"From torment in Sudan to a life of hope, promise" by James H. Burnett III | Globe Staff, April 06, 2013
By all accounts, 19-year-old Keer Deng should be a frightened, angry, almost feral young man, given that the early years of his life were filled with slavery, starvation, and torture in his native Republic of South Sudan.
But watch him navigate the grounds of the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, and his movements paint a different picture. He’s demonstrably happy — ebullient, in fact — high-fiving peers and cracking jokes as he passes faculty and classmates in the hallways. He only gets annoyed, it seems, when people ask him why he’s always smiling.
“The answer is that I have been given a chance to live, to be grown up,” he says. “That is all.”
And I'm happy for him; however, think of how many the EUSraeli empire has robbed of that chance.
That isn’t really all.
Deng’s is a story of pain and tragedy, reinvention and hope, all born on a journey that started 13 years ago when his then-slave master, who had beaten him for years, blinded him as punishment.
And it is appearing in my Jewish war organ, admittedly on a Saturday, but the fact is some people's stories are never told in the Globe -- even on Saturday.
It’s a journey with layovers in refugee camps and an orphanage, a journey that has brought him to the United States and now to Boston, thanks to a veteran journalist whom Deng calls “Momma Chicken,” and her brother who happens to be an owner of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, whom Deng simply calls “Uncle Bruce.”
It always helps to have connections and a $elf-$erving angle.
Keer Deng grew up in the southern part of Sudan, before the country split into two.
Btw, if you scroll my Sudan file you will see that the vote to split was arranged by George W. Bush in one of his greatest diplomatic triumphs.
Of course, peeling off the oil supplies from the North (even though the pipeline still runs through there -- until NATO can get around to setting up an alternate route) and reestablishing an East African base for USraeli weapons-smuggling had nothing to do with it in my war-promoting, agenda-pushing paper.
His family were South Sudanese Christians, reportedly the smallest, weakest, and most bullied sect in a region dominated by warring factions of indigenous black and Arab Muslims.
“I believe I was about 5 when I became a slave,” Deng says.
He was the child of an era when an estimated 200,000 South Sudanese Christians were, according to the human rights group Christian Solidarity International, kidnapped and sold into slavery to warlords and wealthier Arab families in the northern and western parts of Sudan, near the Darfur region....
I'm sorry, folks. I've simply had it with the Jewish narrative of sectarianism and Muslim intolerance, true or not.
Related:
Six Zionist Companies Own 96% of the World's Media
Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed
Operation Mockingbird
Why Am I No Longer Reading the Newspaper?
All of a sudden the stories my paper tells me make perfect sense.
“You think life is over when this happens,” Deng says.
And it might have been, if he had not been freed eventually and relocated to South Sudan to a refugee camp and orphanage operated by Christian Solidarity. “Actually, his masters released him to us — not because they were charitable, but because they decided he couldn’t be a good laborer without his sight,” says Franco Majok, a native of Sudan and a Boston-based project coordinator for Christian Solidarity.
A new family
Ellen Ratner first visited Sudan five years ago with a group of five or six other journalists and her longtime friend Kate Taylor, the singer/songwriter and sister of James Taylor.
“What I saw and experienced pretty much mirrored everything we’ve seen in the news,” says Ratner, a Fox News Channel analyst. “Stark poverty. Pain. Sadness. And some hope as waves of former slaves returned from the north, from Sudan, to try to make lives for themselves.”
During her visit, Ratner visited the camp and orphanage operated by Christian Solidarity International. She recalls one skinny kid who stood out: He wore a floppy straw hat, squatted on his haunches, still as a statue, and appeared to be staring into the ground. But then, she says, something happened....
Her brother is Bruce Ratner, a real estate developer and minority owner of the Brooklyn Nets whose development company built the Barclays Center, where the Nets play. And when Ellen told him Deng’s story, and persuaded him to visit South Sudan with her, that was enough.
Yeah, have you noticed all the sports buildings and events are sponsored by banks that are booming in profits and cash as you suffer, sports fan? Great diver$ion and di$traction, though, and I'm so glad they bring it to us!
“There was so much sadness,” Bruce Ratner says. “But in a way, there was hope, because these people had been freed and had returned home.”
Liberated, if you will.
***************************************
The Ratners spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees on Deng’s behalf, to get him into the United States.
Too bad others didn't have a news reporter for Fox and a pro basketball owner looking out for them.
They got him a passport. And they recruited US Representative Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican and then-chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, to help get Deng a visa, so he could visit the United States to have surgery on his eyes, and maybe stay permanently.
Look at what influence and acce$$ can do! Get's action!
The Ratners cosigned as his sponsors and arranged for him to have surgery at the Wills Eye Institute in Philadelphia. They also enrolled him in Lighthouse International, a nonprofit Manhattan school that helps the visually impaired to live independently.
Deng relied on a translator when he testified before Smith’s congressional subcommittee about conditions in Sudan. But his English and his Spanish (thanks to Spanish-speaking nurses) soon improved dramatically and rapidly....
They took him to the 2011 White House Christmas party, where Deng met President Obama, who told him to study hard and embrace education.
His biggest adjustment was seeing the Ratners as family. After a few months in the United States, Deng began to feel self-conscious about being so far from home. “He wanted warmth,” Ellen Ratner says.
So he stopped calling her Ellen and revived “Momma Chicken.” She, in turn, realized that she had stopped “sponsoring” Deng just weeks after his arrival and had instead begun mothering him.
“I never wanted to be a mother,” says Ratner, who has no children but now describes herself as “the stereotypical doting Jewish mother” who wants Deng to be well-adjusted, happy, and “equipped to grow into a great man.”
You know, I didn't want to type it above, but the name started ringing bells for me. It's why this "good-Jew" story made the paper.
After a few more months in New York, the Ratners moved Deng to the Perkins School....
The first time he felt snow last winter, he thought it was ice cream falling from the sky. And though the concept of reading appealed to him, Deng balked when he felt the pages of his first Braille book.
“It felt like sand and earth, dirt to me. I didn’t like it,” Deng says.
Now, he reads a book every month. His favorite so far? “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Related: To Post a Mockingbird
***************************
Ellen Ratner hopes he is preparing to be president of South Sudan some day. But for now he’s experiencing coconut ice cream, hip-hop, and country music, NBA games, and walks along the Charles River.
Surgeries have restored his ability to see some colors in his right eye, and he hopes one day to have even more of his vision back. Bruce Ratner says he will continue to foot the bill, “because this isn’t about money. It’s about getting this young man to where he needs to be, where he deserves to be.”
No one is saying that, but given all the others that need the same assistance around the world and don't see it (no pun intended).
--more--"
Related: Victims of Vietnam
Anybody bring one of them home?
So how many Palestinians have been blinded by Israel's use of white phosphorous, or by simple shots of tear gas canisters to the heads of protesters?
