Laren Poole has had a busy week. The 28-year-old San Diego native — and former UCSD student — spent last Tuesday in the Oval Office, celebrating the passage of a bill that could end the war in Uganda with President Obama. Three days later, Poole took off to Africa, where he will spend the next two weeks installing short-wave radio towers in the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo — currently a volatile war zone.
Luckily for the graduating class of 2010, he’ll get back just in time for a keynote speech at UCSD’s All-Campus Graduation Celebration.
Ironically, it will be his first graduation. Poole dropped out of UCSD in 2004 to run non-profit organization Invisible Children full time. In 2003, he skipped Spring Quarter to travel to Sudan with friends Bobby Bailey and Jason Russell. After discovering hordes of children hiding from a guerilla army in Northern Uganda, the three adventurers pulled out their hi-def handycams to film “Invisible Children: The Rough Cut.”
The documentary gained international attention in 2006, shedding light on the rebel army’s practice of abducting of child soldiers. At that point, finishing his degree wasn’t exactly the top of Poole’s to-do list. Instead, he shifted his attention to promoting awareness through a successful nonprofit organization, and facilitating an end to the conflict in Northern Uganda.
“I’m kind of playing it by ear,” Poole said. “If we stop this war, then I’m going to re-evaluate where my life goes next.”
The rebels, who call themselves the Lord’s Resistance Army and advocate the overthrow of the Ugandan government, are led by guerilla fighter Joseph Kony. The army has been operating out of Northern Uganda since 1987.
In an attempt to build the army, LRA members — including children who have already been abducted and brainwashed — steal other children from their homes, force them to commit murder and convert them into soldiers. Often, the abductees’ first victims are their own parents — a strategy employed by the LRA so that the children will have no family to which they can return.
In order to avoid this fate, thousands of children swarm into less isolated cities every night, sleeping in public places with only a thin mat to protect them from the bus-station and hospital floors beneath them. When Poole, Bailey and Russell stumbled across one such scene, they began to document what they soon realized was a virtually un-talked-about issue outside of the area.
The original “Invisible Children” has since evolved into its own nonprofit organization, which has held over 5,000 (and counting) film screenings at colleges and high schools around the country. They also provide aid — like microfinance opportunities and scholarships — to help improve education and income rates in Uganda. Not bad for a boy from La Mesa who started out making skateboard videos in his backyard.
Poole said he was not expecting to return home from his 2003 Africa adventure with such a gruesome story to tell.
“I didn’t really volunteer, or anything,” Poole said. “I was just going on this crazy adventure to South Africa to shoot some kind of film — I didn’t know what. Very, very humble beginnings. When I tell people, they expect me to say that, like, I wanted to be like Mother Theresa or something. And I was far from Mother Theresa.”
Prior to his somewhat spontaneous trip to Sudan, Poole’s only journey outside the country had been a family spearfishing trip to Mexico, and the decision to head to Africa came as something of an accident. While working for Jedediah Clothing Company, Poole was commissioned to put on a promotional parade for the fashion company’s fall line. When short notice and a lack of funding got the better of Poole’s patience, he yelled at his boss — soon-to-be fellow filmmaker Russell — for assigning him to a project doomed to failure.
“I had a horrible attitude about the whole situation,” Poole said. “So, I called two weeks after and apologized about my attitude and he said, ‘Do you want to grab coffee?’ And I said ‘Sure.’ So Jason and I had coffee, and he said, ‘Oh, I’m going to Africa, if you want to come?’”
Initially, Poole refused. As the first in his family to go to college, he had only two years left before he could receive a degree in structural engineering. He knew that skipping Spring Quarter of his sophomore year to run away to Africa would not sit well with his parents — not just because it would put him behind academically, but because exploring Sudan would be no walk in the park.
“My mom told me ‘No way,’ and she started crying,” Poole said. “And my dad, who was in Vietnam, just told me, ‘No way; you’re not going to someplace like Vietnam where they hate Americans.’ From the outside, for my parents, [Africa] looks like a huge hotbed of conflict. They were really, really scared for me.”
With a tough decision on his hands, Poole said he turned to god for an answer.
“I told my mom, ‘I just need a sign from god, Mom. I need a sign from god,”’ Poole said. “A couple weeks pretty much affirmed that I wasn’t going to go, because I didn’t receive a sign from god. I just told the guys: ‘Hey, I don’t know. I’m just not going to make a decision. Unless something instrumental happens in my life, I’m not going.’”
Russell and Bailey, however, decided to take matters into their own hands. One morning, months before the intended date of departure, Poole woke up to a very literal calling.
“I got up and my car was parked outside of my house, and there’s a huge black plywood sign on my window that said ‘Go,’” Poole said. “They had broken into my car, and in there was a little envelope inside. It said: ‘This is the sign. You’d better go.’ My mom started crying immediately, because she saw my face and she knew I had made up my mind to go right there. They still haven’t told me how they broke into my car.”
The trio set off on March 20, 2003 — the same day, coincidentally, the Iraq War officially began. They intended to spend a couple months filming the effects of the civil war in Sudan, after flying into Kenya and crossing the border however they could.
However, they soon discovered that most of the Southern Sudanese people had fled across the border to Uganda — so, after a few days of filming shrubs and fighting snakes, Poole, Bailey and Russell made their way south. A woman named Jolly Okot took on the role of guide, driving them to the town of Gulu — where they first spotted hundreds of children sleeping in a bus park — and helping them befriend some of the boys there.
When Poole got back, he was 60 pounds lighter (due to a bad case of malaria) but more than ready to piece together the hours of footage he’d collected. In the end, though, it took them an entire year complete the documentary.
“I was trying to tell people about this experience, but it wasn’t doing it justice,” Poole said. “People just didn’t understand it. I didn’t blame them; it sounds like a nightmare. So then, after a year, they got to see what I’d seen and what I’d experienced. That was really important for me: for them to know why I’d changed, and why I’ve committed my life to it.”
Poole left UCSD at the end of his junior year to devote his time to Invisible Children, which aids African communities in their fight against the LRA. Since his original trip to Africa, Poole has returned over 20 times in hopes of capturing all untold stories that might remain. His current focus is on recent LRA activity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where villagers in the northeast have seen daily attacks for the past three months.
“When you flip on the news, you don’t get any kind of compelling stories from the rest of the world,” Poole said. “Hollywood doesn’t focus on it. Your everyday, average American — the only thing they hear about the rest of the world is a guilt trip asking them for money. There are some really amazing things going on, and these are really powerful stories about tragedy and people overcoming all kinds of odds. I would love to find a way for those kinds of stories to meet mainstream culture.”
A followup to “Invisible Children: The Rough Cut” is currently in the works. The feature-length film, which they hope to release within the year, will combine footage from the original excursion with new material shot at protests and return trips. It will also add a new focus on the personal development of Poole, Bailey and Russell during their travels.
In fact, Poole said his decision to accept the invitation to speak at graduation was partly inspired by the personal reflection he did while putting the film together.
“When you’re writing your own story, you kind of reflect on the decisions of the past,” Poole said. “Leaving school was one of the hardest, biggest decisions of my life, so when I was called by UCSD to come speak, it just felt right — coming back and sharing what I’ve been doing for the last seven years.”
That doesn’t mean he’s planning on completing his degree anytime soon. The structural-engineering major — chosen in part by Poole’s father, mostly for its profitability — no longer fits into his identity as a humanitarian worker. For now, he said, the war comes first.
“I know a lot of these kids are scared about getting a job, and they’re wondering, ‘What am I going to be now?’” Poole said. “We need them to create their own path. We don’t need them to go work in these huge bureaucratic institutions; we need new institutions, we need new ideas, new companies. I want to share that message of how it’s hard — I’ve been there — but ultimately, it’s more rewarding. This world needs trailblazers.”
Readers can contact Hayley Bisceglia-Martin at [email protected].
