centered in the south, grew faster than any other in Africa during the 1990s.

But the north, roughly as large as Maine and New Hampshire combined, has been terrorized for a generation by the LRA. Museveni's critics say the army has done little to stop it. Only in recent months have Ugandan troops stepped up their fight against the LRA, in part because of international condemnation. And there are reports that the LRA, feeling the pressure, may enter talks for peace.

Kony has said his goal is to seize power in Uganda and govern it according to the Ten Commandments. But no one outside his inner circle takes his religious talk seriously. He is more credible as a killer.

His army consists of dozens of relatively small units, perhaps 100 to 150 each, with children making up an estimated 80 percent of the force. Kony prefers children because they are easy to grab, to mold, and to control, according to interviews with nearly two dozen children who escaped his service.

Human rights groups estimate that the LRA has kidnapped more than 20,000 children over the years. More than 5,000 children, ranging in age from 9 to 18, have died, either in battles with Ugandan troops or when trying to escape from Kony's army.

A savage test
Odongo's experience mirrors the accounts of many of those who have escaped. This is how he remembers it.

In the hours after his capture, he walked single file with about three dozen others, most of them children, in a northwesterly direction out of Alere, a village about 150 miles north of the country's capital, Kampala. They passed vast fields of tall grass and villages abandoned long ago. A child his age walked behind him, his AK-47 pointed at Odongo's back.

"I was trembling," he recalled. "One time I stopped, and a soldier slapped me and forced me to get up and move."

On that first day in captivity, he said nothing. He carried a bag of looted clothes for hours on the march. He ate cold beans for dinner and slept on a bed of grass. As he spread the stolen clothes over him as a blanket, he felt utterly alone. He knew no one would come looking for him. That was too dangerous.

"I didn't dare move or say a word," he recalled. "If I did, I thought they would shoot me."

Beyond the fear, there was a certain monotony about his captivity. The soldiers marched for eight or nine hours. They set up camp. The commanders and their inner circle of hardened child-soldiers slept in blue, green, or black tents. The newly captured children slept on grass. There was no teaching of Kony's bizarre creed. That would come later, and only for those selected to join the child fighters.

Three weeks after his capture, the pattern was broken. Odongo faced a savage test.

A boy his age made a break across a river, trying to escape the army. Other children caught him, and he was hustled to the center of the group, hands tied behind his back. The unit commander, known to Odongo only as Adwong -- or "Big Man," in the Luo language -- called Odongo forward.

He handed Odongo a machete, telling him, "The spirit of the dead person will make sure you don't ever try to escape."

"Kill him," the commander ordered.

Odongo said that he balked and pleaded, but Big Man was implacable.

"If you don't, I will kill you," the commander said.

Odongo started hitting the boy in the head, lightly at first.

"The boy was crying out, 'Please save me, please save me,' and the commander said I wasn't hitting him hard enough," Odongo said. "So he ordered several others to hit him with me."

He paused in the retelling, and wiped away tears. "I recall so much how the boy was crying as we beat him. I regret it so much."

Soon, the boy was dead. They left the body at the spot of his death.

Later that day, while fetching water, Odongo started to cry. Other boys threatened to tell the commander. "They said if I cried, it meant that I would try to escape," he said. "I pleaded with them not to say anything, and they didn't."

It was another lesson of survival: Never, ever cry.

That fall of 2002, nearly two months into his captivity, Odongo's group of rebels fought several times with Ugandan army troops. The commanders taught the abducted children to stay still during an ambush. "They told us that stray bullets would kill us," Odongo recalled.

During his first ambush, Odongo crouched. He had no weapon. Government soldiers shot and killed an LRA boy fighter nearby. Odongo crept over, picked up his gun, and began firing. After the rebels retreated, Big Man took Odongo aside and named him to his team of bodyguards to replace the one who had died.

Odongo thus joined a select group of about a dozen child bodyguards, who addressed each other not by name, but as apwony, or teacher. He had now graduated, in the eyes of his commander, into the corps of fighters. If he continued to prove himself, Big Man told him, he "would be taken to Kony, where you will be properly armed and given a uniform."

On marches Odongo now carried his own gun as well as the commander's fold-up wooden chair and ammunition belt. On raids Odongo helped round up children at gunpoint. At night he slept in a tent, along with the other child bodyguards. The commander, who Odongo believed was in his mid-20s, had his own tent, which he shared with 10 child brides. "We didn't know what happened in there," Odongo said. "After each abduction, the girls were lined up and the commander selected the ones he wanted."

He pretended to be happy. "We would tell the commander, 'Oh, I wish I had another gun,' or 'Oh, I wish we would have a battle so I could get another gun,' " he remembered. "We wanted to make the commander happy."

In fact, he liked his gun. He felt powerful. "It gave me courage," Odongo said of his AK-47 rifle, with its magazine clip holding 30 bullets. "I could defend myself. When I didn't have a gun, when I was bare-handed, I was nervous."

And yet he felt a deep guilt about helping to kill the boy who had tried to run away. He feared he would have to do something like that again. And he was right to be afraid.

Not long after he got his gun, Odongo was ordered by Big Man to execute another captured runaway. This time, Odongo said nothing. He began hitting the boy with a wooden pestle normally used to grind grain into fine powder; others joined in.

One month later, he killed again.

It was sometime in December, almost four months after his capture, about midday. It was very hot. Two girls, ages 12 and 14, had tried to escape. Soldiers brought them before the commander, who ordered them to stand side by side.

"Odongo," he called, and he barked his instructions.

Stand six meters away from the girls, the commander said. Shoot the weeping one first.

"Fire!" the commander ordered.

Odongo fired two shots into her chest. The girl fell.

The second girl screamed for mercy. Odongo remembered the commander shouting that she would die for her sins. He remembered him saying, "There is no mercy."

"Fire!"

Odongo fired -- twice into her chest.

There was silence. The rebels marched off. Odongo could not forget the girl's screams and what he had done.

A daring escape
He decided he'd rather risk death than continue this way. He must try to escape. His chance came a week later.

Early one morning the commander asked Odongo and a group of other boys to cut sugar cane from a nearby field. Seven boys went to the field. Odongo was the last in the line. When they reached the field, Odongo slowly walked to a corner. When no one followed him, he removed his rubber sandals and ran.

"I ran and ran and couldn't stop," he said. Perhaps an hour later, he came to a hut and found an old woman there. He breathlessly told his story, but she shooed him away with her broom. And so he kept moving, always listening for pursuers.

By mid-morning he came to another hut, and another old woman. She listened to his story and then, worrying that the rebels would not be far behind, she spirited him and one of her grandsons into a forest, to a large laurel bush. There, the two boys hid, covered by branches.

A few hours later the rebels arrived. That night sounds of gunfire erupted from their camp.

Odongo couldn't see anything. The boy with him panicked and started to run from the bush, but Odongo grabbed him. Stay still, he told him.

The two didn't move. In the early-morning light, the rebels drifted away.

Soon after, the old woman came for the boys. The rebels, she said, had killed three children. She led Odongo to a man who lived nearby. Promising to take the boy to safety, the man took him on the back of his bicycle, and they rode away.

When, hours later, they reached a Ugandan army barracks, the man left him. Several soldiers interrogated Odongo over several days. One soldier, he remembered, came back one night, and, smelling of alcohol, pointed a gun at him and accused him of being a rebel. Odongo said he grabbed a nearby gun and pointed it at the soldier. Another soldier, he said, pushed aside their guns, defusing the standoff between a boy and a man, between two soldiers.

Late one night just before Christmas 2002, Fred Okello, Odongo's uncle, looked up from his television set and was surprised to see the headlights of a truck pull into his driveway. He lived just outside of Lira, one of the biggest towns in the north, and very few people drove at night because of the danger of a rebel ambush.

"I opened the door, thinking I would meet my fate," Okello recalled.

Instead, a boy ran toward him.

"Uncle, uncle! It's me, Odongo!"

Okello broke down in tears. His wife, Lucy, whose sister was Odongo's mother, wept. His grandfather and grandmother, who had moved from Alere to the Okello house, began crying as well, hugging the boy they never expected to see again.

At their house, Odongo told them that an army commander had ordered the truck driver to take him home. And, for hours into the night, he told them about the rebels, about killing, and about his escape.

"We strongly believed him, because so many children here have stories like that, and because of the way he told it," Fred Okello, a private school teacher, said.

He described Odongo as a "wild animal" in those first few weeks.

Odongo, too, remembers how strange it felt. He remembers his fascination at watching a television show for the first time, and then the horror of watching a war film. "I hid behind the couch," he said.

Gradually, Odongo said, he felt calmer. His uncle and aunt, who began to think of him as twice his age because of his survival instincts, taught him different skills, including needlepoint. Odongo also found solace in church.

"God has brought me back," he said. "I was abducted, I was held captive, I was almost dead. But now I am alive."

The Okellos enrolled him in Railway Primary School in Lira, about 3 miles from their home. The school is in the shape of horseshoe; classrooms surround a grassy courtyard. Acres of fields stretch out from the boarding school, and eagles circle high above the meadows at dawn, hunting for mice or snakes.

The Grade 6 classroom, like the others, is so full of students that many sit sideways in order to write. Odongo, sandwiched in the second row, is one of 102 children in the room. Every day he wears the school uniform, a red-and-white checkered shirt and blue shorts.

Headmistress Ira Oree observed him from outside the door one morning earlier this year.

"The boys used to fear him," she said quietly. "He would wake up at night, and walk around in a dream, and act out as if he were still in battle, pretending he had a gun. He went around like he was shooting the others. During the day, he got into fights. But counseling has helped."

The Okellos paid part of his school and boarding fees, and Odongo raised the rest by making needlepoint tablecloths that his aunt sold to friends.

After school one day the children in Grade 6 poured out in the field, joining more than 900 others. Two years ago, the school had just 400 students. But the numbers have nearly tripled because of the influx of families from the countryside who are frightened to stay at their homes and risk the rebel raids. By the headmistress's count, more than 100 students had once been LRA captives.

Later Odongo sat with several classmates in the shade of a tree. Several told their own stories about the war.

"They killed my brother and abducted me in 1998," said Achelo Joanne, a 14-year-old girl. "I stayed one year. Once they told me to kill another girl, and I refused. They beat me badly. My parents were killed, and now I have just my grandparents. It is our duty to survive and find money to get food for them."

"I cannot recall the number of children I was forced to kill," said Okello Francisco, a 14-year-old boy.

"They forced me to drink human blood," said Angom Gertrude, a 11-year-old girl.

Odongo listened quietly before walking away.

"I still dream of those children I shot," he said, entering the dormitory room that he shared with 14 other boarders; his mattress was on the floor, his possessions inside a small trunk. "Four people died from my hands. I can still see them."

Tears filled his eyes, and he wiped them away. He sat still as a stone.

Several minutes later, he found his voice, but on another subject.

"I am very happy here," he said, lifting his chin. "Education is the most important thing for me. I want to be a teacher, like my parents were, like my uncle and aunt."

He said he especially wished he could see his grandfather more often. The next day was a Saturday, and he would have his wish, a visit to their house on the edge of Lira. "I miss him so much," Odongo said.

'I still fear this place'
Odongo bounded into the Okellos' house, hugged his aunt and uncle, and waited for his grandfather. The Okellos marveled at their nephew, now 14, and his enthusiasm.

Kasmiro Bongonyinge shuffled into the room, aided by a cane. Odongo reached for his arm. "It's me, it's me, Odongo," he said.

The old man's face opened in a wide grin, and his eyes filled with tears as he touched Odongo from his hair to his face, shoulders, arms, and hands. It was like he was reading Braille, and the message was of love. Then he licked Odongo's hand. For minutes afterward, the two held hands and talked in whispers, like gossipy friends.

One subject of their talk was Bongonyinge's wife, who had traveled a week earlier to their old hut in Alere, about 25 miles north of Lira, and not returned. They discussed whether it was possible to find her.

"It's too dangerous," Lucy Okello said. But her husband, Fred, made arrangements for a taxi to take them. As they prepared to go, Odongo lingered outside, pressed his palms together, and pointed his fingers skyward. Uneasy about this journey back to where his captivity began, he prayed.

As they rumbled down miles of dirt road, the travelers looked for signs of trouble. They had no idea if the route was safe; neither did local police. But villagers were everywhere and seemed unconcerned. People rode bicycles or walked along the road; in the towns, the vegetable markets were full. Approaching Alere, Okello stopped to see another relative, Peter Ayo Obote. Obote said that Odongo's grandmother was fine, that she was preparing a friend's funeral in another village; he promised to get word to her of the family's concern.

Still, the group pressed onward to check on the grandfather's hut in Alere. The road narrowed. The driver turned onto a trail in the bush. The trail became a tiny path, with no other travelers on it. Odongo tensed.

Finally, the group reached a collection of thatched-roof huts, the place of Odongo's abduction.

It was mid-afternoon and eerily quiet. "The birds are also scared," said Okello, Odongo's uncle, scanning the empty sky.

His grandfather's house had been ransacked. A neighbor's home had been demolished, leaving only its front door upright, like a sentinel.

Odongo sat next to it and reached into his pocket for his rosary beads.

"I still fear this place," he said. "You never know what may happen."

They left quickly, raising their own cloud of dust.

Putting nightmare behind him
Odongo's fears are indelible, but he also now has hope. He wants to stay as a boarder in Railway School for several more years. He dreams of becoming a teacher. So far his grades are good.

"I believe if I'm properly looked after and cared for, I believe I'll have a bright future," he said. "If the war continues, I may be deprived of that future."

As he sat under an acacia tree, watching some of his friends play cricket, he reflected on the struggles that remain -- and on the strength he will need.

"I've prayed to God," he said. "I've asked God to forgive me for having killed, for having made people flee from their homes. I didn't want to do it. I was forced to do it."

A frown came over his face. He seemed on the verge of tears.

"I can forgive myself," he said. "But I still worry. Will God forgive me?"

Next: On the beach, on their own

John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com