True story of horror

As a teen intent on penning an Indiana Jones-style page-turner, Katie Hardy imagined her writing would take her to exotic locations filled with daring escapades and political intrigue.

Eight years and countless hours of research later, Hardy not only found her topic, in haunting horror stories that are all too real for thousands of orphaned African children, she’s gone from nascent novelist to fundraiser and advocate to make sure their stories are heard.

While writing is still in her future, her ultimate goal now is to raise awareness by giving a voice to the unimaginable events inflicted on kids halfway around the world.

When Hardy, a now 21-year-old communications major set to graduate from Lewis-Clark State College-Coeur d’Alene next spring, set out in middle school to investigate a setting for her book, she stumbled across a group of Ugandan children known as the Night Commuters. The kids, who usually range in age from 4 to 16, flee their rural villages at night to seek safety in numbers with other orphans living in larger metropolitan areas, sometimes many miles away.

“I wanted to write a story about something big, something important. So I picked a random topic, which turned out to be about Sudan,” she explained about the origins of her in-the-works book, which she hopes to turn into a screenplay some day. “Eight years later it’s still not done; it’s become a part of who I am. The kids have touched my life forever.”

What the Night Commuters are fleeing from is almost beyond comprehension, Hardy added.

But people need to hear their stories, she continued, especially in the U.S., where the media’s spotlight can lead to political action. Hardy is willing to tell anyone who will listen, which in the past has included presenting in front of Rotary clubs and classrooms, and holding a bake sale which raised $1,000 for school supplies, in order to raise awareness about a little-reported tragedy that still affects thousands of innocent lives.

The commuters, children orphaned from the civil war that ravaged the southern Sudan territories for decades and the years of genocide in Uganda, are trying to escape from fear of being abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by warlord Joseph Kony, a self-described Christian with mystical powers who is also one of the world’s most wanted men. If they are caught by the rebels, the children are indoctrinated into the rebel army, often through brutal physical attacks, rape, or if they are found with their parents, kids have been made to hack their parents to death and young males forced to rape their mothers, or watch as the insurgents kill them.

Through Kony’s more than 20-year reign as leader of the LRA, his army has abducted thousands of children. One UNICEF estimate puts the number of kidnapped since 2002 at about 12,000 and as many as 20,000 since the group formed in 1987. They are often converted into roaming death squads. Meanwhile, clashes between Kony’s guerrilla army and government forces have displaced more than 2 million civilians and left tens of thousands of others dead or mutilated.

New recruits face sinister and often short-lived futures: working as slave laborers, soldiers for the LRA, or used for sex.

So the children run. At dusk, when the fading sunlight offers a more secretive escape, they hurry from their homes to seek out the safety provided by several public shelters in a few neighboring Ugandan towns. Though the shelters offer some sense of security, they are of little solace for the carnage many of the commuters witnessed, Hardy said.

“Basically what happens,” she said, “is if you are in this small village or hut, the LRA will make a raid and kill the parents of the kids and make them watch, or make them kill their parents and watch, or make them rape their parents and then kill them. It’s truly terrible what they have gone through … I think it has to do with the injustice forced on these children that has stuck with me and motivated me.”

Wes Bentley, a former Marine who now serves as the founder and director of Far Reaching Ministries, has been a frequent visitor to the area since his first trip in 1996. Through the years, he’s witnessed the area’s violent history firsthand, having lost 10 employees in the past decade – four of them to Kony’s rebels.

“The closest thing I would say it reminds me of was Bruce Willis in ‘Tears of the Sun,’ where there were fields of bodies where they would leave the dead,” Bentley said in a telephone interview from the nonprofit organization’s California-based home. “You see a lot of trauma. That trauma never goes away, you just live with it.”

The Christian-based ministry, which has missions in Russia, China and five countries in Africa, is dedicated to training chaplains and pastors in southern Sudan “for the brutal world of Sudan,” according to its Web site, and offering assistance to the victims and displaced people of the conflicts. Far Reaching Ministries offers financial and staff support to some of the shelters for the Night Commuters.

For Coeur d’Alene’s Hardy, who cites Bentley as a personal hero, she’s doing what she can for the children a world removed from the atrocities. The biggest way to help is to tell people about them, she believes. “These kids are a part of my destiny. I’m here as a conduit from their hearts to yours,” she often tells crowds at her presentations.

“People in America don’t really know what’s going on,” she added. “My goal is to raise awareness or funds, whatever I can.”

While Hardy’s book has changed course through the years, no longer the daring endeavors of a lone hero or heroine, she said she’s learned much about herself and her place is in the world in the process. “It probably is naïve,” she said about her long-term goals of helping the Night Commuters and others like them. “My mantra is: I’m trying to change the world.”