Lisa Guillen

Invisible Children - The Rescue

The Rescue was this weekend and for those of you who don’t know what it is please visit http://therescue.invisiblechildren.com/



A basic rundown – The Rescue is an Invisible Children event similar to the event they held last year, Displace Me. The purpose is to bring awareness to the lives of child soldiers in Uganda who are abducted and forced to fight for the Lords Resistance Army. Since these kids are basically ripped from their homes and forced to camp out in unimaginable conditions on a daily basis, participants in The Rescue choose to “abduct themselves” for a day (or in some cases longer) in hopes that someone would come save them. Long story short they’re camping out and waiting for a celebrity or congressperson to come to the event and save them, if no one comes to get them they stay there for as long as it takes. (Did I mention they only have the items they can carry on their backs?!) This went on in about 100 cities all over the world.

I found out about the event via Facebook (thanks Melanie) and decided to go. (I’ve always wanted to help out Invisible Children)

Everyone met at Federal Plaza at 3pm to get ready for the march to Grant Park (where they would be staying for the night)

I got there around 3:15 and there was a ton of people there already. (I’d say 1000+) They made us line up in a single file line all holding onto a rope. Everything was going okay until about half way through the march when the rain started to come down and it was coming down hard. I hadn’t seen it rain like that in Chicago in a long time. All the people there were fantastic though and muscled through it all (some people brought umbrellas or rain coats/ponchos, others were soaked head to toe) The rain became non-stop but by the time we got to Grant Park (around 5pm) it kind of died down.



I stayed for about an hour but I was freezing, I didn’t have a tent so I couldn’t hide out and I noticed my backpack was so soaked that it looked like I threw it in Lake Michigan. (An issue that would later result in half ruining my notebook full of notes and discovering a tiny bit of my macbook got wet while in my backpack) So I headed home in hopes of going back in a couple hours.

Anyway, I decided after all was said and done that it probably wouldn’t be smart for me to go back considering everything I could use to keep warm was soaked and the laundromat was closed. Not to mention the only people I knew there that had a tent had decided to go home.

However many kids kept on trucking, waiting for a mogul to arrive and rescue them. The rain didn’t stop and I even heard it hailed for a little bit.

Eventually the area in Grant Park where they were staying got increasingly flooded, the temperature was dropping and the wind wasn’t stopping at all. Many people were going home at this point because they were getting sick/couldn’t take it anymore. The group eventually moved underground to the parking lot near Millennium Park. According to the Invisible Children website the number of people went down to 100 at this point. (Once others who were there before found out that the group went underground the numbers went up to about 400)

Still no one came to save them.

At about 4am the group was told they had to leave the parking garage by the city. What happened to them between then and about 5pm I have no idea. On Sunday at 5 the website confirmed that the group relocated to a church right off the Wilson stop of the Red Line and planned to stay there for the night (or until someone rescued them)

Almost all of the cities that participated had already been rescued and Chicago remained one of only 17 left to still be waiting. Many people (Rescue Riders, as they’re called) decided to travel from other cities near by to Chicago to show their support and help them out. (I just read a tweet about people who are driving from San Francisco to Chicago as we speak)

As of right now I’m not sure of the amount of people at the church. Tomorrow (Monday April 27th) the group plans to meet back at Federal Plaza at 7AM and continue their message there in hopes that a celeb or government official will recognize them.

I will be there bright and early and will update this accordingly.


Here’s a short video I shot while marching -


and here’s the pictures I snapped all compiled into a slideshow for easy viewing