English 8 JRA

Sudan has been involved in civil war fueled by religious, ethnic and regional strife since the mid-1980s. Thousands of children have experienced mind-numbing horrors and intense hardship. Their story has been dubbed the Lost Boys of Sudan because they arrived at Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya without parents.

The name, borrowed from the children's story "Peter Pan," describes a generation of Sudanese boys driven from their tribal villages by a devastating civil war between north and south Sudan.

are from the various tribes of Southern Sudan and most are orphans. Approximately 26,000 Sudanese boys were forced by violence from their southern Sudan villages in the late 1980s.

In Southern Sudan more than 90% of the population of the south live on less than $1 a day.

On-going conflicts continue to affect thousands of people in both Sudan and South Sudan. Half of South Sudan's 9.7 million people do not have enough to eat. The price of food and fuel has reached unprecedented levels, and refugees continue to flee fighting on the border with Sudan.

Dengdit or Deng, is the sky god of rain and fertility, empowered by Nhialic who is the supreme being of all gods. Deng's mother is Abuk, the patron goddess of gardening and all women, represented by a snake. Garang is believed or assumed by some Dinka as the suppressed god below Deng, whose spirits can cause most Dinka women, and some men, to scream.

Garang and Abuk, living on earth, had to be careful not to dig too deeply or strike too roughly when planting crops, because Divinity (living in the heavens) might be disturbed. One day, Abuk, who was greedy, decided she wanted to plant or pound more than the allotted amount of grain. She took a long-handled hoe (which the Dinka use today) and when she raised it up, she accidentally hit Divinity. The god withdrew from earth, offended, into the sky, and sent a small blue bird (atoc) to sever the rope which men could previously climb to reach the heavens.

The first human beings, usually called Garang and Abuk, living on earth had to take care when they were doing their little planting or pounding, lest a hoe or a pestle should strike Divinity, but one day the woman 'because she was greedy' (in this context any Dinka would view her 'greed' indulgently) decided to plant (or pound) more than the permitted grain of millet. In order to do so she took one of the long-handled hoes (or pestles) which the Dinka now use. In raising this pole to pound or cultivate, she struck Divinity who withdrew, offended, to present great distance from the earth, and sent a small blue bird (the colour od the sky) called atoc to sever the rope which had previously given the men access to the sky and to him. Since that time the country has been 'spoilt', for men have to labour for the food they need, and are often hungry. They can no longer as before freely reach Divinity, and they suffer sickness and death, which thus accompany their abrupt separation from Divinity.[16]

It is a direct consequence of the five-year war between Khartoum in the north and the Dinka-dominated Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south - and more especially the government's conduct in that conflict.

Armed tribal militias, used by Khartoum to counter SPLA advances, are accused of raiding Dinka villages in northern Bahr el Ghazal, southern Darfur and Kordofan.

and the militia is rewarded with the booty that it seizes - from goods and livestock to slaves.

Marko Akot Deng Akot

I had to look after the cattle, goats and sheep. I was only given left-overs to eat and sometimes nothing at all. One day, a cow went missing and I was beaten so badly that my right arm and leg are paralysed

My abductor, Khalil, treated me very well. I only had to fetch the water.

One 12 year old boy, Yak, told of how he'd been kidnapped from his village by Arab raiders the year before and enslaved on a farm in the north of Matar.  He told the story of how on a day he had been too sick to work, his master chopped off all the fingers on one of his hands as punishment.

We had agreed that we would include in the book an ancient creation myth known in southern Sudan. In the story, God, pleased with his greatest creation, offers the first Dinka man a choice of gifts: on the one hand, the cattle, visible and known, an animal that can feed and clothe him and last for ever; on the other hand, the What. The man asks God, "What is the What?", but God will not reveal the answer. The What was unknown; the What could be everything or nothing. The Dinka man does not hesitate for long. He chooses the cattle, and for thousands of years Dinka lore held that he had chosen correctly; the cow is thus sacred in southern Sudanese culture, the measure of a family's wealth and the giver of life.It was not until the torment of the southern Sudanese in the 20th century that the Dinka began to question this choice. What was the What, they wondered, and speculation about the answer abounded: was it technology? Education? Sophisticated weapons? Whatever the answer, it was assumed that the Arabs of the north - who, legend had it, had received the What - might have got the greatest of God's gifts, and were using this What to inflict unending pain upon the southern Sudanese.

“if you marry an individual, you also marry the extended family as well.”

"Cattle are their dearest possession and they gladly risk their lives to defend their herds or to pillage those of their neighbors." Francis Madding Deng notes the same sort of love for cattle by the Dinka: "A Dinka will kill and even risk his life for a single cow."

In Ngok Dinka cultures, koor (bedtime stories) combine stories about humans and animals to elucidate social taboos,

Contemporary art works pay particular attention to the devastation caused by famine, civil wars, religious conflicts and ethnic divisions.

One evening late in January, a 21-year-old named Peter Dut led his two teenage brothers through the brightly lighted corridors of the Minneapolis airport, trying to mask his confusion.

What is remarkable about the Lost Boys, who were named after Peter Pan's posse of orphans, is that they arrived in throngs, having been homeless and parentless for the better part of five years.

As a group, they covered in the neighborhood of 1,000 miles, from Sudan to Ethiopia, Ethiopia back to Sudan and finally to Kenya -- a slow-moving column of mostly children that stretched for miles across the equatorial wilderness. The majority of the boys belonged to the Dinka or Nuer tribes, and most were then between the ages of 8 and 18. (Most of the boys don't know for sure how old they are; aid workers assigned them approximate ages after they arrived in 1992.) As Red Cross and United Nations relief workers scrambled to find shelter for them, the boys -- which is how they all, regardless of age, refer to one another -- described an almost unfathomable journey.

are forced into in government "peace camps" - where they become internees, but not slaves.