| My phone started to ring shortly after Deng Fermino Kuol’s shooting death by a Calgary police officer made national news back in October. I had dated a Southern Sudanese man named Deng. My family and friends wanted to make sure that he was OK. I assured them that Deng was a very common southern Sudanese name and that I had never met Deng Fermino Kuol. But despite never having met Deng, I thought of him and of the life that many Dengs share.
Deng was born in a country embroiled in war. As a child growing up, a country at war was all that he knew. For the 15 years previous to Deng’s birth, his parents had experienced civil war. Thirty-four years after Deng’s birth, Sudan is still at war.
Years ago, my ex-partner Deng and I were talking on the couch. I was trying to understand the war, the suffering that he had endured in Sudan. I was trying to understand how his history of suffering was affecting our relationship. My questions kept probing and prodding, hoping that he would open up that tightly bolted war chest in his heart. And he did. His eyes showed me – for brief seconds – the blackness of the suffering he was burying. His vulnerability met my overwhelmed panic, and the bolt went back on, never to be unlocked again.
What would it be like to carry death around with you? How would that affect you? How would that affect your relationships?
Deng left southern Sudan as one of the 17,000 Sudanese who fled war-torn Sudan by foot in 1989. He was still a teenager. Under constant surveillance by armed military, Deng walked 1,000 miles to Ethiopia and then to Kenya. The journey took three months. Deng made it, spared by the gunfire that took friends and relatives to the left and right of him. Deng was now at a refugee camp seeking political asylum.
When Deng was sponsored by the Canadian federal government as a political refugee, he had visions of a new life, a life of freedom, of no longer fearing for his survival. After a three week orientation at a settlement house, Deng was in his own bachelor suite, entitled to local welfare rates of $397 per month for one year. Deng was still in school receiving English as a fourth language instruction. While earning $397 per month, Deng was paying market-rate rent because all government-sponsored refugees are ineligible for low-income housing in their first year. After three months in Canada, Deng received a bill in the mail outlining his debt payment plan to the Canadian government. Each political refugee must repay all costs associated with getting them to Canada–an estimated $3,000 per refugee. Any default would affect his application for citizenship.
Having difficulty making ends meet, Deng went to Brooks to work at Lakeside Packers, a cattle slaughterhouse and meat-packing plant. Despite coming from a heritage where cows are a mark of one’s wealth, he was now in a land where killing them was a more lucrative trade than most others. Deng was now, day in and day out, killing cows for a living. How was his workplace of blood and death affecting this child of war? How were his relationships affected by being surrounded by blood and death on a daily basis – again?
Deng came from a very generous and community-oriented culture, generous despite living in survival-mode for the vast majority of one’s existence. Where do you turn for help when everyone in your community is struggling as much as you? Where do you turn when everyone is struggling to save money to send back to relatives in Sudan? How do you validate your own suffering in Canada when your relatives are afraid for their lives everyday?
In Sudan, men in uniform are the men who kill you. In a country such as ours that has not known war for the past 120 years, Deng had the relative luxury to redefine survival from fear of being killed on a daily basis to fear of not being able to escape survival-mode for happiness. And as I sit in my relative happiness, I am aware of the part of me that has failed Deng. His bolted war chest met my panic and there was silence. And then nothing changed. |
Copyright ©2004 FFWD. All rights reserved.