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The Unitarian Church of All Souls • 1157 Lexington Avenue • New York, NY 10021 email: peacetaskforcenyc@yahoo.com
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To view archived materials, please click on one of the links below: |
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"GOD GREW TIRED OF US" (FILM)
February 24, 2008, 1:00 p.m. in Reidy Friendship Hall The documentary God Grew Tired of Us was presented by the All Souls Peace Task Force. This film, made by Christopher Quinn and Tommy Walker and narrated by Nicole Kidman, won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. It recounts the moving story of three of the Lost Boys of Sudan who came to the United States, and is based on the book of that name written by one of the Lost Boys, John Bul Dau, with Michael S. Sweeney. The Lost Boys of Sudan are the 27,000 boys aged three to thirteen whom – between 1984 and 2005 – war had forced to flee their home villages, often after they had seen their parents killed or been drastically separated from them. This was the second of two civil wars in Sudan that had sprung from Great Britain's decision, before granting the nation independence in 1953, to integrate North and South Sudan, which had up to then been separate colonies. The new arrangement gave most power to the Arabic-speaking Muslim north, thus angering the largely English-speaking and Christian south. Furthering tension between the two areas was the presence of oil in the south and its greater fertility. The first Sudanese war from 1955-72 had left 500,000 dead; the second, beginning in 1983, was even more violent, with 1.9 million civilians killed, and more than 4 million forced to flee their homes. Despite the peace agreement in 2005, the fighting goes on. As for girls of the age of the Lost Boys, some 15,600 have disappeared; but, owing to the low status of women in Africa, their fate is hard to discover. God Grew Tired of Us follows the fortunes of three of the Lost Boys out of a group of ninety whom the International Rescue Committee had brought to America in August 2001: John Bul Dau, Panther Bior, and Daniel Pach. Seeking refuge from the war's devastation of their homes, all three boys – along with thousands of others --walked barefoot across the desert; in helping one another, they built a strong sense of community. They fled initially to Ethiopia but ended up in a vast refugee camp in Kikuma, Kenya. The film gives a glimpse of the peaceful setting in which the boys had begun life – villages of huts with cone-shaped roofs; cattle grazing on a riverbank – and another, stark one of the skeletal figures of starving young boys and children in the Kikuma camp. The film follows John, Panther, and Daniel on their trip to the United States and their introduction to the "wonders" of the modern world: airplane travel, electricity, hot and cold running water, toilets, the cornucopia of fruits and vegetables in a supermarket. Arriving in the United States, two of the boys went to Pittsburgh, one to Syracuse, New York. The film shows us their efforts to adjust to a very different culture; to work -- long hours, often double shifts; their loneliness; their determination that, once successful, they would return to Africa, to their homeland to try to find and help their families. For example, John Bul Dau started a nonprofit foundation to raise funds for the first medical clinic in the county where he lived as a boy. This film is a tribute to the extraordinary optimism and resilience of one group out of the many peoples of the world who have suffered from the blinkered and destructive policies of imperialistic nations. Despite feeling at times that God had given up on them, these Lost Boys found themselves by not giving up on either themselves or those who were dear to them. |