Invisible Children & School Chest

The three weeks in between Thanksgiving and Winter break are always extremely chaotic for me. Not only is it the height of all of my activities, but it is also the time in which School Chest takes place. School Chest is a three week charity drive hosted by my school in which we raise tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars for a charity of our choice. This year, the school chose Invisible Children, as the 2011 School Chest Beneficiary. Invisible Children is a non-profit organization that is dedicated to ending the use of child soldiers in central Africa. For the past twenty-six years, a man named Joseph Kony has been using his rebel-terrorist group called the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), to abduct children from their homes, and force them to become child soldiers. Many times, the children are forced to kill their friends and/or family, they may be mutilated, and brainwashed to never escape.
The amazing $97 thousand that we raised during School Chest will be used by Invisible Children to expand  upon an early warning radio network in remote areas of central Africa. Overall, this year's School Chest seemed to be a very heated one for my high school. Since Invisible Children was our first international charity for School Chest, it is hard for many students to connect with the progress of our involvement and fundraising. I feel that the majority of students at my school support Invisible Children, there are a lot of students who obsessively support the organization, but of course there are skeptics who do not agree with their tactics.
Since I consider myself to be very involved with the organization, I feel that many of the skeptic students are missing out on key details of how our School Chest is being implemented in Invisible Children's Protection Plan: a multi-step plan to rescue and rehabilitate Kony's child soldiers, and to apprehend him and the rest of the LRA. However, even though many students feel don't feel that they have confidence in Invisible Children, I very happy that Invisible Children, and the LRA conflict, is well known in my school and community. It is a cool feeling to talk about issues regarding the LRA and Invisible Children with my friends and classmates at school, and to know that we understand each other. Overall, this year's School Chest was great not only because of the enormous financial success that we had, but also the amazing awareness success that came along for the ride.