I hope this works out for Darfur...

Not sure, Freeduck. When will it be? In five years? Who will have access? Who's gonna pay for it? Who's not gonna get in on the deal and be pissed off?

I doubt people will see ANY benefits from this anytime soon.

Hip-hop stars tend to escape from the ghetto in the back of a stretch limo, clutching a record deal and dripping with gold jewellery. But for Emmanuel Jal, who headlines the Greenbelt Arts Festival this week, the journey has been very different.

Jal grew up amid war and violence in the Christian south of Sudan. His father left home to fight for the Sudanese People's Liberation Army against the Muslim north and never returned. His mother died when he was seven, and Jal was sent 600km on foot to Ethiopia by the SPLA. He thought he was being sent to school, but ?'school' became a training ground for a generation of child-soldiers known as the ?'lost boys', who first saw action in the Ethiopian civil war.

"I learned how to live as an adult from the age of eight. We had to build our own huts and cook our own food. It wasn't easy," he explains. He also learned how to use an AK-47. "I have no good memories of my childhood. Everything is war and violence, from as early as I can remember."

Once the cause in Ethiopia became lost, Jal and thousands of others returned home to Sudan, to bolster the SPLA's forces.

Along the way, he faced many deadly enemies - helicopter gunships and minefields by day, wild animals by night (which ate many of his comrades) and always hunger and thirst. "At times things were so bad that we were faced with having to eat fellow soldiers who had been killed. But I will not eat human beings. So I prayed. I asked God to give me something to eat." And God, he believes, answered his prayers, providing both food and drink against the odds.

"There came a point when there was not enough water. Fellow soldiers were forcing each other to urinate into cups so they could drink. But they never survived. One day we gathered under a tree, waiting to die. I said, ?'God, if you are there, give us water to drink.' And then I prayed the Lord's prayer. I was only a child, but I was serious. A small cloud formed itself on top of the tree. A hundred metres away from the tree, it was dry. But under the tree, it was wet."

Jal clearly believes that someone was looking out for him. "An old lady told me that when my mother was pregnant, she used to pray for me: ?'God watch over this child. You sent this child to be someone great.' I believe there's a God somewhere and he's keeping me for a purpose."

The turning point in Jal's life was certainly little short of miraculous. After fighting in the southern city of Juba for the SPLA, he then made another gruelling trek on foot to Waat, on the Upper Nile, to join a different rebel faction. There, he came face to face with the controversial British aid worker Emma McCune, who had married the ruthless Sudanese warlord Riek Machar. Out of thousands of child-soldiers in the camps at Waat, McCune took Jal under her wing, and managed to demobilise him. She smuggled him in a box of aircraft parts to safety in Nairobi, Kenya, where she sent him to school for the first time...