Lost Boys of Sudan: Childhood, War, and Freedom

Introduction: Africa's Civil War and the Lost Boys

The largest country in Africa is also home to one of the most terrifying civil wars in modern history. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism have combined to plague a nation whose population is torn apart by religious, ethnic, and economic divisions. To Western eyes, the most striking image is often that of starving children from regions where internal conflict has blocked any path toward development.

A more intimate portrait of those children is offered in They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan. These are children who witnessed the deaths of their parents, relatives, and friends and the destruction of their villages — children who were forced to wander "barefoot without food or water, they crossed a thousand miles of lion and crocodile country, eating mud to stave off thirst and starvation... Wandering for years, half of them died before the others at last found sanctuary in a Kenyan refugee camp" (Deng, Deng, Ajak, and Bernstein xix). They tell their story to the world after having arrived in the United States — the land of the "American dream" and its promise of freedom and equal opportunity.

Their stories are gathered and shaped by Judy Bernstein, a woman moved by their fate and humble enough to learn from them despite the vast differences between her world and the Sudanese villages where the boys grew up. In her introduction, Bernstein confesses how surprised she was: the boys were nothing like she had imagined survivors of such horrors would be. Regardless of the degree of civilization of the society one comes from, people everywhere tend to build prejudices and biases toward unknown cultures. Yet the boys were no savages — they knew how to use a fork, a knife, and a napkin; they had no particular desire to buy jeans; and their English was very good. At first glance, they seemed no different from young men fresh out of high school. The real differences ran deeper.

The first major difference lay in their understanding of government and its role in a person's life. After meeting the boys, Bernstein tried to explain why they needed to buckle their seatbelts. She immediately realized she was conjuring the image of a state authority that would send officers to fine them for non-compliance. Thinking one level deeper — about what those boys must have experienced precisely because their government was concerned with anything other than their safety — one can sense the dramatic gap between their two worlds.

Childhood in the Dinka Village

A country governed by a democratic regime has a government chosen by the people to represent the people's interests. The Western world views government as the authority that manages and arbitrates the affairs of the state. According to Milton Friedman, the society people should aspire to today is "a society that takes freedom of the individual, or more realistically the family, as its ultimate objective, and seeks to further this objective by relying primarily on voluntary exchange among individuals for the organization of economic activity. In such a free private enterprise exchange economy, government's primary role is to preserve the rules of the game by enforcing contracts, preventing coercion, and keeping markets free" (Friedman). When the Lost Boys of Sudan first came to the United States, they were as far from such a concept as possible.

The first story in chapter one is, up to a point, a universal story of childhood. Benson enjoyed playing with other children, loved his family, and cherished the warmth and security he felt in his mother's arms. He loved his father and looked up to him. There are cultural and civilizational differences, but they do not make his story foreign to the rest of the world. Only the climax casts a different light on his childhood: the initiation ritual of circumcision, which he remembered all his life as the most frightening experience he had ever endured. The hands of parents and their friends who held him down during the traditional ritual caused the kindergarten-aged child more pain than anything he experienced afterward.

The stories that introduce the world of the Dinka people and their villages show no sign of any government authority. The children do not appear to be aware of any authority beyond that of their parents, older brothers, and the other adults in the village.

Yet a marker that a Western citizen might recognize as civilization appears when the boys mention education. The idea that someone from a family of "pastoralists and subsistence farmers" (Deng, Deng, Ajak, and Bernstein 3), sleeping "in small mudded huts" (4), with no schools nearby, could obtain a college degree and become a lawyer is difficult for the average Westerner to grasp. Alepho writes about his "big half brother" (12) who "was at the University in Wau, a five day walk from Juol, our village." First, the distance measured in walking days alone raises questions about how students managed to get to school at all. Second, it is hard to imagine that their families' earnings were sufficient to support a child living away from the village while studying. And yet young people did go to school. The value placed on education was the same as anywhere else in the world. The difference is that developed countries have public schools and compulsory attendance up to a certain level — children in the United States, for example, are not expected to walk several days to reach a classroom.

Playing, working, and spending time with their parents, the children of Juol village learned lessons about the value and fragility of life, friendship, human nature, responsibility, education, and hard work. The children of the Dinka people were taught the importance of tradition and expected to do things collectively in order to learn the value of united effort. In these respects, their values are not so different from those of the developed world.

Conclusion

After everything they went through, one might think the boys could have expected to receive rations and humanitarian help as something they deserved, but they wanted nothing of the sort. Humanitarian aid was merely a palliative. What they truly wanted was the freedom to pursue their dreams and aspirations — and never to look over their shoulders in fear again.