Singing the Lord’s Songs in a Foreign Land

The following originally appeared in a recent Religious Liberty e-newsletter.  If you would like to receive our weekly e-newsletter, click here and select “Religious Liberty.”

Psalm 137 laments,

By the rivers of Babylon,
There we sat down and wept,
When we remembered Zion.
Upon the willows in the midst of it
We hung up our harps.
For there our captors demanded of us songs,
And our tormentors mirth, saying
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”
How can we sing the Lord’s song
In a foreign land?

But singing the Lord’s song in a foreign land is exactly what the Jolwolieech, the young leaders of Southern Sudan’s former Lost Boys and Girls, have been doing for over a dozen years.

Bishop Nathaniel praying with children during the closing ceremony.

As young children they were forced to flee when their villages were attacked by Sudanese government troops and government-sponsored Arab militias.  Successive Islamist governments in Sudan have sought to impose shari’a (Islamic law) and to Islamize and Arabize all of Sudan.  Because Southern Sudanese, Nubas, and others resisted this Arab hegemony and imperialism, the Sudanese government waged a genocidal jihad against them. Displacing and orphaning Southern Sudanese African children was not thought of as “collateral damage” by the National Islamic Front regime of Sudan, but as a deliberate strategy to further the ethnic cleansing of the black, African Christians and animists from Southern Sudan.

In the late 1980’s when Southern Sudanese villages were bombed and burned, livestock were slaughtered or taken, men were killed, and women and girls were taken as slaves, some 33,000 children, mostly boys, escaped the jihadis. Providentially, groups of these fleeing children found each other in the bush and together trekked hundreds of miles to Ethiopia.  Some were hunted down and killed by lions and hyenas; some were hunted down and killed by government soldiers.  They ate tree bark and leaves to survive, but many still died of starvation, thirst, and disease.  The older children (many only nine or ten years of age) took care of the younger.

Some of the Sudanese children who are growing at Kakuma Refugee Camp. The Jolwolieech are their worship leaders.

Those who survived arrived in Ethiopia about two months later.  Ethiopia under the military dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam was sympathetic to the Southern Sudanese and their defenders, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), so the Lost Boys were safe for about three years.  Day of Devastation, Day of Contentment: The History of the Sudanese Church Across 2000 Years notes that many thousands of the Lost Boys were “shaped by a daily immersion at school and in church in the narrative and the images of the Bible.”  The boys created songs accompanied by dances that used Biblical images to describe their own journey and its significance in God’s plan.

In 1991, the nightmare began again.  Mengistu was overthrown.  The new government of Meles Zenawi, sympathetic to Sudan’s radical Islamists, began to bomb the refugee camps and ordered soldiers to force the refugees out of the country.  Once again the children fled.  This time they were forced to cross the Gilo River, swollen by rain, back into Sudan.  Thousands drowned, and others were shot by Ethiopian government tanks or killed by crocodiles.  Over a year passed before the remaining 16,000 or so Lost Boys ended up in Kakuma refugee camp.

Although the conditions at Kakuma are harsh, and seem destined to wither the human spirit, Sudanese Christians are evidence that the spiritual life is deep and rich.  Hundreds of the Lost Boys  who came to faith while still in Ethiopia, and have continued to grow as Christians when they settled in Kenya.  Young Sudanese men and women at Kakuma have composed over 1,000 original hymns.  They are singing the Lord’s songs in a foreign land.

Sudanese youth at Kakuma Refugee Camp praising the Lord.