After meeting with GUSCO Tuesday morning, we were extremely privileged to be taken by Pamela, one of their social workers, to meet with a former child soldier that she had worked with to reunite with his family.
Jacob was 11 when he was abducted from his family’s home by the LRA. After seven years in captivity, he finally managed to escape when his commander had gotten in trouble, and was forced to flee himself to avoid being killed. Even though he had been gone seven years, his family still held out hope for his return. Then one day in January this year, they heard his name announced on a local radio station. Some escapee child soldiers had been found by the Ugandan army. With no means to verify if it was their son or not, they set off at 5am the following morning and walked for several hours to find out if it was really him. It was an amazing thing to watch the expression of joy on his father’s face when he described the day he was reunited with his son.
In Jacob’s case, the time taken from being found by the army and reunited with his family was just one month. This is indeed a happy ending after seven years apart from his family. It was certainly fortunate that his family had been listening out for announcements after all this time. If hadn’t heard his name on the radio, and they had moved at all in those seven years, the tracing process would have been much harder and much slower.
Even though it wasn’t directly relevant to the emergency response scenarios that RapidFTR has been primarily designed for, it was still very interesting to hear about FTR work from the family’s perspective. One thing we learnt from them is that once Jacob was abducted, there wasn’t anywhere for them to register their search for their missing son. We are now considering adding the ability to register parents (and other family members) to RapidFTR, and the potential for matching between child and parent records.
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