Christopher Quinn

Christopher Quinn’s new documentary, God Grew Tired Of Us, opens in Kakuma, a Sudanese refugee camp in Northern Kenya. But the inspiration for the film goes back to Rwanda in 1994, while Quinn was watching a news story about the country’s horrific civil war.

“I had such a great issue with media in general in America,” he says. “I remember the story that was covered on the nightly news was on the concern for the endangered gorillas. People were tramping through their terrain to escape the war. And I thought, what an incredibly misguided story. You want to preserve the gorillas, but meanwhile, 300,000 people have been hacked and murdered, you know? I couldn’t get my head around that, that it could go unrecognized.”

Quinn wanted to give Americans a more personal look at some of the atrocities in Africa; to put a human face on these events and make it harder for Americans to turn a blind eye to this continent that oftentimes seems so distant. His film follows three of the Sudanese refugees known as the Lost Boys, as they leave Kakuma, hoping for a better life in the U.S.

Though John Bul Dau, Panther Blor and Daniel Abol Pach all have leadership roles in the refugee camp, life there is very difficult. “They might eat for 10 days and not eat for five,” says Quinn. “Those five days are called ‘the black days.’ We were watching the people collectively starve. By the third day, camp almost became silent.”

But as Quinn and his crew followed the young men to their new homes in Syracuse, N.Y., and Pittsburgh, Pa., it quickly became apparent that their struggle wasn’t going to end with their arrival in America. Working multiple jobs to pay bills and send money home to friends and relatives in East Africa, there’s little time or money left for college. “They are so communal in the way they were raised,” Quinn says, “so they take it on as a real responsibility.”

And a life where every hour was spent in community with fellow refugees is replaced by one spent in a culture that is extremely difficult to penetrate. As Quinn tries to show Americans the results of African atrocities, it’s equally disturbing to look at our own culture through unfamiliar eyes. “One of the things people come away with from the film—something I didn’t really see as I was filming—was the critique on America. It’s easy to see where the excess is. The Lost Boys came here and were evaluating everything. John is hoping to see a communal celebration at Christmas, but it’s all quantifiable materialism.”

Never forgetting the people he left behind, former Lost Boy John Bul Dau is now the director of the Sudan Project at Direct Change, raising money for medical and educational needs among the Sudanese still in East Africa (for more information, visit DirectChange.org/Sudan).