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Lost Boy found Sudanese refugee fulfills dream of education, builds new life in U.S. By Sandra Sarr Standing on the banks of the Nile River—as have generations of boys during southern Sudan’s dry season—Joseph Akuei led a calf to water one placid morning as temperatures climbed to 100 degrees. Suddenly, massive gunfire pierced the hot, still air, and thousands of boys scattered to places unimagined. Joseph, age 5, had to rely on himself to survive since his mother and father were 30 miles away in the family’s village. Scanning the smoke-filled sky, he saw bullets rain out of helicopters hovering overhead and people and animals fall to the parched earth. Wild-eyed and barefoot, the child ran for his life. Instinct kept him moving east, eventually joining other boys who had escaped the attack by Sudanese government troops dispatched from Khartoum in northern Sudan. War was nothing new to the region. The 1955-72 civil wars that ravaged southern Sudan had reignited in 1983, the year before Joseph was born. But to the 5-year-old, that day the bombs fell out of the sky, it seemed as though the world had come to an end. And in some ways it had, for that’s the day Joseph became one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, a term international relief organizations used to describe boys torn from their parents by war. Now 25, he has not seen his family in 20 years.
Joseph, so named when he was baptized at age 2, is a member of the Dinka ethnic group comprised of 26 tribes in Sudan, Africa, a place ravaged for generations by political, economic and religious strife. Southern Sudan’s historic vulnerability to outside forces, civil wars and tribal skirmishes has led survivors in the region to highly value education as a means of improving their lives. Yet, by the time Joseph was old enough to attend school, unstable conditions had closed most of them. “I spent many hours documenting their struggle to receive what most Lost Boys said they wanted more than anything else in the United States—an education,” wrote Mark Bixler in his book, The Lost Boys of Sudan. Visions of an education and a safe harbor in Ethiopia helped sustain the Lost Boys as they made the arduous trek when it was too dangerous to go home. The boy survivors of the Nile attack walked for months on bare feet, traveling mostly during the night to avoid being attacked. Joseph joined that human river flowing for months through bush lands and jungle toward an Ethiopian refugee camp. Unlike thousands of others who succumbed to famine, dehydration and attacks by wild animals, Joseph survived the 450-mile walk—roughly the distance from Tacoma, Washington to Missoula, Montana—to Panyido, Ethiopia. There he lived in a self-built hut for four years along with 10,000 other southern Sudanese boys in a camp run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. But in 1991, the camp was attacked by rebels overthrowing Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Miriam. With rebels firing on them, the Lost Boys fled again, staggering across treacherous terrain back into Sudan, where it remained unsafe to return home, if such a place still existed. Thousands perished. That year, Joseph turned 9, and he had yet to enter a classroom. “I learned my ABCs and my 123s,” he said, “but I had to start fresh when I made it to Kenya.” Kakuma, Kenya, was where the Lost Boys fled in 1991, still vulnerable to massacre and military conscription as child soldiers in their homeland. By 1993, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had directed 28,000 Sudanese refugees to a camp in Kakuma, “a broiling tabletop plain of northwestern Kenya,” wrote Bixler. Joseph, whose first language is Dinka/Thuongjang, learned to speak English while going to school in the Kenyan refuge camp for nine years. By the time the U.S. opened its doors to the Lost Boys, Joseph was 18. His hope and determination stronger than ever, he flew from Kenya to the U.S. on a four-day journey. Landing at SeaTac Airport in December of 2000, he peered out the window and saw that the earth was blanketed in white. Joseph and the 250 Lost Boys of Sudan now living in Washington had survived 120-degree heat but had never seen snow. There would be many adjustments to make, and Washington’s weather was one of the hardest for him. He and two cousins were met by a Catholic Community Services worker, who drove them to Tacoma. The social worker delivered Joseph, still a minor, to a foster family’s home, where he stayed for seven months. Soon he was on his own again. He found a part-time job while going to school and renting an apartment near Tacoma Community College with his two cousins, the same ones he escaped with when he was 5. Never before had the U.S. government welcomed refugees such as these—young people unaccompanied by parents and unfamiliar with everyday life in the modern world, according to author Mark Bixler. When well-meaning Americans asked Joseph about his life in Africa, he struggled with what to say. “Why was he alone at age 5? What caused the war? Where is his family now, and how could he, the oldest child in his family, not know until 1993 that two of his five siblings had died of famine? Will he return to the Sudan? How could he afford the $3,000 it took to send his brother to Australia to find refuge? What did he do to survive when so many died around him? When did he learn his mother was still alive and that his father died when he was in Kenya? Does he still remember his mother’s face?” Answers to the often-painful questions were frequently met with incredulous stares. With no frame of reference, how could Americans understand his complex experience? Where to begin to explain, he wondered. Joseph would prefer to forget memories like the ones relief workers report about Lost Boys being forced to eat soft mud and drink their own urine to survive, about motherless and fatherless boys being eaten by lions, crocodiles or hyenas, or about thousands sucked under the swollen Gilo River while fleeing gunfire. Joseph said he ate leaves and wild animals killed by older children on their long journey. And he remembers willing himself to endlessly walk when his frail body just wanted to lie down under a bush and sleep. He remembers praying, “God, if I die, let me die in my sleep, without suffering.” Counselors have urged him to forget. But he tells his story to remember and honor the boys who walked alongside him, those who encouraged him to go on even as they were left behind to die. Through 13 years in refugee camps without family or much schooling, he never lost hope that—if he lived—an education would transform his life. While many of the 3,800 Lost Boys in the U.S. struggled to pass the GED, Joseph rejected advice to take the test and enrolled at Foss High School while stocking shelves at Grocery Outlet at night. A year and a half later, in 2001, he graduated from Foss and enrolled at Tacoma Community College. In 2005, he got admitted to the University of Washington Tacoma, where he studied six hours a day outside of class, worked part time and consistently made the dean’s list. Last June, he earned a bachelor’s degree in politics and values with a human rights minor. His cousins cheered when the UWT chancellor recognized Joseph and his extraordinary achievements at the commencement ceremony. Now he’s working two jobs—in the UWT computer lab and at Western State Hospital in psychiatric security—with plans for graduate school next year. For the first time in his life he feels safe. “He appreciates being in the U.S. a lot,” says Chan Mom, his UWT supervisor of three years. “He’s great to work with—polite and reliable. He likes to joke around, too. We tell him, ‘You could walk for a whole month, but we can’t even get students to walk across campus to the copy center!’” Sitting in an office on the UW Tacoma campus, a brilliant white smile flashes across Joseph’s ink-black face. He is focused on his future. “I will go for a master’s degree in international relations, and I will find a job with the United Nations helping people around the world who have suffered like me,” he said. He might even serve on the Human Rights Commission. Next year he wants to visit the banks of the Nile where he was attacked. “I want to see for myself how people who are still alive managed to survive two decades of civil war in the same place I left 20 years ago,” he said. He could see his mother for the first time in two decades instead of settling for talks interrupted by bad telephone connections. And he wants to start a family of his own once he’s established in a career. “I want my kids to have a good future. I don’t want them to have a childhood like mine,” he said. “I am my own judge. I have to decide for myself what is good.” He will use his best judgment to teach his children what he knows of the world so that they may never lose their way. |
