English 8 RKE

It was opened in 1992 to house the 16,000 “lost” girls and boys fleeing the war from Sudan.

home to around 100,000 people

not look like a refugee camp in the movies, with rows of canvas tents ringed by barbed wire

Late last month, his son, James Mun, 19, was gunned down in an empty lot on Omaha's gritty north side, as he drank beer with a group of friends early one Saturday morning. Police have made no arrests in the case.

Mun's murder is the grim consequence of a rising tide of youth and gang violence afflicting Sudanese refugees in the U.S., who have settled mainly in Nebraska, Iowa and other Midwest states. From weekend brawls to shootings and robberies, young Sudanese are victims and victimizers, ending up in hospital beds, behind bars -- or dead.

The agency described African Pride, which began in Omaha but has spread to Lincoln and other Midwest cities with Sudanese refugee populations, as the "most aggressive and dangerous" of the gangs.

It is quiet in the small, sparsely furnished walk-up apartment off Main Street in Manchester, NH. Michael sits on a low stool, leaning forward slightly, his hands clasped tightly together. Asked to describe his long journey to the United States, he speaks quietly, almost in a whisper at times, and with great care.

The oldest son of a vendor in the village’s open air market, Michael and his family enjoyed a quiet life until civil war broke out anew in 1983. In 1989, roaming pro-Government Islamic militias called Marahallin raided Michael’s town in search of rebels and rebel sympathizers. In a series of home raids, militias killed an uncle and two of Michael’s aunts. Later, they returned and murdered his father in the town’s market.

Then the Marahallin came for Michael and the rest of his family. Arriving at his house late at night, the militias took Michael, his mother, and brother away at gunpoint. They were beaten and crammed into buses which drove them to the north. Days later, they militia men forced them from the buses at a roadside where a group of local men waited. It was a slave market and Michael and his mother and brother were separated and sold as slaves to the highest bidder.

David was born in Wau, one of the largest cities in South Sudan and the capital of Western Bahr al Ghazal state. He was only three years old when he and his father fled the brutal killings of the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005), leaving his pregnant mother, who could not walk with them, behind. Having his childhood disrupted at such a young age, David has few memories of what it was like living together as a family. He remembers happily waiting for his father to come home from work, because he always brought him lollies. H

The long journey to Australia started when David was three and ended when he was twenty-two. After they fled from Wau, David and his father walked for two months to a refugee camp in Ethiopia. David remembers the harsh journey with lack of food and water and bodies scattered alongside the road; his father told him they were “sleeping”. They spent four years in a refugee camp in Ethiopia until they were “kicked out” because of the Ethiopian Civil War. No option remained, but to walk back to Sudan. However, the situation there was still volatile and after a year of languishing in open armed conflict, David and his friends headed for Kenya. By the time David reached Kakuma refugee camp, it was 1992, he was about ten years old and without any family.

He spent 13 years in the Kenyan refugee camp with other South Sudanese boys orphaned or separated from their families by the war – this group later became known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. David’s friends were all he had and they became very close during these insecure years. In 2001, the US Government resettled many of the “Lost Boys”, but David missed out.

John Bul Dau: Dau, 32, is a Sudanese native who fled his country as a 13-year-old in 1987 to escape civil war. For the next five years he wandered 1,000 miles, barefoot, to Ethiopia, back to Sudan, then to Kenya, dodging ambushes, massacres and wild animal attacks. He lived in a Kenyan refugee camp for nine years before being selected for immigration to the United States in 2001.

While working 60 hours a week as a security guard, he completed an associate degree at Onondaga Community College and is currently studying for a bachelor’s degree at Syracuse University

au was recently named director of Sudan projects for Direct Change, an organization formed to fund health care and education for vulnerable children in Africa.

The superior nature of the Northern identity is not only embedded by the conduct of Islamic religion and Arab race, but also history played a major role in widening this gap between the North and the South.

According to this framework, the key to stability in Sudan lies through the centre, which is the North, even though the CPA is promising for Sudan’s national democratic transformation, it seems to appear as a recipe for future instability in Sudan.

he crucial point to get across is not to talk of the probability or the possibility of war, but to make all the Sudanese realise that whatever the outcome of the referendum, good working relations between North and South will be essential if the country is not to slip back into war and chaos.”

seated in the small one room dir- floor, mud-wall tukul. One bed and a few mats are on the floor.

a wall of heat. It is an unwanted companion that never leaves you.

At one time, before the UN came here (because of the civil war in Sudan), Kakuma was nothing but a little trading center for local nomadic tribes.

Most of the Lost Boys have post-traumatic stress disorder, said David Berceli, an Arizona State University doctoral candidate researching PTSD. He has worked with some of the estimated 500 Sudanese refugees who settled here as well as some Lost Boys on the East Coast.

"They've been in the U.S. five years. Naturally, it's trying to surface; they're having difficulty," Berceli said, adding that some are drinking and engaging in unhealthy activities.

When they were brought here, much was done to help the "poor boys" who had suffered so much, he said. "That's gone, that's faded . . . society has moved on."