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!

Come Back to Sudan is a 29 minute documentary about the return of 3 Lost Boys of Sudan to their home village, Duk Payuel. Duk Payuel is also Joseph's home village, and this group returned to Sudan in January of 2008--they slept in the tents we left!

Their film just showed at the Aspen Film Fest.