CBS News' "60 Minutes" on The Lost  Boys of Sudan features IOM

THE LOST Boys (and Girls) of Sudan were named after Peter Pan's posse of orphans. But the 1,000 mile odyssey the ragged, bone-thin refugees endured while shuttling over five years from Sudan to Ethiopia, back to Sudan and finally to Kenya was no fairy tale.

Many of the boys survived the armed attacks on their villages by government and militia troops because they were away tending cattle. Orphaned, they wandered in search of refuge and over half died along the way. Some starved, fell from illness only to be picked off by vultures. Others were attacked by wild animals, including crocodiles, or killed by enemy soldiers. They were judged to be the most badly war-traumatized children ever examined when they finally straggled in a long thin column into Kenya.

A small percentage of the Lost Boys were reunited with their families but by 1996 there were still 17,000 living in refugee camps. In 2001, the US began a resettlement program with IOM which has been judged to be among the most successful such programs ever. Most of the girls were ineligible for resettlement to the US because they had already been fostered with local Sudanese families.

Continue

Reflections on the Sudanese Lost Boys

PICTURE the scene:  Representatives from  IOM, UNHCR, JVA (Church World Service) and the US  Embassy sitting around a conference table on the second floor of a relatively spacious two-story converted home which served as the offices for Church World Services at the time.

Here we sparred; our team – IOM Medical, Cultural Orientation, and Operations staff – and our partners in crime – all engaged in one of the regular resettlement coordination pow wows held every month in Nairobi.

Towering eucalyptus and flowering jacaranda beckoned outside, drawing our attention away from the discussion at hand.  It could have been just another meeting, where we shared respective updates and plans for circuit rides across the continent;   churning out our quarterly numbers for departures, block bookings, medical holds and pending security checks.  However, looking back, I can remember that this particular meeting –somewhere  in early 1999 – turned out to be one of the more memorable (and decisive) meetings I can remember ever sitting through during the span of those 12  years we spent working on resettlement in East Africa.

Two large, significant and equally vulnerable and in-need resettlement population groups were in the pipeline at that time.  Nairobi was one of the largest resettlement processing centers in the world and IOM resettlement staff were working simultaneously in over 30 countries throughout Africa.

Continue

All the News That's Fit to Tweet

HERE'S some breaking news you may not already know about:

• Trafficked children rescued in Senegal
• Fatal fire in Thai refugee camp
• Photo Contest: How migrant domestic workers make a difference

You can find the first two stories here on the IOM website. But if you were a Twitter user, you would have clocked them days ago. Contrary to what many people think, the real beauty of Twitter is that it is the most efficient news vector ever invented.

Those who treat it as a device for self-promotion are simply missing the point.

Still dubious (and let’s face it – most of us are skeptical deep down)? Take a look at what's happening in the world of business. The famous Bloomberg terminal is the backbone of the financial world and there is one sitting on every trader's desk.

According to Investopedia, it's one of the most heavily used and highly regarded professional investment systems in the financial marketplace. Bloomberg is now incorporating Twitter feeds to its terminals.

"If the value of Twitter as a breaking news medium was still in question to anyone, Bloomberg’s decision to integrate tweets into their big-money terminals would seem to answer it," said  Mashable's  Lauren Indvik.

Humanitarian organizations are using Twitter for similar reasons -  it’s the most rapid way invented for getting out the news.