Archive for Nancy Macdonald

Riiny Ngot’s incredible journey from war-torn Sudan to St. FX

Where are we going? Riiny Ngot admits thinking to himself about 45 minutes into the two-hour drive from the Halifax airport to St. Francis Xavier University, his rural Nova Scotia home for the next three years. We’re in the middle of nowhere.

Dramatic change, however, has long been a fact of life for the towering 21-year-old basketball centre, who begins his career in the CIS, the Canadian university league, this fall. Riiny, who is seven foot two—a foot taller than the team average, and the tallest player in the league—is also part of a remarkable group of refugees. They are known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. Starting in the late 1980s, some 25,000 children who had been orphaned or separated from their parents crossed the country seeking refuge from Sudan’s raging civil war. That conflict—one of the last century’s most brutal—pitted the northern Muslim government against the mostly Christian south, and ultimately claimed two million lives.

Psychologists who documented the Lost Boys’ exposure to death and violence place them among the most badly war-traumatized children ever examined. For Riiny, who is gentle and soft-spoken, lily-white scars on his legs and arms are only the physical reminders of the war. He aches, all the time, for the family it took from him.

When Riiny was 11, fighting exploded in the southern city of Wau, where he grew up. He was nearby, at his grandparents’ farm tending to a newborn calf, and he ran home, passing scores of dead and wounded, to find his house in flames. Amid the crackle of gunfire, he could hear Akuol, his eight-year-old sister, screaming from inside. Tearing through the house, he found her hidden in a closet. They escaped just before their home collapsed.

There was no sign of their parents, so they left Wau, crossing the country’s war-ravaged southern flank and joining other children who were fleeing the fighting. They travelled under cover of darkness—and not just to escape the 40-degree heat. Almost anyone they encountered—government troops, rebel soldiers or rival tribes—was a likely threat: Akuol could have been enslaved or forced to become a rebel wife, while Riiny, who already stood six foot three, was ripe for recruitment by the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. (Thousands of children also died from starvation, dehydration, animal attacks and disease.)

For most of the month-long journey, Riiny carried Akuol, who was frightened and tired. When it came to crossing the rain-swollen Gilo River to safety in Ethiopia, he tied her to his back using a T-shirt, and dove deep to avoid the river’s strong top currents. As they surfaced, Riiny heard his best friend, who had been travelling with them, screaming in terror: he was being attacked by a crocodile. Hundreds died that day, lost to animal attack and drowning, says Riiny. Others remember the river streaked with red, the blood of lost friends.

A B.C. student’s quest to bring education to young Afghan girls

Just 11, Alaina Podmorow’s already given a million speeches. She’s also done Canada AM with Seamus O’Regan, CBC’s The Current, starred in a five-minute documentary on The National, and had a private, 15-minute chat with the Prime Minister. But the morning assembly at Davidson Road Elementary School in tiny Winfield, B.C., was even more nerve-racking than meeting with Stephen Harper. The founder of Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan was addressing the entire student body — everyone she knows, “pretty much,” including her brother Connor, 14, who sat at the back with the older kids.

For the past two years, the fifth-grader has been raising money to help schoolgirls in Afghanistan. There, six years after the fall of the Taliban, less than a third of eligible girls are in school. The low enrolment rate is due partly to the fact that the ousted regime began attacking schools as soon as girls finally started trickling into them, and partly because of a simple lack of funds for schools. Where schools, teachers and textbooks exist at all, they’re often of such poor quality that only a fraction of the girls will obtain a decent education. (Only 20 per cent of the teachers are even minimally qualified.)

“That’s where we can help,” said Alaina, standing beneath the orange basketball rim in the darkened gym at her school, in B.C.’s Okanagan Valley. She first heard of the plight of Afghan girls two years ago, at a speech by journalist Sally Armstrong. Armstrong, who is a contributing editor to Maclean’s and has written extensively about Afghanistan, spoke about girls’ schools being razed, and the murders and torture of female teachers. Alaina couldn’t believe her ears. When she got home, she climbed into bed with her dad, Dan, who works for an environmental remediation firm, and recounted the speech “almost word for word,” says her mom Jamie, a dental assistant in nearby Kelowna. “What really struck me,” Alaina recalls, “was about girls not getting an education. I thought about what life would be like for me and my friends if we couldn’t get an education.” Almost immediately, she began raising funds for Afghan schools, eventually hooking up with a non-profit group, Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan.

Indeed, if she and her best friends Cass and Mary were growing up in Afghanistan, the odds that they’d be in school are slim thanks to the ongoing conflict and the Taliban’s strict policy of keeping girls out of the classroom. That tradition lives on, even in more progressive centres like Kabul, Herat and Mazari-Sharif. In former Taliban strongholds like Zabul and Helmand, girls’ enrolment is lower than five per cent. Countrywide, the ratio of boys to girls in elementary schools is roughly two-to-one. But by high school, there are four boys for every girl. In over 80 per cent of rural districts, there are no girls in secondary school. In all, just 10 per cent of Afghan girls ever graduate.

Still, more than 3,500 new schools have been built in the past six years. And, according to the Afghan ministry of education, 5.4 million children are now enrolled — roughly five times as many as in 2002. On the other hand, most of the new schools don’t have actual buildings. And threats to teachers and students persist, particularly in the south, where the Taliban are strong. A year ago in the central province of Logar, not far from Kabul — considerably safer than the countryside — gunmen shot dead three female students, hunting them down on the back of a motorcycle as they left their school. In all, over the past year, 105 students and teachers have been killed, roughly 130 schools burned or razed, and over 300 schools closed. Many of those killed were girls and women; many of the targeted schools were girls’ schools.

For the past two years, Alaina’s growing organization — a junior branch of Canadian Women for Women — has been organizing bottle drives, bake sales, car washes, swim-a-thons, penny drives and silent auctions to fund the salaries of girls’ teachers in the impoverished Central Asian country. This year, they’ve raised close to $40,000 — enough money to pay for over 50 female educators at a cost of roughly $750 per teacher. Recently, the Harper government decided to match, dollar for dollar, the amount raised by the Canadian sister organizations, bringing the number of trained teachers to over 500. (The government is also providing $500,000 to a teacher training program in Kabul province run by the senior organization, as well as $5 million to support projects aimed at integrating women into Afghan society.)