The Lost Boys of the Sudan

Posted by Sappho on May 15th, 2005 filed in News and Commentary, Peace Testimony

A “Lost Boy” came to speak to my Quaker meeting today. Actually, they’re not boys any more, but young men. But they were only small boys when they had to walk away from their villages in the Sudan in 1987.

Benson Dane was seven at the time. He heard talk of the civil war, but at first ignored it, thinking the fighting was only for adults. Then his mother told him that they might be coming to his village, and, if they did, he was to run away from the house and hide. And so it happened one night. He heard guns, and ran, wearing only his underwear. He hid and watched his village burn.

A man of his tribe (Dinka), accompanied by a small child, found him, and together they set out walking. In another village, he saw his five-year-old cousin, who had also fled, and been separated from his family. Benson Dane wanted to go home and find his family, but the adult who had found him told him his only hope of seeing his family again was to keep walking away, till he got to a place that was safe. Soon he was one of thousands of refugees, many of them young boys like himself (including his younger brother and some cousins), all walking to Ethiopia. Rebel troops gave them a ride part of the way.

In Ethiopia, they lived in refugee camps for three years, but then war came to that country as well, so they had to leave. They walked to the Gila river, where many of them drowned, and then beyond, to Kenya. On the way, they found themselves for a while in a camp where they indeed received food, but could see that they could expect to become child soldiers if they stayed. Benson Dane’s brother got out of that camp by becoming sick with yellow fever; the sick boys were sent off to a refugee camp. The well had to escape themselves. He escaped with eleven others one night; one of them died on the way to the Kikuma refugee camp in Kenya.

In Kikuma, they were given materials to build houses, and food, but had nothing to do. They organized among themselves and decided to ask for education. When they assembled to demand an education, they were at first rebuffed – wasn’t it enough that they were getting food and shelter? – but they kept asking, and finally UN refugee people came to meet with them. “We have no fathers and mothers, and if we have no education, what else will we be able to do but fight in the war?” they said. And so they got their education.

After they had spent years in the camp in Kenya, the US agreed to accept them as refugees, and the International Rescue Committee began bringing them to the US, as money could be raised. I gather, from the short video we watched before Dane spoke, that some are even now in the refugee camp waiting for their chance. There they are taught about what they can expect in the US, and they watch to see which names will be posted on the board, to immigrate. The IRC arranges transportation and several months rent, after which they will have to work and support themselves (and gradually repay the cost of their air fare).

It was only after he was living in the US that Dane learned that most of his family did escape, and are now refugees in Uganda and Kenya. His father is dead.

There are more “Lost Boys” than girls for a reason: small boys had the job of taking care of the family herd animals. Girls had chores which kept them closer to home. So often, when troops came into the villages, the boys could see from a distance the village burning, and flee. Dane said about 30000 boys had wound up as refugees, and 5000-7000 girls; many girls, instead, wound up as slaves. There has been an effort to buy slaves back, but they are hard to find, for they are scattered, and have lost their own language, knowing only the language of their captors.

Sudan has suffered from civil war for all but ten of the last fifty years. The war that forced Benson Dane to flee his home began in 1983, when the Sudanese government imposed sharia on the Christian south, and the southern Sudanese rebelled. Now a peace agreement been signed, providing for a six year period of autonomy for the south, no sharia to be imposed there, and a referendum on the status of the region at the end of the six years. So now there is a fragile peace in that part of the Sudan, but still much has been wrecked by the war. And war continues in Darfur.

Dane and some others are coming out with a book on their experience in June. There is also a Lost Boys of the Sudan documentary. (I’ll post links to books later.)

Links:

GlobalSecurity.org’s history of the Sudan civil war

International Rescue Committee (and here is their page on the Darfur crisis)

Oxfam on the Sudan crisis

Coalition for Darfur