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Airdate: The Road To Freedom Peak

This doco profiles a young man abducted at 10 and trained as a child soldier, who returns home to his village 9 years later.

2013-11-21_1411Next month Bio channel screens a two hour documentary, The Road To Freedom Peak, profiling Uganda’s Jonathan Okwir who was abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army when he was ten-years-old and trained as a child soldier.

Australian philanthropist and former model Corrin Varady, who has been working in Northern Uganda for several years and founded the World Youth Education Trust, produced this doco in which he journeys across East Africa with Jonathan as he returns to his his mother and his village nine years later.

Corrin and Jonathan travel from the border of Uganda and Sudan to end up at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, also known as Freedom Peak. The pair cycle, drive, fly and climb through refugee camps, villages, towns and cities before they take on Africa’s highest peak, which becomes a symbol for Jonathan’s new beginning.

Together they meet and speak to hundreds of people on the way, many who themselves were abducted by the guerrilla group and trained as child soldiers. Each of their stories is harder than the last and many of these young people wait desperately for assistance that may never come.

Often the former child soldiers are feared and shunned by their communities and feel displaced in their own homes after returning. They are haunted by the memories of the brutalities they were forced to commit and some suffer from mental illness. Their families cannot support their emotional wellbeing and they are not free to move on from their past and embrace their future.

After speaking with some of the young men who’ve returned home after being captured as children Corrin says, “These kids are totally destroyed by what happened to them. Some of them have had to kill their own parents, some of them have had to kill young children, and then to come back into a community where you then spend your entire life being called a killer – it must just be the hardest thing.”

Jonathon is hopeful about the future of the former child soldiers and his country, and recognises the need for love and acceptance for the young people affected by the war. He hopes to one day become a leader in his community and help make positive changes within Uganda about their attitudes to the war.

The Road To Freedom Peak is in memory of every child affected in some way by the brutalities of war. Jonathan feels he lives every day of this journey throughout East Africa for his friends who were killed in the years the war ripped through Northern Uganda.

UPDATE: To be rescheduled in 2014.

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