The wind howled and kicked sand in the air as the crowds lined up to abduct themselves. At 4 o'clock on Saturday, April 25 the march started in Santa Monica from south of the pier all the way up to city hall, about a mile and a half away. At "The Rescue" individuals "abducted" themselves, marched to a designated Lord's Resistance Army Camp (LRA) and waited to be rescued by the 2 necessary things: the Media and a Mogul, or "A" list politician or celebrity. The purpose was to raise awareness and speak out in solidarity against the longest running war in Africa and Joseph Kony, the leader of the LRA who has ruthlessly abducted thousands of children and put them on the front lines of battle. Invisible Children is an amazing organization that has brought awareness and a heart for these child soldiers through incredible use of media, especially facebook and YouTube. Steve Hernandez gave me a call and said "dude, come to this thing on Saturday, i got us on as official photographers". Needless to say, my eyes were opened more to the whole issue and we had a blast.
Here is the abduction site.
Over 4000 people showed up to participate.
What a sea
This is Jason Russell, the founder of Invisible Children.
A filmmaker from USC, he travelled to Uganda and it
changed his life. He is a passionate and gifted man.
It was cool to have him at the Los Angeles site, becuase
there were 100 other cities in 10 different countries
who were participating.
This teacher from Santa Clarita was nicer than he looked.
The volunteer staff did an amazing job of organizing the 4000+
people who came to support the event and abduct themselves.
The March started at 4:00 PM and everyone marched
single-file, holding on to pieces of rope with 10 on each rope.
The sands of santa monica beach.
IC is not a Christian organization, but they certainly run
on biblical principles and a majority of people involved
seemed to be believers.
The stream of people seemed endless!
Once everyone got to the camp it was expected that we
would stay until we were rescued, which could have meant
days. We were rescued early on that night, but Chicago
is still not rescued as I write this and has been camped
out for 3 days.
Everyone who was abducted got a red x on their hand.
Once we got to the campsite they did some filming for
some new media that they will present to congress in
June. Jason was an amazing director, getting incredible
results in no time with a crowd of strangers.
this is the camp from across the street...City Hall in Santa Monica.
Stephen Hernandez. None other.
Filming on the lawn of city hall for the new media.
Kristen Bell was one of our celebrity rescuers. She was great.
Here was KTLA's van.
while we were camped out, we wrote letters to Boxer and
Feinstein to express our concern and empathy for the situation.
Another one of our celebrity rescuers. They said he was
on the O.C., but I didn't know him.
This is another rescuer, the director of Bruce Almighty,
Ace Ventura and several other films.
