Mary has spent the day gathering sheaves of grass to feed the cattle, weeding the vegetable patch and helping her mother cook dinner over a charcoal fire: the life of any African girl in any African village.
But as daylight begins to fade, Mary slips away from the family’s mud hut and strides down a sandy track into the nearest town. The adults in the town of Lacor in northern Uganda are going home but Mary, along with hundreds of other children, is going the other way. Dressed in rags and flip-flops, some carry sacks or rolled-up blankets; they are on their way to the night shelters, which are guarded by government troops.
In any other country, a 14-year-old girl leaving her home and an anxious mother for the night would spell rebellion. Here, it is simply about survival. ”We fear the rebels, we fear thugs and robbers who come at night to disturb us,” says Mary.
The war in this region is perhaps the only conflict in history where children are both the main victims and the principal aggressors. Mary and the other children walk to safety every night because they fear abduction by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a Christian fundamentalist rebel group that uses children as soldiers, porters and sex slaves. The LRA carries out its raids at night, storming into villages from the surrounding bush, killing adults and forcing children to bludgeon their parents before marching them away to camps deep in the bush.
Desperate to keep the child-snatchers from their doors, parents in northern Uganda began sending their children into nearby towns at night in 2002. Back then, children used to sleep on the pavements, curling up together for warmth. They came in vast numbers: 40 000 children started walking into towns to sleep. Aid agencies set up shelters to give them somewhere safe to go.
Mary lives near the town and follows the main road, but some of the other children walk for hours to reach safety, following winding unlit paths between mango trees and thickets of scrub. When she reaches the shelter, it is already full of children, some of them barely toddlers, others in their late teens. The shelter is made up of stark concrete buildings, bare as a barn inside, as well as rows of giant white canvas tents propped up by wooden stakes.
The children filter through the gates looking subdued, but a party atmosphere soon develops. A dozen or so children begin dancing. At other shelters there is frenetic singing of hymns or motivational songs, accompanied by the beating of cowhide drums.
At Mary’s shelter, groups of boys are washing themselves beneath communal taps, their wet bodies glistening in the semi-darkness provided by the moon and a sprinkling of lightbulbs.
The children are not given anything to eat. The shelters are busy enough as it is, and if food were provided they would be overwhelmed. Adult wardens patrol with torches, breaking up the occasional fight over a blanket and checking on children who look scared or upset.
Often, children feel more looked after here than they do at home. ”When I am here, I feel I am somebody,” says Gabriel, who studies his schoolbooks in the dim light.
Gabriel is head of his family, responsible for the four younger brothers who walk with him to the shelter. ”My parents are dead, killed by the rebels,” he says.
Childhood is short in rural Africa — boys in their teens will herd cattle and girls of 10 must fetch water — but it is rare for children to be thrown so completely on their own resources as they are in this war-damaged society.
The children who come to the shelters crave affection. The girls braid each other’s hair while the boys spin bottle tops or engage in play-fights.
Elsewhere, teenage hormones are going wild. A crowd of watching children gathers around the gaggle of dancers. In the villages, dances such as these were courtship rituals, approved by the elders. In the shelter, the wardens keep boys and girls apart, but outside its metal gates young couples are cuddling in the semi-darkness.
Mary’s shelter fills up quickly. There are soon more than 1 000 child-ren here, more boys than girls, and the adults are making sure everyone has a place to sleep. By 10pm they have settled down for the night and the lights go out.
Some are already half asleep; many are exhausted from the walk in. A few of the small ones are agitated; they seem to be having nightmares, and cuddle up against older brothers or sisters for comfort.
The sun has not quite risen when the adult wardens rouse the children. The new day begins with a communal prayer, led by the adults. Some children raise their right hands in the air. Some crouch down and cover their faces, a symbol, the adult wardens explain, of being ”humble before God”. — Â