THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION
As a young boy chasing chickens on his parents’ farm in northern Uganda, Louis Lakor dreamed of becoming a teacher. But when he finally set foot in a local primary school at age 7, it was as an armed killer.
Abducted in a night raid, Lakor was forced to become a child soldier with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group, which terrorized northern Uganda for nearly two decades before being driven out of the country by a military offensive in 2005. Clutching a gun handed to him by his kidnappers, Lakor was ordered to “shoot everything you see.” He did.
“Otherwise they would have killed me,” he said 20 years later, looking out on the lush countryside near his home village of Awach, about 60 kilometers south of Uganda’s border with South Sudan.
Lakor, now 27 years old, is helping other ex-child soldiers learn skills, from vehicle repair and carpentry to tailoring and hairdressing.
“When I train youths here, I tell them my story,” he said, pacing around his noisy workshop where lanky teenagers welded, sawed and hammered. “I tell where I came from — that I’m like them, that I’m still an orphan looking for a way to survive.”
Lakor escaped from the LRA after four years. He ended up on the streets of Gulu, the main town in the region, begging for money. He eventually met Peter Owiny Mwa, owner of Baka General Motors, who decided to give him a chance, at first employing him as a cleaner, and later training him as a mechanic. In 2013, Lakor asked Mwa to let him train and employ ex-LRA youths.
Today, the Baka Youth Training Centre, a cluttered open-air courtyard surrounded by dilapidated wooden buildings, helps about 60 boys and girls each year, with little external funding. Lakor drives a motorcycle taxi to keep up with the rent.
Ex-LRA youths, some with limbs scarred by machete and gun wounds, sleep two to a single, stained mattress on the floor of a filthy room with peeling paint and no mosquito nets or glass in the windows. Student Godfrey Oloya, 18, was born in LRA captivity and still has a bullet lodged in his arm, a “souvenir” of his escape under gunfire when he was 7.
“When I finish here, I want to drive a taxi or a lorry,” he said, as budding mechanics trained on the rusting remains of a pea-green Volkswagen Beetle from the 1970s.
Comments are closed.