You don't have all these other estimations or planning. As a kid you really think about going home. But how did I feel? I wanted to get out of Moroto to go home. So, there's no way I would have done anything. Well, I wouldn't make a call to them because they didn’t have a phone to respond to my call even if I called them. So, the best means of transport was on foot at that time.Ĭan you remember how you were feeling at the time? And were you able to make a call to your parents? And what were they telling you? Because the vehicles that tried to move from Moroto going southwards were captured by the soldiers and hijacked. And they told the students to find their way home. By six o'clock, five o'clock, everybody was sitting around the radio trying to find out what was happening. How did you first become aware and what was it like when you started hearing that things were becoming dangerous and that your safe life as a boarding school student was going to be upended? And then they kept fleeing further north, north of Uganda. And whenever they captured a town, I mean, soldiers would flee and move to the next town. But if you look at the map of Uganda, the war started from the south bordering Tanzania. It was safe until that time before the war. You're at a safe, what you thought was a safe boarding school, what your parents thought was a safe boarding school. And the fighting started from the southern part of Uganda and kept moving, pushing Amin from Kampala, pushing the soldiers up north until they some of them escaped into present day South Sudan and northwestern Uganda. Moroto High School is in the northeastern part of Uganda. I was in school, in a school called Moroto High School. Can you tell me Alfred where were you when the conflict engulfed you? How old were you? From the United Nations, I'm Melissa Fleming and this is Awake at Night. Now he is the Chief of Child Protection at the United Nations Mission in South Sudan working to help child soldiers there. He became a child soldier when Tanzanian forces invaded his home country of Uganda in 1979 to oust the dictator Idi Amin. Especially when you’ve experienced as much as my colleague Alfred Orono. But I don't think it’s as bad as where I have come from. If I have regrets, then I should be dead because I think so far things have been okay.

Alfred keepingyouawake