Mary Aciro has spent the day gathering sheaves of grass to feed the cattle, weeding the vegetable patch and helping her mother cook dinner over a charcoal fire: the life of any African girl in any African village.
But as daylight begins to fade, Mary slips away from the family's tiny mud hut and strides down a sandy track into the nearest town. The adults in the town of Lacor in northern Uganda are going home for dinner on buses which spray plumes of dust over Mary's face and clothes as she walks. Mary, along with hundreds of other children, is going the other way.
The children are dressed in rags and flip-flops; some carrying sacks or rolled-up blankets on their shoulders. They scramble over grassy banks and hurry down the sun-scorched roadside on the way to the night shelters, which are guarded by government troops.
In any other country, a 14-year-old girl leaving her home and an anxious mother for the night would spell rebellion. Here, it's simply about survival.
"We fear the rebels, we fear thugs and robbers who come at night to disturb us," Mary says as she walks with a swinging stride.
On a troubled continent, the war in this region stands out. It is Africa's longest-running civil war, and perhaps the only conflict in history where children are both the main victims and the principal aggressors.
Mary and the other children walk to safety every night because they fear, with very good reason, abduction by the Lord's Resistance Army, (LRA) a Christian fundamentalist rebel group which uses children as soldiers, porters and sexual slaves. The LRA carries out its raids at night, storming into villages from the surrounding bush, killing adults and forcing children to bludgeon their parents before marching them away to camps deep in the bush.
Mary's 15-year-old brother Geoffrey was abducted by the rebels; he was held for three months.
"They made him carry heavy loads, beat him at times, he went without food," their mother Agnes says.
Geoffrey only escaped when a government helicopter gunship strafed the rebels holding him. Mary's neighbor, a girl named Florence, was abducted too. She spent three years with the rebels: she was forced into sexual slavery and became pregnant.
Desperate measures
Desperate to keep the child-snatchers from their doors, parents in northern Uganda began sending their children into nearby towns at night in 2002. Back then, children used to sleep on the pavements, curling up together for warmth. They came in vast numbers: 40,000 children across northern Uganda started walking into towns to sleep.
Aid agencies set up shelters to give them somewhere safe to go, and it's one of these that Mary is heading for.
As she approaches Lacor town, she walks past bars lit by a single, bare lightbulb, where a few drinkers sit outside on white plastic chairs sipping fizzy drinks or local beers, past tiny shops whose wooden shelves are crammed with cooking oil, salt, soap powder and mobile phone top-up cards. As the shadows spread, the shopkeepers are bolting their thief-proof metal doors and stepping out on to the chipped concrete pavements.
Mary lives near the town and follows the main road, but some of the other children walk for hours to reach safety, following winding unlit paths between mango trees and thickets of scrub. When she reaches the shelter, it is already full of children, some of them barely toddlers, others in their late teens. The shelter is made up of stark concrete buildings, bare as a barn inside, as well as rows of giant white canvas tents propped up by wooden stakes. The children give them names such as Pope Paul II and Moon Star Hall.
Lillian Apiyo, 14, is already inside.
"I come here for protection," she says, sitting on a concrete step. "I always get new friends from here. There is nowhere to stay at home."
The children filter through the gates looking subdued, but a party atmosphere soon develops. A dozen or so children begin dancing, gyrating their hips and nodding their heads. At other shelters there is frenetic singing of hymns or motivational songs, accompanied by the beating of cowhide drums.
In one camp, adult volunteers chant: "Who are you? Who are you?" as the children arrive, and they shriek back: "I'm a winner -- a winner!"
At Mary's shelter, groups of boys are washing themselves beneath communal taps, their wet bodies glistening in the semi-darkness provided by the moon and a sprinkling of lightbulbs.
The children are not given anything to eat. The shelters are busy enough as it is, and if food were to be provided they would be overwhelmed.
Adult wardens patrol with torches, breaking up the occasional fight over a blanket and checking on children who look scared or upset.
Often, children feel more looked after here than they do at home.
"When I am here, I feel I am somebody," says Gabriel Oloya, who studies his schoolbooks in the dim light.
"When I am at home I'm always upset. I feel lonely and so many thoughts come into my mind. Here I tend to forget such things," he says.
Gabriel is head of his family, responsible for the four younger brothers who walk with him to the shelter.
"My parents are dead, killed by the rebels," he says.
Childhood is short in rural Africa -- boys in their teens will herd cattle and girls of 10 must fetch water -- but it is rare for children to be thrown so completely on their own resources as they are in this war-damaged society.
Gabriel receives food handouts from the UN. Together with his even smaller brothers, the skinny 15-year-old hauls bricks for a little money.
"What worries me most is the absence of my parents," he says. "I have to be responsible for taking care of my brothers."
The children who come to the shelters crave affection. Many of them are cuckoos at home -- orphans whose parents were murdered by the rebels and have been taken in by their extended family. Freed from the responsibility of caring for younger siblings, or working in vegetable gardens, they can be young again in the shelters. The girls comb and braid each other's hair while the boys spin bottle-tops or engage in play-fights.
Collins Ocen, a tiny 13-year-old who looks scarecrow-like in an oversized coat, ragged shorts and flip-flops, comes partly for the fun.
"I like playing, sharing stories with others and bathing," he says.
Dancing
Elsewhere, teenage hormones are going wild. A crowd of watching children gathers around the gaggle of dancers. In the villages, dances such as these were courtship rituals; a chance for teenage boys and girls to sneak glances at each other in a setting approved by their elders.
In the shelter, the wardens keep boys and girls apart, but outside its metal gates young couples are cuddling in the semi-darkness.
This sort of thing does worry Mary's mother.
"We can't follow our children up to the shelter," Agnes says. "Sometimes a girl says she has gone there, but she has gone to a boyfriend, and she becomes pregnant and drops out of school."
But then there are more serious things to worry about than teenage boys in the night shelters; in this land of lost innocence the soldiers who are meant to guard the children have been known to press girls into prostitution, or shoot boys merely for leaving their huts at night.
Mary's shelter fills up quickly. There are soon more than 1,000 children here, more boys than girls, and the adults are busy making sure everyone has a place to sleep. The boys and girls sleep in separate dormitories, spreading mats or blankets they have brought from home across the bare floors.
By 10pm they have settled down for the night and the lights go out. Some are already half-asleep; many are exhausted from the walk in. A few of the small ones are agitated; they seem to be having nightmares, and cuddle up against older brothers or sisters for comfort.
The Acholi and Lango tribes of northern Uganda were once peasant farmers, living in small, scattered villages amid their herds of long-horned cattle and fields of maize. But 19 years of war have warped everything: virtually the entire population of the north, some1.5 million people, has been displaced into crowded, dusty encampments on the outskirts of the main towns.
Families live pressed together in tiny mud huts with thatched roofs. There is little space to farm or keep their cattle. Despair has bred alcoholism and domestic violence; the horror of war is part and parcel of life. It is so common, in fact, to have lost both parents that children here talk about it in calm, steady voices.
As the older generation dies out, so does the hope of anyone here returning to a normal life. This is a culture with few written records, which relies on memories rather than maps to place the boundaries of farmland and the distance to the nearest stream. When their parents are gone, the children's link with their original villages will be broken for ever.
"Half of the population of people in the camps are under 15," Father Carlos Rodriguez Soto, a Roman Catholic priest who has spent 18 years in Uganda says.
"[They] are losing memory of the original demarcation of their land. For me, the worst thing that may happen here is a situation where officially there is no war, but everybody remains in the camps," he says.
The sun has not quite risen when the adult wardens rouse the children. There is laughter and the sound of scuffling from inside the tents as they get dressed and hurry outside, turning on the washing taps in the raw pre-dawn light.
The new day begins with a communal prayer, led by the adults. Some children raise their right hands in the air, a gesture common among the evangelical churches sweeping up souls in the most desperate corners of Africa. Some crouch down and cover their faces, a symbol, the adult wardens explain, of being "humble before God."
Surveying this crowd of skinny children in second-hand rags, it is hard to imagine any group of people on earth more humble.
After the prayer, the children who have blankets roll them on to their shoulders, the older ones gather up younger brothers and sisters and they begin to slip out of the gates and stream on to the road. By 9am the sun will burn and sweat will drip from every forehead, but now it is gentle. It is a good time to walk home.
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