Monday, March 10, 2014
What is the What: Post #1
This book is filled with emotionally intense moments. Even when the book first begins it opens up on him being robbed. So i had a pretty clear idea on how emotional hard this book was going. Valentino's life is a very interesting one, that takes twists and turns, from what i've learned. His past and present are both very troubling. This book shows us the side by side comparison of hardship in the United States vs Sudan. This make you think about how the hardships in the United States although bad are nothing in comparison towards the Sudanese hardships.
This got me thinking on what exactly happened during this sudanese civil war, and what was the amount of damage done to the people. According to The International Crisis Group there was around 10,000 causalities during the second sudanese civil war. Also something even more shocking is that over 200,000 people where brought into slavery after the second sudanese civil war according to IRIN. It is no shock that that war has caused sever trauma to the people of the country as we see in the book, sudan may still need help for quite some time to recover from the effects of this war.
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The statistics above don't even come close to the amount of suffering that is in the novel. Every page has images of little boys dying of starvation, of thirst, walking hundreds of miles through desert for days on end and being shot at and targeted by bombs. I decided to take a closer look at the refugees that were relocated into the United States like Valentino Deng was.According to the Lost Boys Website, In 2001, intolerable living conditions in the refugee camp gave the United States government reason to resettle some 4,000 of these now young men in America. Approximately 26,000 Sudanese boys were forced by violence from their southern Sudan villages in the late 1980s. The majority of the Lost Boys were between the ages of 8 and 18 when they arrived to the refugee camp after 700-1000 miles of walking. The respect I have for these boys, who are now men is tremendous, to go through what they experienced and still have the strength to live a full life in a new country is incredible.
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