This man is Zach Barrows, IC’s Movement Director. He’s in charge of coordinating the Invisible Children National Tours. So when our full-time volunteers (‘Roadies’) descend upon your local community it’s thanks to this guy.
Yesterday, I sat down with him and he had one very important thing to say: The Ugandans are coming.
Barrows, who had just returned from a grueling 20 hour flight to Uganda, came back with exciting news. The final interviews had occurred over the past week and selections we made in the process of hiring Ugandan roadies.
“I was hoping to find people who could represent Invisible Children and that could speak to the experience that the people of the DR Congo, Southern Sudan and Central African Republic are going through right now,” Barrows said.
IC is about to enter our fourth tour with Ugandan advocates, and we’ve come far from where we started. Barrows was able to relate the difference between previous tours and this most recent one,
“At first it was, ‘this was my story, help put my peers in school.’ Now it’s ‘this is what was happening to me, now it’s happening to people in neighboring countries, help us bring an end to it.”
It’s a powerful example of global citizenship: Americans, Canadians, and Ugandans standing up for the safety of the Congolese.
As for this round of Ugandan advocates? According to Barrows, the interviews were a huge success,
“The interviews were unbelievable. One of the coolest things was interviewing a handful of members of the first class of legacy scholarship fund members to graduate from University. The stories that people shared were at the same time so devastating but at other times so hopeful,” he recounted.
“These kids and their communities were crushed by the LRA And now you’re seeing in their lives these same kids who were abducted, these kids whose parents or siblings were abducted either just graduating from university, in university right now or staff members at IC helping their communities to recuperate from the effects of this war. I’ve done it a couple of times and each time the stories are so compelling and the people are so amazing and hilarious.”
The process itself consists of a first round of interviews carried out by the Ugandan office. After some logistical planning, Barrows attends the final round of interviews. This time around things happened to move pretty fast,
“This was the quickest it’s ever been. The word goes out to all our scholarship recipients, the whole region and the Ugandan Invisible Children staff as well. The team there does the first round of interviews. Once its whittled down to those people I come over for the final selection. We were able to do it with two very long days of interviews. Day three was the day that we all got together to hash it out to create a team.”
Barrows spoke with pride as he described this fall’s Ugandan team,
“Got a few returners coming back. The people will be happy. The team is stacked. I would think of it as the Boston Bruins of roadie teams.”
