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Amou Ajang: In spite of growing up in Tonj, I was born in Khartoum, Sudan in a family with six children. My sister and father are still in South Sudan today. My parents became refugees in the late 80s. At the time my mother was still a teenager living at home with her family in Tonj, and my father was a young adult studying at Khartoum University. My mother and her older sister decided to leave Tonj due to mass violence similar to that which took place in December of 2013-except at the hands of Arabs and Muslims from the north.
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I'm very fortunate that I was so young when we arrived to refugee quarters in Egypt. Older members of my family recall details of continued prejudice based on ethnicity and religion. Other than feeling the emotional shifts of the grown-ups around me, at the age of 1-4, I was rarely aware of the tense environment we lived in. I just knew that some days the adults were sad, some days they were stressed or scared, and some days they were angry. However they rarely spoke about it. I remember being curious about why they never seemed to speak about it.

I consider myself a writer. Growing up in my household, saying that you were a writer or an artist was the equivalent of saying that you are an aroma therapist at your core (which, let's be honest, is valid in its own right). My parents pushed my siblings and I towards certain career paths (medicine, law, engineering), because they wanted us to have an opportunity to escape the instability that we lived as refugees. However, the older I get, the more I am haunted by the desire to write. I can no longer ignore the calling.
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My father and little sister live in our family home in Juba. During the first days of fighting two Nuer boys, our neighbors, came to our door. My family hid them for a few days. Those boys survived but I am told that their sister went missing and she still hasn't been found. My family still doesn't know what happened to her. We can only imagine what kind of horrible end she met. There are no words to describe how empty I feel when I think about the violence that has occurred on our soil for so long, but most specifically, the violence against women and children.
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One of my favorite Artists is Khalid Kodi, a Sudanese activist, artist and professor. During the Sudanese Civil War he and his wife Nada Mustafa Ali (a researcher, professor, and activist) raised awareness of the plight of the Southern citizens. I've been lucky enough to be recruited on to one of his projects for Healing and Peace. In 2012 he started Artist Movement Engaging Non Violence (A.M.E.N.) in response to the burning of public places of worship by Muslim radicals in Sudan. The temple was significant because Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, essentially people of all faiths, gathered there to worship. To show solidarity, he enlisted several students to create religious paintings as gifts to the church.Depending on our ability to find funders and collaborators, we hope to travel to Sudan and South Sudan within the next year, showcasing the works, and finally delivering them to their destination, the reconstructed house of worship. Alongside this traveling gallery, we hope to provide artistic workshops to promote this idea of healing through expression. There are several other phases of the project that we would like to realize, but for now we are looking for collaborators and support.
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There are many barriers to overcome because the violence is cyclical, permeating all aspects of our society, both in the diaspora and back home. A structural remedy to political and tribal violence begins within the ruling elite Dinka and Nuer, who compose most of the ruling party and are not only known for their regality, but also for their tempers and stubbornness. We tend to be ambivalent towards new concepts and perceive change as threatening to our customs (which if we are honest, could use change because they have historically benefited certain groups over others).I think it is new ideas that we need in order to see true peace. We have to make room for a new generation of leaders. This is not to say that we must completely dismiss those who have served our country since before independence, but the fresh ideas of several educated experts that we have at our disposal need to be allowed to penetrate the current system. It seems as if most of the current political positions are held by elite members of the SPLA, who reshuffle themselves every few years/months. It's important to add diversity of thought and process by adding new faces and giving them actual power. This will break up the power struggle within the party that is becoming nearly ancient.
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