Guns for Pens

HM Queen Silvia with the 2012 Child Jury (http://worldschildrensprize.org/photos)

It’s the child soldier who always makes me cry...this time it was a young boy with a round face and dark, haunting eyes which had seen too much. The boy on the stage could not have been more than fourteen years old, but he had seen his two friends killed and been forced to step over their bodies, on his way to becoming a killing machine. How can we do this – teach children to kill? How can we stand by when children are robbed of their youth, robbed of their right to a childhood – to learn, to play, to live without fear?

It was an ordinary day for Ndale when he left for school that morning. He and his friends were a little late and took a shortcut through the forest where they were captured and forced to march to a camp deeper in the bush. Their clothes were burned and they were dressed in adult uniforms with the legs and arms cut off to fit. Rifles were placed in their hands with the words – “this is your pen now”. It would be three years before Ndale escaped and made his way to BVES, an organisation which rescues children who have been forced to be soldiers in the war-torn D. R. Congo.

Ndale is the newest member on the jury of the World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child, the largest global organisation which teaches children about democracy and their rights. 27 million children are registered with the organisation which meets annually to honour child rights activists.

When I first attended the awards ceremony in 2008, Bwami was the child solider who brought a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes. He told a similar story and shared his revelation that education was the key to improve his life and the lives of all the other children in similar situations. Now Bwami is 18 and too old to sit on the child jury, but there are many more to take his place...