Global Night Commute

Sunrise was the culmination of our night. About 700 Baylor students and Waco residents woke before dawn, regardless of when they had fallen asleep - if they slept at all - and gathered at the wall with "Heritage Square" engraved on it. Everyone moved into place as directed by Invisible Children volunteers. Once the crowd stood silent, a volunteer filmed the scene, just as others were filming waking crowds that day in hundreds of cities across the nation and around the world.
The sun eventually broke over Waco's downtown skyline and bathed the whole scene in a golden glow. Sleeping bags, pillows, matted hair and dazed faces - everything lit with morning rays. Our cameraman paused while young people standing on the wall unfurled a sign that spanned the width of the crowd. It read:"We have cried with the invisible children."
According to "Invisible Children: Rought Cut," children in Northern Uganda travel en masse to sleep in urban areas so that the rebels who infest the rural areas won't conscript them, and the Global Night Commute was meant to raise awareness of these children's plight by having participants walk together to a downtown location and sleep there overnight.
The night before, last-minute complications prevented the mass pedestrian transit for Waco, so those organizing the event let a few people at a time walk from the Ferrell Center to Heritage Square via University Parks.
As people trickled in, they claimed their sleeping spaces on the sidewalks or on grass or beside fountains, and used materials dispersed by volunteers to write letters to President Bush and Texas senators, and to decorate Polaroid pictures of themselves (taken by volunteers at the site) to make art projects to send to Ugandan children.
We gathered after a few hours for a group filming similar to the one that would take place in the morning, but most of the evening was spent with friends, playing card games and board games, playing guitar and, in short, enjoying the evening. Our overnight experience didn't resemble the night commutes faced by the children in the documentary, but everyone there hoped that one day the two experiences would be the same, that circumstances would allow the Northern Ugandan children to band together for purpose, camaraderie and joy, and not for a flight from terror.