World Vision Rehabilitation Center

Inside the facility.

Paintings some of the kids did on the building.

We stayed at the Acholi Inn which was really nice. Thursday morning we got up and left the hotel around 9am. Brenda called a friend, James, who came and met us in town and took us around all day long. He was a wealth of information and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to ask him a million questions about Gulu and the war.

This is the first place we ventured to go to-the World Vision Rehabilitation Center. As we pulled up I though there is NO WAY we are getting into this place unless God gets us in there. (I've heard that typically they require visitors to go through a couple of months procedure before they are able to go in and see the facility.) James goes into talk to the staff on the inside of the big gate and comes out a couple of minutes later to tell us they don't normally let people who just show up like this in but the are going to bend the rules for us (Thank you Lord!).

We are all sat down in a conference room while Fulkas, the program director, shared with us what center has done in the past many year sand what they are currently doing. He told us that in 15 years they have seen 14,000 kids go through the program! It takes about 1-3 months in order for a child soldier to be rehabilitated. After they are sometimes physically cared for because of wounds they are counseled using art therapy, play therapy, and they are taught skills like carpentry, bricking and bicycle repairs. The World Vision staff does family counseling, follow up counseling with the children, and there are also community counselors. They have about 2 % relapse rate, which is extremely good! Currently the children that are still in the LRA (Lord's Resistance Army) were brought to the Congo so they are not able to escape because they do not speak the local language. If they escaped in the Congo the communities there would most likely kill them. So it was a lot safer for them to escape when the LRA was in Uganda. There are supposedly UPDF (Ugandan Army) stationed in the Congo. So in order to escape they would have to surrender to the UPDF, be taken to immigration, and then to the Ugandan government, and then to World Vision. They told us that the youngest children they've had here were 2 weeks old because they come with their mothers who are young children themselves who escaped from the LRA. They used to have 40 staff members when they had a huge influx of children. But now that the numbers have gone down there are about 15 staff. He told us the perception in the community is not bad for the children who return to their families and there are only isolated cases of abuse that happen. We asked if some of the kids had a lot of anger with their parents for allowing them to be taken. He said that happens but most of the time the kids and parents are just so overjoyed to be reunited. He told us WV will continue to do what they are doing until the last child has come home! Currently they are trying to gather records of children to figure out how many are still missing. We were then able to go out and tour the facility (pictures). We met the four former abducted children who were about to be going home soon. We then go to look through many of the art therapy that the children had done.