![]() They protected one another, raised one another, and, in the months spent fending off wild animals and enemy soldiers, buried one another. It is a testament, first of all, to the power of the story they have to tell: Forced from their homes by civil war, 33,000 boys from the Dinka and Nuer tribes have lived for 13 years as a virtual city of children wandering across Africa. The decision by the US State Department to resettle 3,800 Sudanese boys across America - in places like Arlington and Fargo and Phoenix and Grand Rapids - seems extraordinary on two levels. ![]() “It was as if they are doing a test on you. “They were afraid,” said Peter Lagad, a 27-year-old who watched the first groups of boys climb aboard in November. Most had never ridden in a motorized vehicle before leaving for America their grandparents, some said later, were not necessarily aware that other countries existed. Heads down, barefoot except for shower thongs, the departing boys file into the aircraft as grave as spacemen, sometimes without even looking back at the friends standing five deep against the barbed wire.Īs far as their tribes are concerned, they may as well be spacemen. The flights to America are leaving every day now, screaming out of the bush in a huge cloud of orange dust, as the great migration of the group known as the Lost Boys of Sudan gets underway. Within hours, however, Deng would be told the name of a place that suggests a landscape without cattle: Arlington, Mass. We believe that in Chicago we will have a lot of bulls,” said Deng, a young man with a gap-toothed smile who speaks a formal English akin to that of a BBC announcer. “I see that on some shirts, like Chicago Bulls. To the son and grandson and great-grandson of cattle herders from the Dinka tribe - men who still sing adoring songs about the horns of their favorite oxen - Chicago has enormous appeal. Albany, New York,” a spot whose distance he estimated at a million, or possibly 2 million, kilometers.Īnd a 17-year-old, John Deng, had his heart set on Chicago, having learned that it is home to an abundance of bulls. Another was enraptured with the idea of Albany, and dreamily repeated the phrase “Albany, New York. An older boy asserted that North Dakota is colder than Nairobi, but this was impossible to confirm. KAKUMA REFUGEE CAMP, Kenya - Here, amid the cracked earth and grizzled acacias of northwestern Kenya, rumors were running rampant about North Dakota.ĭozens of boys crowded around the UN compound where someone, somewhere, held a list of the US cities where they might be offered homes. As they prepared to board their first motorized vehicle for their first airplane flight and their first glimpse of the West, someone taught them a new word: Massachusetts. ![]() On December 17, a dozen teenage boys left mud huts in the Kenyan plain for a new life they could only vaguely imagine.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |