War-affected refugee cum Winnipeg Hip Hop prodigy, Samuel Mijok Lang, a.k.a. Hot Dogg is rapping his way into the hearts and ear-phones of North Americans. Hot Dogg is a “Lost Boy”, a name borrowed by the UNHCR in reference to the forest dwelling orphans in Disney’s Peter Pan; it was an apt title for the 33,000 child refugees who made the 16 hundred kilometer journey out of southern Sudan. Little Hot Dogg was among the children aged between 4 and 9 that walked single file across the grassy plains of an unforgiving African landscape towards Ethiopia.
The journey to Ethiopia took four months and thousands of boys perished along the way from starvation, dehydration, disease, attacks by Arab militias and wild animals, and bombing raids. Twenty-six thousand of the child survivors reached Ethiopia, but refugee life was not easy, as Hot Dogg describes, “It was like a death camp, with hunger and disease everywhere you looked.”
After only a year in Ethiopia the children were forced to flee again when rebel for