Rebuilding Hope
The film rebuilding hope features a story of young Sudanese men who were separated from their families over twenty three years ago. The film tells a story of the reunion of these boys with their families for the first time in over two decades. This story basically is true for the so called “lost boys” of Sudan both their struggles and triumphs. Every time I watch this film I shed my tears because it brings back my own memories from when I had a reunion with my family in 2006.
I thought it would help many people to provide my personal reaction after watching the film and try to explain what this film tries to tell us in laymen’s terms. When this film first premiered in October last year in Syracuse, the theater was basically full. At the end of the film, I observed the entire room going silent and people could not move out of their seats and just staring either at each other or at the screen. People didn’t know what to say to each other and every eye was teary. Gabriel and his friends Garang and Koor got up to the stage and asked people if they had any questions. At first, people where just overwhelmed emotionally and could not express themselves until few minutes later people started to recover and began to ask questions. There were of course more comments than questions.
The second time we screened this film at Essex Cinemas the same thing happened again. After the film was over, people could not move out of their seats because they were weighed down by emotions. To help people to process what they had just seen, I stood up to try and explain my personal connection to the story such as my experience when I had a reunion with my family in March 2006. The reality is that it is a true story that tells deep human connection can defies time and space.
I struggle to make up my mind about which part of my life journey is more emotional when I compare the day when I fled my village and lost touch with family and the day when I had a reunion with my family in 2006. I happen to believe that my reunion with my family was the most emotional moment in my life. This is so because I had been thinking about them and this day for nearly twenty years and I had created different scenarios in my mind about how I would react when this day finally comes.
I was always hopeful that when I ever get back to my village I would be able to see my family (my parents, brothers and sisters, friends and relatives). Realistically however, I had to prepare my brain also for the worst case scenario and I had to think about what I would do if I did not get to find anyone in my family alive. These are deep emotional guesses we had to make and dealt with for two decades.
On top of these familial thoughts, we had to deal with death threats ourselves. We lost many friends during our journey as refugees and there were times when we had to struggle for months with questions about death. This is difficult because in the Dinka tradition and I believe it true is for the entire human society, the children are protected from seeing death or dead people. Having been alone, we lost this shield and we had to bury our friends. At night, the time in which we are alone and thinking, each of us had to struggle answering death questions in his/her mind and heart. I questioned myself on many occasions. Questions like: Am I going to die? Is it going to be my turn to die? What would happen to me if I die? Would I be able to see my family? Who is going to play with me if I die? Is it going to be painful when I die? What is going to kill me; a gun or a disease? When will I die? Could I avoid death? Why do people have to die? What wrong did I do to deserve death? Did my friend do something wrong and is that why he died?
These questions of course reflected the fact that we did not understand death and we worried about modest things permissible to our brain capacity to comprehend at that time. We did not have a mechanism as a group to deal with this so each of us had to deal with this by himself. It was helpful of course to have everyone in the same situation because we could compare ourselves with each other. Having nursed and nurtured these thoughts in our minds the last thing was to actually go through the experience either of a reunion with the family or going on a reunion trip only to find no one in your family to reunite with. Both cases of course are deeply touching but they achieve something important; the closure. Once you go through either case, you can rest your brain and delete or store these thoughts subterranean at the bottom of your brain file cabinet.
Nonetheless, I personally had experience with death much earlier than some of my colleagues probably when I was six years old two years before I took this long refugee life journey. It was around 10 pm at night around July or August 1986 or 1987 when militias attacked Kalthok town killing over twenty including six SPLA soldiers. The militias basically almost killed me and my entire family because they came actually to our gate and were debating whether to attack our village or go Kalthok town where they could kill many people and cause maximum damage. Fortunately they decided to attack the town instead of our village which would have started with my family. When they attacked Kalthok it was night time and people were afraid to go out at night to check. The following morning however, my mom and many people in the surrounding villages converged in Kalthok to investigate the attack. Kalthok is just about three to four miles south of my village.
I was warned of course not to go anywhere near Kalthok town, but I was curious to know what had happened. Stubborn the kid I was and I knew the area very well; I disobeyed my mom and took the back road to the town running as fast I could. I was the first on the scene and when I got there I saw about seven people lying dead in the open and they where drenched in their own blood. Three guys were stripped naked and I could see the wounds. I was shocked and I shrieked terribly and I was wobbly. As soon as my mom heard me crying, she came out running and took me away from the scene. She did not blame me for coming to the scene, but she consoled me. I couldn’t eat or sleep for several days and I had nightmares. I did not understand even what happened to these people lying on the ground, but I knew it was something dangerous because there was blood and really bad wounds. My mom did everything she could to calm me down and brought me to my senses and she explained the whole situation.
This was the time when I started to sense death and whenever I think about it, these memories from Kalthok are refreshed in my mind. While I had always kept positive thinking about my family, there were times when I would imagine my family killed and again that scene in Kalthok was the scene in my imagination about what could have happened to my family. This image has never left me even when I was trekking to Ethiopia and when I was in refugee camps. No sooner than when I had a reunion with my family did this memory began to wane in my mind. I still have it in my mind it does not occur to me as often as it was before I had a reunion.
The other part of our story that we must try to get people to understand is what our families were also thinking and feeling or imagining what could have possibly happened to us. My mom told me that for the first few months or years after I left she would sit at night in her mosquito net and look all the four corners our homestead to see if I would jump out of the bush and appear to her. If she heard anyone coming by, her heart would rapidly start pumping hoping that it would be me. When she hears another boy crying or playing somewhere in the village she always thought it was me. I was basically living in her heart and her head. My brothers and sister told me that my mom almost when crazy because of this and she could even wake up at night and talk to herself singing my many names.
When I saw her in March 2006, she acknowledged that there were times when she imagined me dead and that thought alone made her sleepless. However, in most cases my mom somehow believed that that I was I alive. She had always hoped that I would show up someday before she died. She literally had been waiting for me to come home for eighteen years. When my mom saw me in 2006, she collapsed in front me as she was overwhelmed emotionally and I was worried about her. She regained her consciousness after several hours. The only thing she asked me to do before anything else was for me to sit in her lap. She was not ready to say anything but to just stare at me.
When she told me her stories about how she was thinking about me and praying for me and missing me every night, I cried and I said to her “mom, if I knew the way I would have come home so you can stop worrying about me.” This is true for all of us because we feel bad for our parents and relatives who had to wait either for us to show up one day at home or at least get some credible news about how we died and where and whether we were buried or left to rot.
The hardest part for us is to finally see our families and get to experience the destitute and despair and their struggle to keep themselves alive. When we look in the eyes of the children who are either half or full naked and barefooted and not in schools, we take it personal and we feel like we have failed the next generation. We do not want these children to ever experience what we went through, but again we are but we feel we can only make insignificant change. Being poor ourselves we feel powerless and we tend to collapse under the pressure of expectations. For some, it is an inspiration to try and do something, for others they feel insignificant and see no worth in life.
The film rightly named “rebuilding hope” tells a story of people’s resilience and desire to remain hopeful even when the odds seem impossible. It is not rebuilding a lost hope per se because our people and even we, we have never lost hope. Those who lost hope during the war are not alive today for there was only hope to sustain us. The hope we are trying to rebuild is the hope for a better future and a better life for the children that are growing up. The future we are trying to build is a new nation that will be born in 2011 where hope its children will never go to bed hungry nor will they be separated from their parents. It is a future in which justice, freedom, prosperity and equal citizenship before the law will be cherished. It is a future in which villages and towns will experience economic growth so the children can go to school, get proper medical attention and dream big. It is a future where our experiences will only remain in history books and no child shall ever be exposed to such experiences ever again. The hope we are trying to rebuild is to transition our people from despair and instability to taking responsibility for their future in their own hands. Somehow, we have found ourselves in the middle of this responsibility by virtue of the fact that we are educated and we live in the most powerful country; the United States.
We have climbed up very high swiftly on the ladder of responsibility above and beyond our age and capacity because we live in the United Sates of America. Our families expect us to bear full family responsibilities in terms of being the bread winner and also making sure siblings, kith and kin can go to school or get medical treatment when they get sick. On top of all that, the villages expect us to bring change that can benefit not only our families but the entire society. Notwithstanding the fact that even our governments expect us to help rebuild the new country that cherishes democratic values and prosper economically and socially. For some, this is a burden, for others, it is an opportunity to contribute to the rebuilding of the society.
Having been loaded with all these responsibilities where do we go for help to unload this laden? We come back to the American people. They are the people who came and rescue us when were dying and rotting in refugee camps and by doing so helped us to go through education and now we are manned up to take these responsibilities. We come back to the American people to testify about what we found after visiting our families and villages. We ask them for help to rebuild our communities and our society. We ask them to cloth naked children and feed the malnourished ones. We ask them to treat the sick and school the illiterate. We ask them to be the guarantors for peace in our country.
The American people being generous the people they are, have answered every single call for help in Sudan. What remains to be seen is how long the American people can tolerate our unyielding need for their support. We have realized that asking for mosquito nets, drugs, food, money, cloth and shoes is unsustainable. Human beings can lose interest and focus and the problem in Sudan is not the only problem in the world. This is where we really need to be strategic about what we need to do and how best we can use the American people’s support to establish communities that can be self-sufficient and sustainable.
At Sudan Development Foundation (SUDEF) we have come up with a strategic approach to help communities now as they need help the most by enabling them to gain skills, start small businesses and facilitate peace initiatives and produce enough food for consumption and commercial. By so doing, we are going to create a system in each community where resources can be exploited to benefit the society both human and natural resources. The idea is that the community should be able find resources within the local community to sustain livelihoods.
We will achieve this by establishing Resource Center for Training and Development in Southern Sudan. SUDEF will offer Technical, Vocational and Entrepreneurial Training (TVET) programs in sequences of courses that prepare individuals for employment in emerging occupations instead of a degree. The training is offered in variety of fields such as industrial, technological and business education as well as medical and agricultural-related occupations. TVET is: a learning system in which both “soft” and “hard” skills are developed within a “joined-up”, integrated development and delivery framework that seeks to improve livelihoods, promote inclusion into the world of work and that supports community and individual agency.
As suggested by the African Union, in rural post-conflict communities with low TVET capacity, our vocational and entrepreneurial training will include a combination of enhanced basic education, literacy and livelihood skills training. Sudan Development Foundation will adopt the following models in the resource centers for training and development to ensure successful execution of its programs:
Sustainable Local Enterprise Networks (SLENs)
The SLEN model was originally developed by Wheeler et al. (2005) as an applied model of business development that equates the significant and systemic changes in enterprise networks with the critical growth and sustainability of local enterprises. These sustainable networks are collaborative, trust-based networks that deliver human, social, financial and ecological benefits for all participants. They address objectives of sustainable development and poverty alleviation, by fostering relationships and building enterprise capacity among various partners, including entrepreneurs, the development sector, investors, local training institutions, community members, sustainable local businesses and government.
SUDEF adopted this model because it offers an alternative approach to traditional development activities that often have a narrow focus and undermine local generation of creativity, capabilities and self-reliance. This model starts with a range of existing assets in the local community that are then augmented by some type of external investment functioning as a catalyst for increased growth. Positive outcomes can then result in virtuous cycles of reinvestment in human, social, financial and ecological capital (Figure 1). When this model is implemented rightly, it can assist with the reintegration of IDPs and ex-combatants into society, reducing the likelihood that they may return to combat as a survival strategy. In a post-conflict environment like Southern Sudan, this process will help in the transformation of conflict through the creation of sustainable livelihoods.
To compliment SLENs model of development, SUDEF will also adopt the Basic Employability Skills Training (BEST) model aims to “provide young adults from economically weak backgrounds an opportunity to assimilate into the competitive job market” (Dr.Reddy’s Foundation, 2009, p1). The program is geared towards helping youth and the most vulnerable community members obtain “the required livelihood and social skills in an environment of learning and mentoring. In so doing, BEST attempts to bridge the ever-widening divide between those who have access to opportunities and those who are increasingly marginalized from the new jobs and the economy.
In a very simple and systematic way, BEST attempts to match market and industry demands with the potential of trainees. Hence, it provides job-oriented training courses to youth who have barely reached high school levels of formal education and prepares them for entry-level jobs or small business creation in various industrial sectors.
One of the reasons why SUDEF adopted this model is because BEST programs normally consist of three months of in-class training followed by three months of on the-job apprenticeship training. The success of this model is based on its approach, focusing on offering livelihood skills to underprivileged youth of vulnerable age, ex-combatants, and women with the objective of ‘mainstreaming’ them so they can access and enjoy the benefits of the new economy (Atari et al 2010).
This model is grounded in a deep belief in human potential and the importance of engaging the whole person to realize their potential to flower and flourish. The model does not simply impart vocational training, although imparting such skills is a critical component of the process. It is also a positive socializing process that rescues individuals from negative life styles choices and work practices. The model seeks to ensure that families are involved and parents are trained and communities are included in this process. This is I believe is the best way to help the community and to transform communities so that peace and prosperity can be realize at last.
