At Lincoln High School, we feel that losing seven close friends or students, period, in one year is like losing 10,000 people in a single day. As devastating as it is to lose any human being, seven is a small number compared to the six million Jews that died in the Holocaust, or the 3.8 million Africans that were exterminated in 1994. If the government just sits back and watches the genocide that is happening at this very moment, they will lose most, if not all the support of the United States. What happened to the government promising “genocides would never happen again?” They reacted too late to the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Why don’t we step in before it’s too late for Uganda? The Uganda government is not helping with anything, they are too afraid of the “rebels” to do anything.

Why are we letting this tragedy prolong? ‘It doesn’t matter’ some say, ‘It’s not us; let them deal with it’ others say. Well what if it was us? What if we were the ones running from the “rebels” getting abducted from our own bedrooms at night, then being brainwashed into killing other people, friends, even family. It sounds like a bad movie –but it’s really not, it’s happening right now in Uganda. What if we thought the safety of our homes wasn’t safe enough and we felt the parks were safer?

In the United States, we’d stop this kind of thing as fast as possible, no questions asked. But because it’s not “our” country and it’s Africa, no one cares. They are people too. So tell me, those of you who have kids, what would you do if your child was abducted and there was nothing you could do about it? And even if you wanted to cry your eyes, they’d kill you. So . . . would you sit back and pretend like your enjoying it? Most likely not, you’d be fighting the government to make them stop.

The government is trying to keep the whole genocide in Africa quiet, but if it were us, it’d be on news channels everywhere. Why is it that no one cares? It’s ridiculous, we’ve thousands of troops over in Iraq fighting for our country, but we can’t take on a small army of kids to stop this genocide, the one that shouldn’t be happening. The kids in Uganda are suffering, having to commute to the town at night because they don’t want to be abducted, having to live in fear. Most children in Uganda would rather die than live in fear, especially the children that escaped “the bush,” they new that the leader was looking for them by name, so they had to be extra careful of what they were doing.

If only people would start caring, because one of these days we are going to be in the same situation, in need of help, but no one will want to help because we didn’t help them when they were in need.