"After I tell my story, I do not want you to fear me," a former child soldier of Joseph Kony tells Prince Philip and his guests at a function at St James's Palace.
Jonathan Okwir, who was abducted to serve under Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), has become the poster boy for rehabilitated child soldiers.
He served for a little more than a year, killing hundreds of Ugandan soldiers, before he escaped and returned home to rejoin his family and eventually tell his story to the world.
His uplifting but, at times, sad story is told in the Foxtel special The Road to Freedom Peak on the Bio channel on March 5.
The first scene shows the 19-year-old being coached on how to address the Duke Of Edinburgh at the International Awards Ceremony in London, and then there are the opening words of his speech.
Australian journalist and former fashion model Corrin Varady found Okwir when he volunteered to teach orphaned and disadvantaged children in the African Great Lakes region.
In the documentary, the pair travel from the border of Uganda and Sudan to Freedom Peak, at the top of Mt Kilimanjaro.
Along the way, they meet hundreds of villagers, and among them are dozens of former child soldiers.
Varady's crusade is part of his investment in the World Youth Education Trust, which helps returned child soldiers and their families.
He says the viral clip about Kony, titled Kony 2012, raised awareness of the atrocities being committed in Africa, but did not necessarily serve those affected by the LRA.
"This is the first corrective documentary since that (Kony 2012) came out," Varady tells AAP.
"They didn't really voice what the young child soldiers needed and where they were in their lives.
"We see this as voicing the truth about what is happening with this generation of returned child soldiers."
Varady says Okwir surrendered to the Ugandan defence force after a battle in which his own commander was shot and killed.
Child soldiers who surrender and co-operate with the army are given amnesty, he says.
"As long as they lay down their gun and machete, the defence force will take them in and interrogate them about the rebel army," Varady says.
"Then under the Geneva accord, they are granted amnesty for their act and we make sure we get amnesty certificates so never in the future are they tried for war crimes."
Varady says an estimated 5000 returned child soldiers where Okwir lives require assistance to readjust, and there are possibly 40,000 similar cases across East Africa.
He says former child soldiers require counselling, but rather than try to bring closure to their acts, the focus is on forging a future.
Varady says many of the children will never forget the actions they were ordered to perform, which sometimes included killing their own family members.
"We've got a lot of our kids who have killed their own parents because it's part of an initiation by the rebels so they are cut off," he says.
"There's not a lot you can do to process that, so we spend a lot of our time creating self-esteem programs.
"It's really a distraction in lots of ways, because developing a future helps them overcome past thoughts."
* The Road to Freedom Peak airs on Wednesday, March 5, at 8.30pm on Foxtel's Bio channel.
