God Grew Tired of Us

If you’re more of a movie person than a book person and are interested in an eye-opening story, watch God Grew Tired of Us. 

God Grew Tired of Us tells the story of the Lost Boys of Sudan, a group (actually thousands) of boys displaced by the civil war in Sudan.  After reading What is the What, I borrowed this documentary from our library.  It’s definitely an eye-opening story.   Maybe it wouldn’t be as eye-opening for someone who followed this story from the get-go, but most of the “lost boys” would be my peers, meaning I would have been in elementary school (maybe younger) when they lost their homes and families, walked across their country, and started calling a refugee camp home.

If you want to see America with fresh eyes, watch the scenes in this documentary of a group of Sudanese refugees climbing onto a plane, seeing an aerial view of their camp, eating airline food, seeing an aerial view of New York, walking on an escalator, turning on a light switch, going to a grocery story, asking about our Christmas traditions…. These scenes feature both comic and sober moments.

The whole story makes me think back to a video our church showed before Christmas that tried to answer the question, “What is poverty?”  In the video, they defined poverty not by a standard of living, but by relationships.  If you suddenly didn’t have a place to sleep tonight or food to eat today, how long would it take you to find a place to sleep and food to eat?  How many people could you call that could give you these things? How many people could a Sudanese refugee call? 

Anyway…the documentary was well-done.  Interesting and informative.  Not your typical boring high-school-history-class documentary. I’d recommend watching it.