Working at the Interface: Dr. Kevin Brooks

Deb Dawson, ASAH Producer, sent out this message on Friday:

Dear Friends of African Soul, American Heart,

Please join me in congratulating Joseph Akol Makeer on his graduation today from North Dakota State University where he earned a degree in Criminal Justice. You will probably agree that this is an extraordinary accomplishment for a 31-year-old man who spent his childhood trying to survive by escaping his war-torn country of South Sudan, who learned to read as a teen in a refugee camp, and who came to Fargo, North Dakota in September of 2003. In only 4 1/2 years since that day, he has earned a college degree, written a book, and inspired a group of talented people to help him tell the story of those who continue to suffer in his country and his desire to help the orphans there.

I am proud to announce African Soul, American Heart is now incorporated and our non-profit status is pending approval. Our board of directors is actively putting together information about costs for building materials, supplies, labor, and staffing so that we might build an orphan center in Duk Payuel, South Sudan, the village Joseph left as a ten-year-old.

Our film director and editor will be working hard over the summer to edit our documentary. We hope to have a rough cut by the end of August and a finished product by November. African Soul, American Heart (the movie) will be available then for showings and to submit to film festivals around the country to help us generate interest and funds to support these children who have no one to care for them.

For more information about our project and to VIEW A 3 MINUTE EXCERPT of our documentary, check our website.

______

To add a personal note, yesterday, as I was driving my Sudanese friend Joseph home from graduation, we heard this NPR story about Lost Boy Emmanuel Jal, now a successful musician. As Jal was describing walking to Ethiopia, then back to Sudan, and living through those incredibly difficult years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I turned to Joseph and said, "can you believe that you were there, too, and now you are here, in Fargo ND, a graduate of NDSU?" He said he couldn't believe it. I still can't believe it.

I heard an interesting story this morning about the murder and legacy of the Congo's first leader of the postcolonial era, Patrice Lumumba. I don't know much about Lumumba yet, but a documentary about him looks like a good place to start. Yesterday, as I was driving my Sudanese friend Joseph home from graduation, we heard this NPR story about Lost Boy Emmanuel Jal, now a successful musician.

Thanks to the more or less anonymous comment two posts ago, I just discovered the inaugural issue of MediaTropes is devoted to McLuhan: "Marshall McLuhan's 'Medium is the Message': Information Literacy in a Multimedia Age." Great contributors, good looking articles = lots of reading.

Through my involvement with Friends of the Congo, I learn about initiatives and petitions like this one, seeking to pressure the State Dept. to play a more aggressive diplomatic role in getting Rwanda out of the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. I met and have gotten to know Martin Buhendwa and his family; Congolese refugees who have been living in Kakuma, Kenya (the UNHCR

Crunch time this week--4Cs proposals due this Friday. I'm at a point where I need to propose something I haven't quite started yet, so a few different ideas are floating around blogosphere. Conference theme: Making Waves. 1. War and Peace and the Global Village. I have been wanting to do something with this text for a while, and I am doing a seminar in the fall WPGV: Rhetorical Acts Post 9/11

A student of a friend of mine analyzed my blog for an assignment and came to the conclusion that I never blog on more than one idea at a time. I think that was a nice way of saying my blog is boring, so tonight, two ideas! Wait, not really ideas, just links. John Walters used the phrase "OHM Thesis," to refer to the Ong, Havelock, McLuhan thesis that, in McLuhan terms, boils down to "the

I've moved from being director of first-year writing to being director of upper division writing, and I am working on a pilot assessment procedure. Our department has expanded its 300 level offerings considerably, and we don't have a history of assessing these types of courses. I'm working from Bob Broad's What We Really Value and trying to craft a procedure that will work for our situation.

Joseph was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota to attend an event with John Dau and Moses Jokhnial. Moses lives in Watertown SD and is working on a raising funds to build a school in his home village in Sudan. It is not often Joseph is the shortest person in a photograph!

I just discovered Valentino Achak Deng's Google Book talk on YouTube. He is the subject of Dave Egger's What is the What and does a nice job of telling his story--much like Joseph's--in a succinct, powerful, and occasionally humorous way.

Ron Saeger and Joseph spent about 3 hours at B. Dalton in Fargo on Saturday and had a good day of sales and visiting with well-wishers. They spent Sunday in Watertown SD and Monday in Sioux Falls with John Dau promoting other Sudanese aid projects.

I just discovered Valentino Achak Deng's Google Book talk on YouTube. He is the subject of Dave Egger's What is the What and does a nice job of telling his story--much like Joseph's--in a succinct, powerful, and occasionally humorous way.

Ron Saeger, an ASAH Board of Director, has been doing some great research on Sudan and turned up this startling video and report from Doctors without Borders, Dying in Peace: The Ongoing Emergency in Southern Sudan.

The influx of Sudanese returning to the country with so little infrastructure in place is putting a tremendous strain on the returnees as well as the aid organizations trying to help them make the transition.

The new education has to take the form of training of perception instead of learning lists of concepts, so that we equip our young to navigate through entire fields of information. This is to train explorers and innovators, intellectual and cultural nomads rather than sedentary bureaucrats. Eric McLuhan, "One Wheel, All Square."

This semester has been a struggle for me, and as much as I would like to blame various factors, I have started to realize all the ways I have failed to be a teacher with a pedagogy or a plan. I need to remember: 1. Don’t just assign writing, teach it. 2. Don’t just cover material, interact with it. 3. Don’t just teach the course, teach the students. 4. Get the students to teach; they learn

1. Fathers Playing YuGiOh with Sons. 2. Run Over by The Ambulance. 3. Why Southern Sudan Still Matters. 4. Ulmer McLuhanized--an essai concrete. If only summer would come.

Joseph will be signing books from 12-3 pm on Saturday April 26th at the B. Dalton store in the West Acres Shopping Mall, Fargo ND. Come out and visit with Joseph; buy a book if you don't already have a copy, or think of three friends who need to read it!

The Barnes and Noble signing last Saturday, April 12th, went well.

John Dau, Joseph's cousin and good friend to ASAH, will be in South Dakota doing at least two events: Friday the 25th in Watertown and Monday the 28th in Sioux Falls.

Nicholas Kristof's opinion piece in the New York Times lays out 8 steps the Bush Administration should take to help not only Darfur, but, as Mr. Kristof says, "Save Sudan." A little over a month ago Kristof started to broaden his view (and his readers' view) on Sudan; the crisis is most visible and deadly in Darfur (western Sudan), but the North-South tensions have returned after only 3 years of peace.

Southern Sudan desperately needs piece. Various aid projects grounded in the US are gaining momentum, but they will not be realized if fighting in the south resumes.

Bill Moyer's Journal covered the rebuilding efforts in The Democratic Republic of the Congo. Southern Sudan faces many of the same challenges--lack of infrastructure, few jobs, no reliable food source, etc. What really stood out for me, and something that I have heard from Joseph and others in southern Sudan, is that life was good before the wars. People had enough food, kids were going to

Bill Moyer's Journal covered the rebuilding efforts in The Democratic Republic of the Congo. Southern Sudan faces many of the same challenges--lack of infrastructure, few jobs, no reliable food source, etc. What really stood out for me, and something that I have heard from Joseph and others in southern Sudan, is that life was good before the wars. People had enough food, kids were going to school, progress was being made and it was being made by the people of Sudan and the DRC. Joseph remembers a good life before the Sudanese Civil war of 1983-2005. Valentino Deng in What is the What describes a good life in his Sudanese village before the war. My Congolese friend Martin says life was good for him, he was going to school, his father had earned a Master's degree and was gainfully employed before the family was forced out of the Congo in 1999. I fear that many in the west assume these African countries are always at war within and among themselves; I fear that many in the west assume life has always been and will always be difficult in Africa, but that isn't an accurate perception. The wars disrupt everything, they destroy everything.

A very good story about a Sudanese man who left Bor with his family when he was 10, stayed in Pochalla for about 6 months, and then moved to Pinyudo for 3 years. From there, his story looks like the Lost Boy story, except he was never resettled to the US, and in November 2007, at age 29, returned to Bor with his family.

What's particularly interesting here is that it describes whole families moving out of the Bor area to Pochalla--different than the typical Lost Boy story. Pinyudo, I have read, had 40,000 or more refugees, about half of them unattended minors.

Today at the Red River Conference on World Literature, I heard Jason Owens of SDSU present on the GDR Kids of Namibia, a group (about 140 I think he said) of Namibian children who were relocated from a refugee camp in Namibia to East Berlin in the late 1970s. They were educated in Germany, became known as the GDR kids, and returned to Namibia when the government there changed and the Berlin Wall fell (almost simultaneously).

The parallels with the Lost Boys of Sudan story were interesting, although the GDR kids were much younger when they left Africa. Jason told me afterward that the kids did become "media darlings" a bit like the Lost Boys have become, but the name has proved problematic, as these kids are now well into adulthood.

Surprisingly little on the Web about this group--the one book about them is very expensive, and Jason's conference presentations show up, but not even a Wikipedia entry!