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“Hurry up Wes, we’re pushing curfew,” I said, for the one-hundredth time. It was a late, sticky August night in Monrovia, Liberia and I was waiting for Wesley to finish paying the shirt tailor for his alterations. At last, Wesley quickly shoved all his change into his backpack. Zip, zip, and we were ready to hit the road back towards the port where Mercy Ships was docked. Mercy Ships is a nonprofit organization, which brings free medical care to the coast of West Africa, and we were both working on the ship for the summer.

We started out on our journey back to the ship in a brisk but forceful walk through the crowds. The sun was beginning to set and we already knew that we would be in trouble with the captain for not making curfew before eight o’clock. In an undeveloped country, like Liberia, the chaotic past of guerillas and warfare seem to seep through the cracks after nightfall.

We shoved our way through the crowd to what seemed like a clearing in order to gain some road on the rest of the travelers. As I looked down to watch where I was stepping, I missed that Wesley had come to a complete halt with his hands sticking out straight behind him as if to pull my body in close behind him for protection. I looked over his shoulder and I made direct eye contact with a man who was not much older than myself, standing there with five other friends. Their clothes were tattered; their arm muscles were bulging underneath their smooth, dark skin. At first he seemed angry, but when I did not remove my gaze his look became more of a warning. Each one of the men was holding an automatic machine gun.

The six men began to walk towards the crowd and pushed through to keep going on their designated track. Wesley grabbed my hand and we walked, jogged, darted, and made it safely back to the ship in record time. We never knew if those men were there to protect the people of Liberia, or if they were the guerillas our captain had warned us about earlier (They were still in hiding and were trying to raise up their army from the ashes and induce another civil war.) Either way, we did not want to stay to find out. After seeing several instances of near-violence, I feel most of the younger generation is not correctly informed of the violence that takes place in this area of the world. If I had never taken that two-week trip with my Dad the summer after I graduated high school, I would have never heard of the violence that Central and West Africa undergo everyday. If I had not heard of it, how would I have become aware of the detrimental living conditions that these people live in everyday? If it were happening in any other area of the world it would be on the front cover of Newsweek Magazine.

The recent movement of Kony 2012 has been made popular through the social media, Facebook, and the Invisible Children organization in order to create awareness of the violence that is taking place in Central Africa. According to the viral YouTube video, Kony 2012, Joseph Kony is the Ugandan leader of the child-recruiting Lord’s Resistance Army. For the past twenty-six years this man has been abducting children from their homes in order to sell them into sexual slavery or raise them to become soldiers in his army. The violence that these children are taught to tolerate consists of killing their parents, friends, and mutilating peoples faces into disfigurement. These children are scared into thinking that this lifestyle is the only way to stay alive. However, there has been much controversy after the release of the Kony 2012 YouTube video. Many were disapproving of Invisible Children, since the money donated is not going to where the giver originally thought. Research raised several questions but also provided several positive answers. Even though there might be questions that arise about Invisible Children’s fundraising, they are making young people more aware of the global crisis and encouraging them to participate. Young adults want to give back to the world and be a person this world can count on instead of giving into the selfish pressure of the previous generations to make the big bucks in order to keep your family roots happy.

Washington Post states, “A child dies every four seconds, according to UNICEF. Fourteen die every minute. Some of their deaths are mourned publicly; many go without attracting any notice at all” (“Travyon Martin: One of Seventeen Children Shot Very Publicly This Month”.) This statistic and the trip to Mercy Ships are some of the reasons why I chose to research this area of the world. Elizabeth Flock brings up several valuable arguments in her Washington Post article published on March 8, 2012, titled “Invisible Children Responds to Criticism about ‘Stop Kony’ Campaign,” Flock addresses the facts about Joseph Kony’s organized army and manipulation of the Ugandan government. She states, “Over the past two decades, the LRA made it common practice to enter towns and kill the adults, take the male children as soldiers, and sexually abuse the female children.” According to this article this has been going on for two decades and the majority of the rest of the world had no awareness about the cruelty that was taking place. The YouTube video, Kony 2012, has created a movement within the younger generations to raise awareness and stand up for the rights to better the chance at achieving world peace. This video has been passed around in the social medias of Facebook, Twitter, emails, etc. It has sparked a phenomenon to notify governmental officials to do something about Joseph Kony.

Jedediah Jenkins, director of idea development for Invisible Children, originally launched the YouTube video on March 5, 2012, and after millions of views, he was criticized for the content of the video. One major criticism was against the Invisible Children Organization itself; that the money donated to the cause of this organization (as previously mentioned) was weighted heavily towards the fundraising of the Invisible Children Campaign instead of given directly to the Ugandan people. Although it is unethical, Invisible Children is an up and coming organization that relies heavily on advertisement through the media  (I would consider that a worthy cause of my donations.) “Kony 2012 and the Prospects for Change,” written by Mareike Schomerus, adds criticism to the topic: “Such organizations have manipulated facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony — a brutal man, to be sure — as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil.” In response the research developed from the World Bank estimates that around 66,000 Ugandan children have been confirmed abducted from their homes and forced to fight.

People are now involved, want to do something for others, and are asking each other to help in achieving this broad goal of peace. Now that there has been awareness on this issue, the LRA has migrated North of Uganda. This provides more information for critics to accuse on inaccuracy. However, Kony is still alive. He is still out there. He is still in Central Africa making his way to North Western Africa. That itself should be motivation for people to support this cause.

The YouTube vide prompted people to get involved. From March 5 to April 20, Invisible Children ask their supporters to take the time to put up posters, change their facebook profile picture, tweet, blog, and share the news of Kony 2012. Their goal is for America to wake up on April 21 and have their neighborhoods, cities, and states blanketed with “Stop Kony,” in order to encourage governmental officials to take action. However, one major critic of Invisible Children’s methods is the doubting tumblr blog “Visible Children”: “These problems are highly complex, not one-dimensional and, frankly, aren’t of the nature that can be solved by postering, film-making and changing your Facebook profile picture, as hard as that is to swallow,” the blog wrote. According to Guernica Magazine, there were 70 million viewers in one week of the video being launched, which proved that the tactics of Invisible Children were working. Invisible Children created the movement and have made it easy to get involved. The Kony 2012 movement engages the world and encourages this generation to take action.