Posts tagged with “Sudan”
Lost Boys Found
John Bul Dau meets the natives at a Syracuse, NY public pool.
GOD GREW TIRED OF US (2006/DVD) Once in a while we fat Americans should be required to watch (on our awesome and equally fat flat-screen HDTVs) a film that reminds us just how lucky we are. The next time that spoiled-rotten ankle-biter of yours complains about his PS3 not networking online proficiently enough, sit ‘em down (no candy!) for a family viewing of Christopher Dillon Quinn’s devastating 2006 documentary God Grew Tired of Us, a story of inspiring tenacity and amazing personal heartbreak on a global scale. God Grew Tired of Us tells the story of the Lost Boys, a moving city of broken children ranging in age from 3 to 13 (in a marching line stretching over a mile long) that for five long years in the late 1980s fled certain death in war-torn Sudan on foot through over 1,000 miles of jungles and deserts—TWICE, first to Ethiopia and then to Kenya—the group of 27,000 eventually cut down to 12,000. That’s a hell of a subtraction: 15,000 dead kids. And we’re talking kid kids here—Lost Boy John Bul Dau tells a particularly sad story about how, due to his impressive height, as a 13-year-old he had been placed in charge of a group of over 1,200 smaller kids, and how his first lesson as a leader was how to “bury the bodies.” Dau’s heartbreaking story is just one among many—each one as sobering as the next. Read more »
