The Lost Boys of Sudan

Last week we watched a documentary called “The Lost Boys of Sudan”. This movie was a huge surprise to me, because I had no idea that any of that was going on in Sudan. We learned about two different kinds of migrations in class. One is forced migration where people are forced to flee the country just like in the movie we watched. The other migration is called volunteer migration where a person chooses if to leave their home or not.  I can’t imagine being sent out of my country to find my own home and fend for myself. Migration can be a good thing or a bad thing. A good thing because in some countries people don’t have food, things to wear, or running water, so for them to come to America and experience all of these things is a good thing for them! A bad thing could be because they are leaving everything that they know. How would you like to leave the country and try and figure out someone else’s culture?

                Watching this movie has made me look at African Americans that I don’t know sort of differently, because you never know where they might have come from. The jobs that these Lost Boys got when they came here were not very good jobs. Some of the guys were making $6.50 an hour. So yes we do need these people in our country to do these jobs but on the other hand we don’t.   The condition that the Sudan boys came from is 100 times worse than what we experience every day and our country gave them a new chance at life, when there country was falling apart. I think that a great explanation for the word globalization, our country helped these boys become a better person when there country was falling apart.   But the lost boys couldn’t really do anything about the fact that there country was in a civil war and that they were being sent to America. They didn’t want to leave everything that they knew in Africa and I wouldn’t either. They were very scared to begin a new life in a different culture and did not want to leave there “brothers”.

                There are many push factors for the lost boys but the main push factor is that if they stayed in Kenya they would get killed. A pull factor for them would be that they would get to go to America and find their families that they haven’t seen for so long and make income.