I figure I should pick back up this blogging thing. I've got supporters and stalkers keeping tabs on me.
Working with my mother not only makes me vulnerable to embarrassing newsroom moments, but also to intra-office conspiracies. Or maybe I just have a complex. Either way, last night I had a co-worker plop down next to me when we went out and begin to tell me how horrible of a place Sudan is and how I shouldn't go if someone else is making me.
Apparently, I'm not the only one with a conspiracy complex, as many people seem to think I'm being forced to go to Sudan. Rest easy, friends: this is not the case.
I'm not sure why I haven't been taking advantage of those great moments to explain to people that it's not other people making me go and it's not a vacation I'm looking for, and it is the situation there that makes it all the more important I go. Pray that I do open my mouth and speak of Him, as I should.
Back to this guy. He was asking me where exactly I'll be ("Lopit," I say, which translates to "I have no clue") and saying I should check out this book, The World's Most Dangerous Places. Sudan made the list. (Yahoo!) All this to say, I went to the library today to check it out and, while I couldn't find it, I did happen upon another book about three Lost Boys from Sudan.
The Lost Boys are thousands of young (I'm talking 4-, 5-, 6-years-old) kids who were forced from their families and villages by Muslim extremists. It was 1983 and the North had declared shari'a law. However, many of the tribesmen rejected Islam. In this particular case, it wasn't necessarily because they were Christians -- more because of the inconvenience of the five-a-day prayers for a people who relied on raising and herding cows to survive and because of the brutality of female castration. The army set fire to whole villages thought to be sympathetic to the Sudanese Liberation Army, weidling guns that many of these people had never see before and "pouring fire from the sky" from airplanes and helicopters. They burned whole families alive in their huts, raped women and young girls and killed the older men. One of the boys tells about finding his friend's family charred in their hut and a girl who walked with a terrible limp because a soldier had tied her hands to a tree, raped her and broke many of her bones in the process. Many of the boys ran into the bush and spend the next months on a terrible journey across a dessert and dangerous land -- thirsty, starving, covered with lice and flies and prey to wild animals and horrible disease. They walked to refugee camps in Ethiopia -- can you imagine escaping TO Ethiopia? -- which weren't much better.
I'm yet to finish the book, but I'll probably go back and read more tomorrow. I know I need to know more about what has really happened in Sudan and what kind of scars these people are dealing with. Also, it was neat to get the cultural perspective. The three boys eventually came to the states -- where they later compiled their stories into this book -- and the beginning of the book is a narrative from a woman who became their mentor. It was funny to hear about how new and different everything was to them and how they embraced it all, tried everything. I laughed as she told about their first dinner -- chicken strips. The boys were entranced by the different dipping sauces. They were also warned before their left that American women were often single and wanting husbands, so they needed to watch out for one of these desperate women kidnapping them and threatening them with knifes and other horrible things. I wonder what understandings I have in my head about Africa that will be uprooted as nonsense once I get there. It reminds me that I have to step away from all of my cultural reference points and somehow be able to break down barriers and build relationships with these people. Praise God that He'll help my team in this!
This was long, but whatever. I hope to erase all the other ones soon and start afresh.
"The cars stand like cattle in a cattle camp." -- Benson, a Lost Boy (then grown to 20), making an observation about San Diego traffic and parking
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