Readers were moved by her story and the photograph of her. They wanted to help. And so began efforts to bring her here for medical treatment she could not get at home.
Yesterday, hours before Christmas Eve began, those efforts culminated in her arrival.
"I feel all right. I am happy," she said in Acholi, her native language, as Odongkara interpreted.
She didn't say she was overwhelmed; words weren't necessary.
It showed in how she would not let go of Odongkara, a 71-year-old who is like a grandmother to her and who will be her medical guardian here.
It showed in how she would not get too close to that towering, sparkling Christmas tree at Terminal A west, and how her wounded eyes glistened with tears.
It showed in how the thin girl in a T-shirt and knit pants fiddled with a soft, stuffed toy dog that Odongkara's daughter-in-law had just given her.
Jennifer has lived her entire life amid a conflict that trains its brutality directly on the children of this east Africa nation, a conflict that the world barely has noticed.
Officials of the U.N. children's agency UNICEF and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs have called the war in northern Uganda one of the most ignored humanitarian crises in the world.
That's the truth.
For 19 years, children have been caught between the government forces of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and the Lord's Resistance Army, led by a man named Joseph Kony.
It's not clear why Museveni and his government forces have been unable to protect civilians in the north. Fuzzier still is what Kony, who fancies himself a prophet, seeks to gain.
