The night-walkers of Uganda

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The night-walkers of Uganda
Level 1 
l
Elementary
1
Key Words
Fill the gaps using these words from the text.
aid agency pregnant capture hut warden
shelter slave bush rebel patrol
1. A 
is a small simple house with only one or two rooms.
2. A 
is a place where people are protected from bad weather or from danger.
3. A 
is someone who opposes their government and tries to remove it using force.
4. A 
is someone who is responsible for a place and checks that people follow rules.
5. If you 
a person, you take him or her prisoner.
6. If you 
a place, you move regularly around it in order to prevent trouble or crime.
7. The 
is an area in a hot country that is not used for growing food.
8. An 
is an organization that gives money, food or help to people in need.
9. A 
is someone who is forced to do what another person tells them to do and has to work for
him or her.
10. If a woman is 
, she is going to have a baby. 
2
Find the information
Look in the text and find this information as quickly as possible:
1. Where is Mary Aciro from?
2. How old is she?
3. What is the LRA?
4. How many children spend the nights in shelters?
5. How many people live in shelters?
The night-walkers of Uganda
Mary Aciro lives near the town of Lacor in northern Uganda. Every day, she collects grass to feed the cattle, 
works in the vegetable patch and helps her mother cook dinner over a fire. And then, just before the sun 
sets, Mary leaves her family’s tiny hut and walks down a sandy road into Lacor. The adults are going home 
for dinner on buses. Mary and hundreds of other children are going the other way. They are wearing dirty 
old clothes and flip-flops. Some are carrying sacks or rolled-up blankets. They are going to night shelters 
guarded by government troops. 
In any other country, a mother wouldn’t let her 14-year-old daughter leave home for the night. Here, the 
most important thing is to survive. “We fear the rebels and violent robbers who come at night to disturb us,” 
says Mary as she walks. 
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There are many problems in Africa but the war in this region is the worst problem of all. It is Africa’s longest 
civil war. Mary and the other children walk to the shelters every night because they don’t want to be captured 
by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The LRA is a religious rebel group that uses children as soldiers,
porters and sexual slaves. The rebels attack the villagers at night. They kill adults and take the children 
away to camps in the bush. 
Mary’s 15-year-old brother, Geoffrey, was captured by the rebels and he was a prisoner for three months. 
“They made him carry heavy things. They hit him and didn’t give him any food,” says their mother, Agnes. 
Geoffrey escaped when a government helicopter attacked the rebel camp he was in. Mary’s neighbour, a girl 
named Florence, was captured too. She spent three years with the rebels: she was forced to have sex and 
became pregnant. 
In 2002, desperate parents in northern Uganda began sending their children—about 40,000 of them—into 
nearby towns at night. Aid agencies built shelters to give them a safe place to go. Mary is going to one of 
these places. When she reaches the shelter, it is full of children of all ages. The shelter is made up of
concrete buildings and large white tents. 
Lillian Apiyo, 14, is already inside. “I come here for protection,” she says. The children look sad when they 
reach the shelter, but soon they become happier. Some children begin dancing. At other shelters, they sing 
songs. The children are not given anything to eat. The shelters are already very busy, and if food were given 
to the children, they would be even busier. 
Adult wardens patrol with torches. They stop fights occasionally and check on children who look frightened 
or unhappy. “When I am here, I feel I am somebody. When I am at home, I’m always upset,” says Gabriel 
Oloya, 15, who is 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, but it is even shorter in this society. 
The children are alone and they need love. Many of them live with their extended family because their
parents were killed by the rebels. 
In the shelter the wardens keep boys and girls apart, but outside its gates young couples are alone in the 
semi-darkness. This sort of thing worries Mary’s mother. “We can’t follow our children up to the shelter,” 
Agnes says. “Sometimes a girl says she has gone there, but she has gone to a boyfriend, and she becomes 
pregnant and leaves school.” But other things worry her more. The tribes of northern Uganda were once 
farmers. They lived in small villages and had cattle and fields of maize. But 19 years of war have destroyed 
everything. Almost all the population of the north, 1.5 million people, now lives in crowded temporary
shelters near the towns. As the war goes on, the situation gets worse. 
There is little hope of returning to a normal life. This is a culture with few written records. When their
parents are gone, the children’s link with their villages will be lost. Who will tell the children the boundaries of 
farmland or the distance to the nearest stream? “For me, the worst thing that may happen here is a situation 
where there is no war, but everybody stays in the camps,” says Father Carlos Rodriguez Soto, a Roman 
Catholic priest who has spent 18 years in Uganda.
The wardens wake up the children before the sun rises. The children pray and wash. Some children roll 
their blankets, others call their younger brothers and sisters. They leave the shelter and walk to the road. At 
9 a.m. the sun will be very hot, but now it is gentle. It is a good time to walk home.