“Education is my mother and my father.” This African saying reveals the strength and suffering of an estimated 20,000 young boys driven from their homes in southern Sudan, Africa, in the late 1980s, during the country’s violent civil war. Separated from their parents’many of whom were killed’and suffering from thirst and hunger, they walked barefoot across 1,000 miles to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. They became known as the “Lost Boys,” and 3,800 of them were eventually relocated to the United States through the efforts of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Three of those boys’now in their mid-20s’have told their story in a book entitled “They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky.” Living near San Diego, they are pursuing their dreams of getting an education’a way to reconstruct their identities. One of the authors, Alephonsion Deng, spoke about his journey and assimilation in the U.S. at Palisades Charter High School on March 29. His visit was organized by Human Rights Watch Student Task Force representatives from PaliHi as part of their efforts to further understand the ongoing conflict in Sudan’currently in the Darfur region of western Sudan. “I was used to a life of escaping bullets and taking care of myself,” Deng told the large crowd of students and teachers who gathered to hear him speak in Mercer Hall. He was only 7 years old in 1989 when northern government troops attacked his village and he began his journey across the war-ravaged country. He walked for five years, stopping at refugee camps, before finally reaching a camp in Kenya where he lived for nearly a decade on a half cup of cornmeal a day. “It wasn’t enough, but it was enough to keep me from dying and starving to death,” he said of the meager portion. Deng told of an earlier time in a camp when he did think he was going to starve to death. He saw a woman preparing some grain and, when she wouldn’t let him have any, he began to pick up the pieces that had fallen into the fire'”like a chicken on the floor,” he said. She kicked the granules out of his hand and asked him questions like where his parents were, which he could not answer. He understood that the woman’s own children had died. “War doesn’t have any boundaries between who’s a child and who’s an adult,” Deng said. “This war is taking everybody.” When one student asked how he dealt with the everyday pain of walking without food or water, Deng said he had to get used to it. “I didn’t want to lag behind because some of the boys left behind were left to die.” According to the book, half of them did die before the others reached the Kenyan refugee camp. Many of their sisters were sold into slavery and taken to northern Sudan. Deng said the UN aid workers would follow them to camps and give them food, which is how some of them survived. But he believes that what really kept him going was the basic education he received in the Kenyan refugee camp, where he started studying English. After a long application and interview process, he was chosen, along with his brother and cousins, to come to the United States. They arrived in San Diego in 2001. “It was frustrating for them that first year,” said Judy Bernstein, chair of the advisory committee of the San Diego International Rescue Committee and co-founder of the IRC Lost Boys Education Fund, who mentored Deng as well as his brother and cousins. “The hard part was assimilation and learning the [American] ways.” Deng said that in his first job in the States, as a bag boy at Ralphs, “customers would get upset because I put the meat together with the soap.” He explained how, even though he could move quickly in Sudan when he needed to go from one camp to another or defend himself, “I couldn’t move very fast in an American, modern-day grocery store.” He found that speaking about and writing his story helped him mentally and emotionally. “I think it is important for my self-esteem to be able to tell the stories,” Deng told the Palisadian-Post. “I think if I’m helping myself, than I’m helping other people.” Bernstein, who assisted the three young men in developing their stories and structuring the book, agreed. “Most of our [U.S.] veterans keep it inside,” she said. She added, “I thought their writing was exceptional’it had a lyrical quality.” The book was published in May 2005 by Public Affairs. Deng currently attends San Diego City College and works in the Medical Records Department at Kaiser Permanente Hospital. “I take the challenges day by day,” Deng said, adding that the hardest thing for him now is adjusting to having a schedule’getting up and going to school. In Sudan, his life was precarious, and he continually had to move from place to place. He recently took a pantomime class, another artistic form of self-expression that he said helped him “get back to what it was like when I was a kid.” Deng said that every time he speaks to an audience about his experiences in Sudan, “it feels different.” But the message is the same: to spread peace. “Peace has never existed in my world,” he told a group of Student Task Force representative who gathered around him after his talk. “We should take our peace [here] and place it over there.” But the war in Darfur, Sudan is complicated. Unlike the north v. south/Arabs v. blacks/Muslims v. Christians conflict of which Deng is a victim, the conflict in Darfur pits Muslims against Muslims. The enemy is the Sudanese government, which has backed Janjaweed militia troops that are attacking and killing civilians. More than two million people have been displaced and are living in refugee camps in Darfur and Chad, which borders Darfur to the west. When one student asked if Deng feels angry towards other governments that are not doing anything to help the people of Sudan, he replied, “I feel angry towards my own government.” Deng admitted that while he likes to read the newspaper, he does not like to read the articles about the war in Iraq or the few that appear about the conflict in Darfur, which the United States has labeled a genocide. “It’s the political perspective. I don’t think they really know what is the bottom line,” he said, referring to how the war is affecting civilians, especially the women and the children. “All I know is we are the ones who get caught in between.”
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