By Kathleen Acuff

Talia Recht, left, introduced Los Altos High School students to Ben Makit, a survivor of the genocide in Sudan.

Ben Makit came to the United States two years ago, knowing no English, as one of the “lost boys” of Sudan. Now majoring in business at De Anza College and holding down a job, he also works to bring the attention of the world to the continuing murder of his people in Sudan’s Darfur region, where 70,000 die every week and 2 million civilians have been displaced in two decades of havoc.

A lost boy no longer, “I consider myself to be found by the American people,” the 24-year-old told Los Altos High School students March 8.

Makit spoke to six assemblies in one day at the invitation of senior Talia Recht, who had prepared an informative, moving and disturbing presentation that included a powerful slide show and a clip from the documentary “The Lost Boys of Sudan.”

The day was the culmination of Talia’s senior project, although it will continue to have an effect as the letters she prepared for students to sign - she will send them - to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the U.N. Security Council and the area’s congresswomen are read and, she hopes, heeded. Talia distributed 1,300 packets of letters to students before the end of the day.

The project was a natural for her. She told her classmates that all her grandparents survived the Holocaust, but other relatives were murdered by the Nazis. People must “stand up and say, ‘No’” to genocide, as other countries finally did to the Nazis, she said.

“Today I am raising my voice … to stop the killings in Sudan,” she announced.

Makit told the gathering that he was a child playing with his cousins when there was a boom and a flash “like lightning in the sky.” He went home and found his mother shot to death and his father and brother gone. He ran and climbed a tree, where he spent the night. He soon met other boys and displaced people, and together they walked to East Africa - “we didn’t know where it was,” he said - and back, seeking a haven.

The tall, slim young man with the idiomatic English called his experience “that nightmare thing that happened in my life.”

“What happened to me should not happen again,” he said. He urged his listeners to send letters saying “This is genocide” to Congress. The slaughter continues in Darfur in the south, but most of the deaths in West Sudan are from lack of water and food, he said.

Makit firmly believes his repeated statement that the United States is the only nation in the world capable of stopping the carnage.

Will Makit return to Darfur?

“Of course, I will,” he said, as if there could be no question. “I want to go back to help people.”