Don't Miss Exceptional Movie Focus on a Part of Africa

Commentary

Africa Tree - Cover Copyright 2012

The upcoming October 3, 2014, release of The Good Lie movie should interest a wide audience, not only those involved with refugee or immigrant issues. I hope readers here will make a point to see this movie.   

Resse Witherspoon's dark-haired lead is on the dramatic side, reminiscent of her June Carter Cash role in Walk the Line. She draws more seriously on the comic side that movie-goers remember from Legally Blonde, as The Good Lie trailer shows. The film includes performances by former refugees from Sudan who returned for scenes they had left behind in their homeland.  

I wrote about Sudan and a place called Juba years ago, and named the article "No Place to Call Home." I feel some connection with other parts of Africa, having studied some and walked streets and driven through towns in Zambia and South Africa. I visited those countries as an onlooker with people vitally involved with refugee and migration issues. I tried to listen and observe as fully as possible.

You may see ads for The Good Lie movie and note the Africa tree photo. It's the same kind of tree on the cover of Refugee Was My Name by Mogama (2012), shown also in the lead photo. Sudan (The Good Lie) and Liberia (Refugee Was My Name) have in common certain historical and present-day experiences. 

Regular people today quietly involve themselves with the ongoing millions of refugees and needs for places to call home...safe places. They continue to take part in good answers, however complicated the moving parts of solutions.


  

Mogama's Ebola-Infected Liberia

Disturbing dreams about guns and killings arise in REFUGEE WAS MY NAME by Mogama, his story of late 20th century civil war in Liberia. He escaped the war and became a refugee, then earned a graduate degree in the U.S., got married, and began a new life. He could not envision the deadly Ebola outbreak this year in his native land.

Mogama once told a roommate in refugee camp about a significant dream for which he foresaw "...a woman who, due to her maturity, becomes the actual leader of Liberia." Almost 20 years later, in 2011, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a Liberian peace activist and Liberia's first woman president, part of the prediction in Mogama's book. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was the first woman elected president of any country in Africa.  Mogama also predicted in his book that peace would come only "in the distance."

Liberia made its slow climb out of the pit of civil war and up to a new presidential election from the news until...Ebola. Today, Ebola quarantines continue in Liberia, and in Liberia's capital of Monrovia, West Point neighborhood, thieves broke into a clinic treating Ebola patients. They stole linens and equipment, infecting the halls and rooms with such fear that some Ebola or supected-Ebola patients fled. It is thought that they, in turn, might pass the the disease to anyone close to them. Ebola is believed to spread by direct contact.

On Mission Liberia updates, Mogama has reported that Dr. Oluwole Olusola, whom many call Dr. Wole, "is a medical doctor, surgeon and psychiatrist who has worked in the medical field for decades...currently lives in Maryland, where he works as the Medical Director at Brentwood Meadows Hospital. 

"Presently Dr. Wole is writing a book on natural health and healing, because he is determined to bring God's natural health and cures to people." 

Natural Ebola treatment ideas follow in this report by Mogama. 
 

Refugee Was My Name by Mogama. Published by Opine Publishing.

Refugee Dreams: Liberian Author in America, Mogama

Twitter @opinaripeople

Disturbing dreams about guns and killings briefly appear in forthcoming book REFUGEE WAS MY NAME by Mogama (Moses Garswa Matally). He based his book on his journal of civil war in Liberia and life in Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana. The dreams reflected the nightmarish events the author went through because of civil war in his homeland, Liberia, starting in 1990. 

     Mogama told a roommate in the refugee camp about one significant dream, and the roommate asked him what he thought it meant. Mogama reflected on the three main warring factions that were tearing up their homeland, Liberia. He then told the meaning that he foresaw, about people in the dream and future leaders in Liberia: 

“The driver represents a ruler of Liberia, but someone other than the three. He despises the three fighters, but he too is unfit to lead the nation. He is just as impatient and power-hungry as the factions he will try to keep under control. He will be highly influenced by a woman, or perhaps will be replaced by a woman, who, due to her maturity, becomes the actual leader of Liberia. The warning in the dream is this: Outbreaks of fighting will continue for some time in Liberia. Peace will eventually come, but it is still in the distance.”

     Should a Christian writer include such a dream in a book, as Mogama did in his new book, Refugee Was My Name? Is it accepted by most readers? I think that what most writers include in personal stories are potent memories, and readers understand and even sympathize with this fact. It is like seeing a movie and being touched by it for different reasons. For Mogama, a real world outcome years later closely resembled his nightmare dream as a refugee...with a hopeful ending. Many writers have life-affecting experiences of suffering that include dreams that retell, warn, inform, or give insight to the dreamer.

     What reminded me of this dream vignette from Mogama's book is that the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a Liberian peace activist and Liberia's first woman president. I have found this news to be especially interesting because Mogama's dream interpretation in his book included that a women would lead Liberia out of its civil war pains.
     Recently, Liberia's slow climb out of the pit of civil war has been in the news more.     People that help through churches or organizations care about the future of this country they may never visit. Refugees of that war care deeply and rejoice to see awake hopes and dreams being given a chance to be fulfilled.

Follow above Links to Guardian UK and ABC news blogs.

Excerpt from Refugee Was My Name by permission of publisher, Opine Publishing, the sponsor of this blog.

Copyright (c)2011 Opinari Writers

Related articles

• Liberia: Polls open in 2nd postwar election - USA Today (news.google.com)
• Observers: Liberia presidential election peaceful (ctv.ca)
• The Power of The Powerless (nfaa.wordpress.com)
• Liberia Police: Ruling Party Office Burns Down (abcnews.go.com)

The Value of a Name - Mogama

A good name is more desirable than great riches; 

to be esteemed is better 

than silver or gold

(Proverbs 22:1 NIV).

Cover by Adazing.com

by MOGAMA

From his book

"If you're ever put at gunpoint, and the gunman says, 'Your name or  your money,' give the robber your money and keep your name, especially if it's a meaningful, good name.

"That's how much people should cherish their names. Slave masters must have known the value of personal names to identify and esteem a people. That's why one of the first things a slave master did was to replace the name of his slave. That new name helped to purge the slave's memory of personal value, and that began to reduce the slave to little more than the master's property.

"If loss of name devalues a person, then there is little difference between a slave with a foreign name and a refugee with a fake name."

From Refugee Was My Name, revolution violence, Pub. 2012, Opine Publishing. 

(c) 2011 Mogama

Change

Faith is much more demonstrated in going where we do not know than sitting where we have been used to.

~ Mogama

Mogama (M.G. Matally) is finishing his forthcoming book: Refugee Was My Name, a personal journal of the Liberian civil war and the internally displaced and refugees of Liberia, from 1989.