Uganda exhibit a picture of hope.

Byline: Bill Bishop The Register-Guard

In murals depicting their lives, the children of Uganda paint horror and hope.

David Bersch of Eugene learned of the horror on a trip to Uganda last year, meeting children stolen from their villages when they were as young as 10 to become slaves and soldiers for a rebel group that has terrorized northern Uganda for a decade.

Many are killed. Some escape to go back home. Others escape to find their families murdered, their impoverished villages too hurt or angry to take them back, according to international relief agencies Amnesty International and World Vision Uganda.

Bersch learned of the situation from relief workers and from former child soldiers on a visit to Uganda with his sister last year. But he says the kids' murals spoke loudest to him.

Uniformly, the murals begin on the left with a pristine village, degrade into scenes of flames and violence in the center, and emerge on the right with an image of a sun-drenched schoolhouse - a universal symbol for hope among Ugandan children.

Bersch knew he could never just go home and forget those murals.

"I didn't have a choice," he says. "You see something like this and you just have to do it."

With his sister, Mary Westring of Brooklyn, N.Y., he formed the nonprofit Ugandan Children of Conflict Education Fund to pay the secondary education costs of former child soldiers who have no family or village to take them in.

"It's their only hope for doing better than digging ditches or fighting with the Ugandan forces," Bersch says.

In its first nine months, the fund has found sponsors for a dozen children to attend six years of secondary schooling. Still, the effort is fledgling. Bersch has no business card, no Web site, no brochures. Just the murals and the children's stories.

To raise awareness and support for the fund, Bersch and Westring are bringing the stories and two murals painted by Ugandan children to Eugene for a show on Thursday at the Eugene Water & Electric Board training center, 500 E. Fourth Ave. at 7:30 p.m.

The need for such help was brought home to Bersch and his sister one morning in Uganda as they were having breakfast.

Bersch, on his first trip out of the country, says two boys approached him and his sister in the belief they were "rich Americans" and presented a scholarship proposal.

The boys, Kilare Patrick and Komekech Joseph, itemized school fees, uniforms, tuition, books - even bricks and mortar for a dwelling - to attend six years of secondary schooling. While the Ugandan government pays for elementary schooling, families must pay for any further education.

The cost came to about $40 per month for each boy, Bersch said.

"That was the moment of genesis for the Uganda Children of Conflict Education Fund," Bersch says.

As a 25-year employee of Springfield Creamery with two kids in college and a third headed there, Bersch says he has precious few extra dollars at the end of the month. Nevertheless, he now sponsors Kilare Patrick with a six-year commitment to $50 monthly payments. His sister sponsors the other boy.

Through a liaison in Uganda, the fund works in unison with World Vision Uganda and the Gulu Support for Children Organization, two programs that provide counseling and therapy for former child soldiers and attempts to reunite them with families or villages.

The World Vision center in Gulu, Uganda, currently has 168 children in its care.

Over a two-week period ending Aug. 6, the center took in 81 children and reunited 66 with their families, according to a report last month by the Reuters Foundation.

Bersch admits being surprised to learn the shocking reality of child abductions by military groups and the lack of international notice of the problem.

"It happens all over the world," he says. "The government (in Uganda) is doing the best they can. The security there is very difficult. The villages are as remote as you can get. There are no roads. The army has its hands full."

The Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group headed by Joseph Kony, has operated in the area for a decade with the goal of overturning the Ugandan government and ruling the country in accord with the biblical Ten Commandments, according to Amnesty International.

Although child abductions by the group are well documented, they are overshadowed by the country's other human rights and economic troubles, the agency says in its 2003 report on Uganda.

Ongoing military conflicts with neighboring lands, killings of civilians by the military, poverty, laws limiting political party functions, growing numbers of refugees and media restrictions are a few others listed in the Amnesty International report.

Kony's army probably could not survive without child abductions, during which children are enslaved, raped, indoctrinated to violence and killed if they try to escape, according to Amnesty International. At least 8,000 children have been abducted by Kony's forces, the agency says.

"That's how they recruit. They steal children," Bersch says. "Sometimes when they are kidnapped their family is killed. Before World Vision came on the scene, these kids were pretty much thrown away. No one worked with them. To a person, every one of the kids we talked to say their No. 1 wish is to go back to school."

Bersch says the goal from the show in Eugene is to find sponsors willing to develop a relationship with these children.

Bersch says he and his sister volunteer for the project and 100 percent of donations go to education for the former child soldiers.

"I'm in it for as long as it takes, as long as this problem persists," Bersch says. "If this rebel group were vanquished tomorrow, we'd still have six years of work to do."

UGANDAN CHILD FUND

What: Stories and artwork by Ugandan children who escaped abduction by military groups and hope to continue schooling

Where: Eugene Water & Electric Board training center, 500 E. Fourth Ave., Eugene

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday

Information: www.wvi.org or www.amnesty.org or 461-1297

Contributions: Ugandan Children of Conflict Education Fund, 3050 Memory Lane, Eugene, OR 97404; donations are tax deductible

CAPTION(S):

Former child soldiers in Uganda paint their story on a mural to be shown at a public presentation on Thursday in Eugene.