By Overseas Team | Member of Overseas Team
Names in this update are pseudonyms to protect each person's privacy.
Thank you for walking this long road toward peace alongside us. In this update, we'd like to share the stories of a few of the graduates we've been followin—thee people at the very heart of everything your support makes possible. They are quiet stories, but deeply hopeful ones.
Our follow-up work is simple but essential: we stay in touch with graduates after they finish their vocational training to see whether their new livelihoods are holding—and to witness something remarkable: the way one person's independence becomes a gift to the next generation.
This cohort includes not only former child soldiers but also young people born in captivity during the conflict (we call them CBCs—Children Born in Captivity). Many grew up in the shadow of war, and during the pandemic they faced new dangers, including pressure to join gangs. We welcomed them into our training program, and we are now following their first steps into independent life. Here are two of them.
Awor opened her own tailoring shop last October. Since then, she has done something we are especially proud of: rather than waiting for further support, she saved from her own earnings and bought additional sewing equipment herself, reinvesting in her future. Her livelihood is steady, and she is living independently. This is exactly the ownership our work hopes to nurture—not dependence on aid, but the confidence to build forward.
Okello's story reaches back across the years. He, too, is a young man born in captivity, and last October he opened his own carpentry shop. He has saved enough from his earnings to buy two cows—no small thing, when a single cow can cost several hundred dollars. But the most moving part is who his mother is. More than a decade ago, she was a young woman who had been abducted and held for years and who lived with a lasting injury from a landmine. With our reintegration support, she rebuilt her life and stood on her own. Back then, Okello was just a small child at our facility.
A mother supported him into independence; her son is now standing on his own feet, building a trade, and saving for the future. One generation's recovery passed on to the next—this is what "pay-it-forward" means in real life. And recently, a new baby was born into the family: a granddaughter for his mother, a niece for Okello. Time moves on, and so does hope.
Not every story is this steady yet—some young people still face real challenges, and we will keep walking with them, too.
It is modest progress. But it is the kind of progress that lasts. Thank you for making it possible and for staying in this with us.
Links:
By Channie Cheung | Member of Overseas Team
By Misa Ito | Member of Advocacy Team
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