No forgetting

WORCESTER - Any day now, Grace Akallo will give birth to her first child. Doctors have told her it will be a boy.

The prospect puts a radiant smile on Akallo's face. "A blessing," she says. Then, after the briefest of pauses, she adds: "And he's going to be with me everywhere I go."

The protective instincts of a mother-to-be? Perhaps. Or perhaps it is a response to the fact that part of Akallo's own childhood was stolen. When she was 15 years old, Akallo was kidnapped from an all-girls Catholic school in northern Uganda and forced to fight in a rebel army. Before she escaped after seven months, she was brutalized, buried alive, and made to march hundreds of miles barefoot, with food so scarce she sometimes had to eat lizards and rats to survive.

She saw terrible things done to other captive children. She was forced to be the "wife" of a rebel commander three times her age. There were times when death seemed preferable to life: She tried twice to kill herself with her own gun, as she had seen numerous others do.

But somehow Akallo, 27, survived with her spirit and humanity intact, and eventually made it to the United States. She recently graduated from Gordon College, in Wenham. She met and married Jonathan Baiden, a nursing home employee in Worcester who is originally from Ghana. She is preparing to apply to law school. And soon there will be the baby.

All in all, she has fashioned a life, a future, that would have seemed an impossible dream during the long torment of her captivity. Nonetheless, more than a decade after Akallo escaped from her captors, she remains haunted, not only by her ordeal but by two facts she is determined to change.

First, that thousands of Ugandan "child soldiers," including two of Akallo's friends who were kidnapped along with her in 1996, are still in captivity. And second, that the world does not seem to care.

"My friends are still there," Akallo says, her soft voice growing even softer. "They've never seen their parents; they've never seen their home. They have not released the children." Akallo has co-written a book about her experiences, "Girl Soldier," that she hopes will galvanize international action to free the child soldiers. For years after she escaped, she repeated the same prayer: "God, why don't you give me wings, and I can fly and help my friends."

"God did not give me wings," she says. "But maybe the book . . ." She leaves the sentence unfinished, as if afraid to let herself hope too much.

'God, I'm ready to die'

Just hours before the rebels arrived, the schoolgirls were dancing.

It was Oct. 9, 1996 - Uganda's Independence Day - so Akallo and her classmates at St. Mary's College turned on a radio and danced in celebration. Earlier that year, Akallo had enrolled at St. Mary's, a Catholic boarding school for girls between ages 13 and 16 in a town named Aboke.

She had been raised in a village in northeast Uganda, where from the age of 7 Akallo had helped care for her four younger siblings while working in the fields with her mother. Her father had left her mother to marry another woman and stopped sending money to his first family. Still, Akallo says, "I was happy."

"It was peaceful when I was living with my family," she recalls. "Children had no fear. We would walk to school, 10 miles, without any grown-ups."

But by the time Akallo arrived at St. Mary's in early 1996 at age 15, children were frequent casualties of the war between the Ugandan government and rebels led by Joseph Kony, whose stated goal was to create a state run according to the Ten Commandments. Kony and his so-called Lord's Resistance Army kidnapped children in droves, subjected them to relentless brutality, and turned them into cold-blooded killers.

That October night, as Akallo slept, a window was shattered near her, spraying her with glass. Rifle butts pounded the door. Terrified girls began praying or screaming for their mothers. Outside, hundreds of armed figures, many of them children, brandished weapons ranging from machetes to assault rifles. They told the girls if the doors weren't opened immediately they would hurl a grenade into the dorm.

"Everyone was so scared," Akallo recalls. "They pulled us out of the school. We began marching with them through the whole night. Everybody was crying in different voices, asking God to help them escape."

In all, 139 girls were kidnapped from St. Mary's. "Some of the kids who took us were 10 or 11," says Akallo. Recalling it, she seems on the verge of weeping. "And they were so harsh," she adds in a near whisper.

Eventually the rebels released 109 of the girls but kept 30 as captives. Akallo was one of them.

The goal of the rebels was to enlarge their army with young people who could be brainwashed more easily than adults to do battle with the Ugandan government and its allies. To intimidate the children out of trying to escape, Akallo says, "We were beaten so badly. All the time, we were beaten. And we were threatened with death: 'We will kill you.' All the time."

Within a week of Akallo's abduction, a 12-year-old girl in her group tried to escape. The rebels ordered the other children to beat her to death or be killed themselves. Akallo could not bring herself to do it. As the others began to bludgeon the child, she got the smallest stick she could find and struck the girl, but only on the legs. A rebel saw that Akallo was holding back and knocked her unconscious. "By the time I woke up," Akallo says, "the girl was dead."

The rebel brigade, which included adults, killed anyone who stood in its way as it roamed from town to town, kidnapping hundreds more children. Eventually, the captives were divided into two groups. Akallo's group was forced to march into southern Sudan, where the rebels had protected bases. Along the way, they were constantly sent on long treks to look for food and water, which ranged from scarce to nonexistent. "You would see people leaning against a tree, and you would think they were resting," Akallo says. "But they were gone. Dead."

Once they arrived in Sudan, the rebels issued guns to their captives, in preparation for battle. But some of the desperate children found another use for the weapons. "People were starting to kill themselves," Akallo says. "One girl, she blew up her head in front of us. She was tired. She was thirsty. She was hungry."

Akallo took part in more than 10 battles. She saw hundreds killed around her, children and adults alike. She fired her gun many times and was fired upon in return. She does not know if she hit anyone. One night, after a particularly bloody battle, she passed out from exhaustion. Her fellow child soldiers, thinking she was dead, removed her clothing and buried her in a shallow grave. Akallo woke up hours later, in the middle of the night, submerged beneath loose soil. Panic-stricken, she dug herself out. "It was cold. It was quiet. I was alone," she says. She began walking and eventually caught up with the other child soldiers.

In late spring of 1997, she was sent out again to look for food and water. At 16, she was emaciated, a walking skeleton. In the seven months she had been a prisoner, five of her St. Mary's classmates had been killed. On this day, it felt like the end for her as well. "That was the time I said 'God, I'm ready to die,' " she says. "I was tired of running. I was tired of being sent to fight." She sat near a tree, determined not to move. Then, she says, "I heard a voice telling me to get up and go. . . . I think it was God telling me to leave."

She decided to try to escape. She lived in the bush for three days with no food, surviving on dew from the leaves. Some other child soldiers joined her in the escape attempt. They walked for four days, and eventually arrived at a village. They threw away their guns and walked into a village in southern Sudan, with Akallo in the front, shouting: "We are not bad people! We have been abducted from school, in Uganda! We need your help!"

Delivering a message

Akallo wears no shoes as she sits on a couch in her apartment. Her feet are scarred and mottled, a consequence of innumerable forced marches through the jungle.

After she escaped, she required more than 30 shots to treat a variety of rashes she kept getting. As for her psychological recovery, Akallo says, "I prayed a lot." The nuns provided crucial emotional support when she returned to St. Mary's College. "The sisters encouraged me a lot, and said, 'It's not the end of your future,' " she says.

Upon graduating from St. Mary's in 2001, she attended Uganda Christian University, where she met exchange students from Gordon College, a nondenominational Christian college. Intrigued by what they said about their school, she transferred there in 2005, on a full scholarship. She majored in communications, she says, because it would help her learn "ways that I could speak and write about this."

When she needed a break from studying, she found an unlikely outlet: Watching reruns of "Walker, Texas Ranger." Recalls Megan Thompson, 21, her former roommate: "She used to stay up till 2 o'clock in the morning to watch that show. She would say: 'It's the one show where the good guy always wins.' "

Real life, as Akallo knows, is not as simple, but she clings to a dogged belief in the power of faith, and in the power of one human voice, speaking out. Akallo has emerged as a spokeswoman for World Vision, a Christian relief and development organization that is active in Uganda. Tom Slicklen, World Vision's director for New England, says that congregations at Boston-area churches are invariably "moved to action" after hearing Akallo.

In 2004, hoping to draw attention to her country's plight, Akallo told her story on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." That year she also spoke to the annual meeting of Amnesty International. Last year she testified before a congressional subcommittee, urging "high-level engagement" by the US government in helping end the conflict.

The latest of several cease-fires was recently declared in Uganda, and peace talks are ongoing between the government and the rebels. But the national trauma is far from over. Akallo was just one of an estimated 30,000 children who were kidnapped during a two-decade-long war that caused thousands of deaths. The International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, has issued warrants for Kony and four of his commanders, accusing them of war crimes. In June the court's chief prosecutor said an investigation proved that "the top commanders of the Lord's Resistance Army were personally responsible for conscripting and enslaving children, slaughtering their families, forcing the displacement of millions."

Akallo thinks constantly of her homeland. She hopes to one day visit Uganda and do what she can to help her nation heal. Until that day, Akallo will keep delivering a message that she hopes "Girl Soldier" will amplify. Indeed, part of her message seems to be embedded in the book's subtitle: "A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda's Children."

"I want people to know what's happening in Uganda and do something to help," she says. "People should work hard to stop these atrocities, because kids don't deserve these atrocities. If we keep quiet, we're allowing this to proceed."

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.