Poem for you

This was written for the children of Uganda who are victims of a terrible war. They must walk to shelters every night, some as far as ten miles, to escape being kidnapped by the LRA. I have posted an excerpt from the Invisible Children website at the bottom for more information.



A dusty road under a stormy sky
A thousand footprints every day
A thousand miles to run from the nightmare
That may never go away.

Just another night under God's starry sky
Go to sleep now, go to sleep.
Maybe they won't come for you tonight
And hope is all you keep.

There's no one around to hear my tears fall down
I walk alone in the moonlight.
Can anyone out there hear my weeping
Would you save my soul tonight?

Across the ocean children laugh and play
Do they know we bleed and die?
Did God mean to let them take our children away?
What in this life is not a lie?
Now they are gone and I want to know why.

There's no one around to hear my tears fall down
I walk alone in the moonlight.
Can anyone out there hear my weeping
Would you save my soul tonight?



"For the past 23 years, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Government of Uganda (GoU) have been waging a war that has left nearly two million innocent civilians caught in the middle. The GoU's attempt to protect its citizens from this rebel militia has largely failed, leaving an entire generation of youth that has never known peace.

With dwindling support for their cause and heightened government offensives, the rebels resorted to abducting children and indoctrinating them into their ranks. It is estimated that more than 90% of the LRA’s troops were abducted as children.

In the last two years, an estimated 800,000 of the 1.8 million displaced have returned to their homes. But that leaves one million people currently living in the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps. While the majority desires to return home, the issues surrounding their return are complex. Some have been displaced for more than a decade, and their former way of life is all but gone. Access to clean water, economic opportunities, health centers, and education are a pressing concern for all, and even more so for the many who contemplate returning to resource-barren villages."

http://www.invisiblechildren.com