DTJ is launching a communiqué series where once a month we will post a highlight of our impact.
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In January DTJ screened a short film we directed, shot and produced called “Let us Be Free: A Plea for Relief from the LRA” at a Congressional Briefing in Washington, D.C. hosted by Human Rights Watch and Resolve. Our film served to advocate directly to US Congressmen and senior staff to implement the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, signed in 2009 by President Obama. DTJ’s media was screened alongside the talented photojournalist Marcus Bleasdale who recently chronicled the LRA crisis in Central Africa with the Pulitzer Center.
DTJ partnered with Resolve, an advocacy organization based in D.C., committed to seeing the end of the LRA’s atrocities in Central Africa. This unique partnership allowed us to travel to Sudan in 2010 and be on the ground in Western Equatoria, a remote part of Sudan, where people from DR Congo, Central African Republic and Sudan have all fled from LRA attacks. We interviewed Congolese children who had been abducted by the LRA, mothers who had lost their children to the LRA, men who showed us in a few handfuls, the food they had that was expected to last for the next two months. Urgency, pain and despair saturated the pleas for help people shared with us. We asked them if they could say something to the US Government or to the American people, what they would say. With bravery, people explained how they want peace, how they love peace, but THEY NEED HELP.
DTJ is committed to continuing to amplify the voices of our friends in Southern Sudan and reporting on continued developments of the affects of the LRA in Central Africa.
// Photograph by Lindsay Branham of young boy who recently escaped from the LRA in Yambio, Southern Sudan.