By Lauren Burdick
<[email protected]>

Tonight from 6:30 to 9 p.m., this school’s chapter of Invisible Children will host its second annual benefit concert at this school. The club has been working hard to get ready for this charitable event.

“I’m personally excited because I know last year was the first year that we had the Invisible Children Club here, and we raised about $2,000 from the concert, and we have a lot more people involved than we did then, and I know that we’ve been planning a lot and organizing,” co-president and junior Cassandra “Cassie” Wild said.

From 6:30 to 7 p.m. during the concert, Invisible Children will show a video about a girl affected by the war in Uganda and the child soldiers. Once the video is over, the bands will begin to play.

All proceeds from the Invisible Children Benefit Concert will go toward building this school’s partner school, the St. Joseph Layibi Secondary School in northern Uganda, an area devastated by the 23-year long civil war. Invisible Children will be selling tote bags and T-shirts, as well as having a bake sale. Open donations are also encouraged.

Invisible Children is a national organization that began in 2003 when filmmakers went to the ravaged Uganda to film a documentary. Upon seeing the child army and the Ugandan civil war, the filmmakers created “Invisible Children: Rough Cut,” which has now been seen by millions worldwide. The Invisible Children organization was created as a charity stemming from the documentary. Various chapters of the parent organization now exist at schools nationwide.

According to invisiblechildren.com, the civil war in northern Uganda began in the 1980s, when the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) began fighting against the Ugandan government. The LRA began after one woman, Alice Lakwena, claimed that the Holy Spirit told her to overthrow the Ugandan government.

After she was exiled, the new leader of the LRA, Joseph Kony, began abducting children, which one statement claims made up 90 percent of the LRA army. In 2001, the U.S. Patriot Act officially recognized the LRA as a terrorist organization, and in 2005 the International Criminals Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Kony and his top commanders.

“(Kony) would go and basically massacre villages and take children ages 5 to15 because they’re the most malleable and basically make a child army,” co-president and junior Priya Patel said. “It stopped in Uganda, but they’re spreading into Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

The Juba Peace Talks, which took place from 2006 to 2008, ushered in the first conversations of stability between the LRA and the Ugandan government; however, children are still being forced into Kony’s army as the issue extends its reach to other countries.

Wild said, “Right now they’re trying to negotiate peace talks, but there’s a lot of pressure on the President (Yoweri Kaguta Museveni) because obviously the man leading the rebel army wants to be completely pardoned before he stops fighting, but there’s a lot of pressure from international society to convict him for all his many crimes, and right now he’s fighting in a different country, so the fighting is no longer in Uganda, but there’s still some tension and warfare.”

Partner schools, like the St. Joseph Layibi School, represent much more than an institution of education for the students. “The schools represent a safe haven for these kids because they’re not safe in their own homes, and they are definitely susceptible to being captured anywhere they go,” Patel said.

The Invisible Children Benefit Concert will allow students to get involved with the club and learn more about the devastating happenings and current events in the war-torn African country.

At the second annual concert, attendees can look forward to the passion put into the event.

As sponsor Alicia Noneman said via e-mail, “Last year the students had a lot of fun organizing it, recruiting help, and watching the event be a success. I am excited to see a new group of students share this same enthusiasm.”