Personal Narrative: A Rotaary Peace

While my time is winding down at the University of Bradford, as a Rotary Peace Fellow, I have been thinking about what made me come to this place in the first place, and beyond that, if I got out of this experience all that I had hoped for. Looking back I noticed that I'm the ultimate example of an immigrant story who is just trying to overcome the reality of a new life in a strange new world.

Watching the impact of war on so many people in my own country of birth, South Sudan, and what’s been unfolding in Syria, broke my heart.

A recent United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) report put the number of forcibly displaced persons around the world at 59.5 million, the biggest number of people living as refugees since the Second

Ernest Hemingway once wrote in “A Farewell To Arms,” that “war is nothing more than the dark, murderous extension of a world that refuses to acknowledge, protect, or preserve true love.”

As a former refugee, I know what it feels like to be force to live in a foreign country, and the difference that people can make in the lives of others when they welcome strangers, simply because of our shared humanity, humbly in love.

I was taken to the United States when I was 17 years old as a refugee on December 4, 2000, through a refugee resettlement program undertaken by the United Nations and the United States Department of State with a group of South Sudanese boys, now young men; who have been known in the international media, especially in the United States as the “Lost Boys of Sudan.”

Our story is a real story of human tragedy and resilience, unlike the Lost Boys of Peter Pan, who decided to never grow up.

Leaving behind our country of origin and everyone that we loved and knew was not really our choice. The outbreak of civil war in Sudan in 1983 brought the circumstances that would permanently alter our

Approximately 3,600 of us were resettled in the United States, beginning in the fall of 2000; after having lived in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya for more than a decade. I was placed with Catholic Charities’ Unaccompanied Refugee Minor program (URM) in Jackson, Mississippi.

Although life in America may have presented us with struggles and dangers of a different kind; volunteers’ help was very important in our adjustment in America. In Jackson, Mississippi, where I was resettled, we had volunteers from local communities and faith groups. They were the ones who ‘gave much hand’ when we had just arrived. They took us around to look for jobs and provided us with clothes.

There is now a Sudanese Ministry committee that was established through the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi to help the Sudanese refugees in Mississippi. Through the help that we received from many people of goodwill, our story as the Lost boys of Sudan was able to draw a significant global media attention that galvanized political and public support for the peace process in Sudan and ultimately facilitated the independent of South Sudan from Sudan in the north in July