My brother’s non-profit Operation Broken Silence has worked in Sudan and South Sudan for many years. They just spent two weeks in Yida, a refugee camp that has swelled to hold 70,000 who have fled the genocidal acts of Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir. The purpose of the trip was to film a documentary about life in the camp, in the shadow of the unspeakable crime of genocide at the hands of the Sudanese government.
Here’s The Memphis Flyer’s Chris McCoy writing about the trip:
“Yida is sort of a microcosm of what’s wrong with Sudan right now,” [Mark] Hackett says. “No schools, people who don’t have jobs, people displaced by the conflict. We wanted to go to Yida to get eyewitness interviews about what’s happening. But it’s also where most of our classrooms are. In Yida alone, it’s estimated that there are 20,000 to 25,000 kids. We’ve only put 700 of those kids back into a classroom.”
The teachers Operation Broken Silence supports are all local. “Before the war started, there were about 200 schools in the Nuba Mountains. Now there are fewer than 100, and none of them are functioning anywhere close to capacity. The schools that were destroyed, almost all of the teachers escaped, alongside the kids. They’re the only ones who understand the cultural context, and they understand what these kids have been through, because they’ve been through it, too. They’re better than any teacher we could bring in.”
I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, but I could not be prouder of Mark and the work he and his team are doing. In a world where people are jumping up and down about headphone jacks, it’s good to be reminded that there is some serious shit in the world, and that people are busying trying to make it right.