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You can hear them if you listen carefully: perhaps a lilting tune, some good-natured sibling jostling and the low murmur of excitement. Soon they come into view. Children, some one-hundred eighteen—with crisp navy uniforms and outfitted with bright socks and new shoes on feet unused to being enclosed—are converging on the village road that leads to a beacon of hope in Gulu, northern Uganda. These children are attending school, many for the first time, and they are proud and enthusiastic to call Christ the Center Ministries Primary and Nursery School their school. Even the word "school" doesn't connect with what these children (many fatherless and barely surviving with their mothers as part of an outcast society in an already impoverished area) have been told their future holds. Their vision has been marred by war, haunting nightmares, gnawing tummies, racial taunts.

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