‘Lost Boys’ Peril Returns in Sudan

[hue]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/world/africa/from-sudan-a-new-wave-of-lost-boys.html?_r=1&smid=fb-share

YIDA, South Sudan — Thousands of unaccompanied children are streaming out of an isolated, rebellious region of Sudan, fleeing a relentless aerial assault and the prospect of famine.

The New York Times

Sent by their parents on harrowing odysseys across battlefields and malaria-infested swamps, the children are repeating one of the most sordid chapters of Sudanese history: the perilous flight of the so-called Lost Boys during the civil war in the 1990s, who wandered hundreds of miles dodging militias, bombers and lions.

Now, a new generation of Lost Boys, and some Lost Girls, too, is emerging from a war that, despite a peace agreement, has never completely ended.

Haidar Musa, 14, recently trudged into the muddy, mushrooming refugee camp here in Yida, which is growing by 1,000 people a day, turning a lush green jungle into a squalid sea of white United Nations tarps. With him were eight other boys with shredded clothes and bellies full of grass, their only sustenance for several days.

[SharonAnn]

1. And the Lost Girls? Most end up in forced marriages or servitude/slavery.

That's why it's nearly always the boys who manage to escape.

The girls are not able to.