Mosley writes as follows:
" Try to imagine a catastrophe that drives thousands of small children out across the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. Imagine more than 20,000 of them--most six, eight ten years old--wandering for years, covering a thousand miles, some preyed upon by wild animals, others hunted down and killed by soldiers. Picture a huge camp in which the half who survive live in a city of children, huddled in brush and mud shelters they built themselves to escape the scorching heat of the desert sun.
This is not the plot of a Hollywood horror film. Such a cataclysm happened, not in the southwestern United States, but in northeastern Africa. Many of its survivors are still in a United Nations camp today, more than two decades later. In the wilderness of Northwestern Kenya, visitied by dust storms and drought, plagued by malnutrition and malaria, the Kakuma camp has been home to 70,000 refugees from several African nations. The Lost Boys of Sudan have been its most renowned residents.
["How did they get there?" You may ask.]
Among the Dinkas and other southern tribes, it is the custom for sons to spend much of their time tending cattle out in the bus while their parents and sisters remain at home. So it was that in 1987, countless boys watched in horror from a distance as planes swooped down and dropped bombs on their villages in southern Sudan. In many cases, northern Sudanese troops then laid siege, shooting the surviving men and enslaving women and girls.
The attacks wiped out one village after another and orphaned thousands of boys. Word spread among them that they could find safety in neighboring Ethiopia so that the rebel soldiers could recruit or kidnap them into their ranks and send them back into Sudan to fight the northern Sudanese troops.
Thousands of boys headed through wilderness toward the Gilo River on the border, often with hostile soldiers in pursuit. Terrified, the children had to hide like wild animals to survive. After they arrived in Ethiopia, a change in that country's government closed the door on them, and they were forced back to Sudan. As they tried to recross the river, many drowned, some were killed by crocodiles, and others were shot by Ethiopian soldiers.
Those who survived were forced a few months later by northern Sudanese soldiers to flee once more for their lives. This time they headed south to Kenya. After many more hardships, the weak, exhausted, half-starved children were allowed to settle in Kakuma camp. Kakuma is Swahili for "nowhere".
Sudan is the largest country in Africa, equal in size to the United States east of the Mississippi River. Thirty million people are scattered over its considerable area. The country's longest civil war has been one of the bloodiest conflicts since World War II, claiming the lives of 2 million people and displacing more than twice that many.
As in most wars, the conflict has multiple causes, with religion and race being major contributing factors. More than two-thirds of the Sudanese are Sunni Muslims. Most of the people in northern Sudan are light-skinned Muslim Arabs, whle those in south and west are predominantly dark skinned Africans. Between 1 and 2 million southern Sudanese are Christisans, but several time that many practice indigenous religions.
The civil war [in Sudan and elsewhere] is not as simple as a conflict between Muslims and Christians, as some have characterized it. it is true that the present national leaders in Khartoum are Islamic fundamentalists, led by President Oma al-Bahsir, who has the distinction of being the first sitting head of state ever to be formally charaged with genocided by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. But in recent years , the conflict in Sudan has shifted largely from the southern to the western part of the country, where the dark-skinned Muslims of Darfur are suffering from the brutality of the Khartoum government. Omar al-Bashir has carried out his murderous policies against Muslims as well as Christians.
In 1999, U.S. authorities agreed to resettle 3,600 of the Lost Boys as political refugees in the United States. Early in 2001, we welcomed our first two to Jubilee. One turned out not to be a "lost boy at all, but a teenage girl! Sarah Solomon arrived with her older brother, Emmanuel. She was only six years old when the two of them had been forced to begin their thousand-mile struggle for survival.
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Seventeen more Lost Boys arrived in the spring of 2001. Most were no longer boys, but young men, though their exact ages and birth dates were lost in their exodus from Sudan. U.S. immigration officials guessed at their ages and assigned January 1 as their universal birthday. Their stories are among the most dramatic we've ever heard.
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