Out of Africa

One of the first stories I wrote for the Medill News Service was about the Darfur crisis in northern Sudan. The crisis is a continuation of two civil wars Sudan has already gone through. It’s almost been like non-stop violence and fighting has gone on in this country. And although the perpetrators and aggressors have changed faces, more or less over time, the victims remain the same - millions of children displaced, families split up and separated, the general collateral damage of war.

During the second civil war in Sudan, the collateral damage bared the face of thousands of boys who became known as The Lost Boys of Sudan. Unlike the whimsical Lost Boys in the pages of ‘Peter Pan,’ very little about their lives is envious or wonderfully exciting. (this New York Times story is amazing, really compelling).

Here’s a recording of Mabouc Mabouc, a Lost Boy who resides in Chicago and acts as a social worker for the Pan African Association and a spokesperson for the Darfur crisis. He tells an abbreviated version of his story - from being seperated from his family, walking across multiple countries, living in refugee camps and eventually making it to the United States.

His story is sad, but as Mabouc points out: He is one of the lucky ones.

Audio

Cultural and language barriers make it hard for African immigrants to acclimate to American society. But apparently it can also be deadly.

The Dallas Morning News had an article about Musa Bailey, an immigrant from Eritrea, who died after being hit by a car while trying to cross a major freeway.

The article, for me, raises the question of what sort of education or training should America offer its immigrants at their point of entry. For Musa Bailey, he came to the US under a program with the State Department as a refugee from civil conflict in Eritrea. But while this country has offered him refuge, they didn’t offer him any understanding of the ways of a 21st-century metropolis. 

Is the United States in some way responsible for his death? When offering asylum for people from rural and uneducated backgrounds, is this country responsible for making sure that they provide refuge and survival training of sorts? 

While one could say Musa Bailey walking across a freeway is dumb, refugees suffer in the American society in a lot of other ways. Take many of the Lost Boys of Sudan, who were brought here, given some money and told “everything will be alright now” … many of them are still struggling to make ends meet and understand the inner-workings of this society, so different from their own.  Or refugees from other African countries who can barely speak English, if any at all (like Musa Bailey’s wife). Their survival is equally at risk.