The Lost Boys

Best known among the Sudanese refugees were the Lost Boys of Sudan, a group of boys, mostly young men by 2001, who were separated from their families during the worst days of Sudan’s civil war in the early 1990s. They escaped the murderous carnage in their villages by taking to the surrounding jungle. There were no adults among them, and the boys’ ages at the time ranged from three to sixteen years. To survive, they learned to fend for themselves, and among a host of frightening experiences, they later recounted, they were forced to swim across a crocodile-infested river to the relative safety of the opposite bank. During the harrowing swim, it was said, many boys disappeared, never to emerge on the other side. Some probably drowned, and some were likely eaten by the crocodiles. The boys told their tales with little emotion, the trauma of their experiences still raw even years later.

Once on the other side, the ordeal continued. Without food, the boys foraged in the jungle; they were attacked by wild animals or died of hunger and dehydration and exposure and untreated disease. Finally, miraculously, many of the boys made it to the safety of Kakuma, a refuge of wonder after their experiences. Once they were registered by the UN, the boys were allowed to live in small groups sharing the mud huts; they had, after all, become family. They were enrolled in school, and most became eager students.

When they first arrived at Kakuma, I was told, many were unable to talk about the terror they’d survived and told their stories through crude drawings depicting their ordeals. By the time I arrived in Kakuma, many of them worked in the clinics as assistants, and they were eager to share their own stories. Francis, a six-foot-tall young man of about twenty, worked alongside me one day in the clinic, and, with a surprising lilt to his voice, he told me that he was one of the Lost Boys.

“I’ve heard the stories,” I said during a break between patients. “It must have been just terrible.”

He pulled up a chair and sat down, a fine sheen of sweat covering his brow. “Very bad,” he said, picking his front teeth with a small wooden twig. “We traveled for days through very bad conditions.” He slipped the twig into his shirt pocket and sat very still. “I am one of the lucky ones, you know.” He paused and plucked a paper from the notebook he’d carried to the clinic. I’d assumed it was for taking notes, but when he opened the pages, I saw drawings—some colorful, some stark pencil sketches—all dramatic pictures of rivers and animals. He placed the loose paper on the desk in front of me, and my mouth fell open as I saw what he had drawn. It was a crude sketch of a young boy at the edge of a river—crocodiles in front of him, lions behind.

“Is this you?” I asked, pointing to the image of the boy.

He nodded. “We couldn’t tell our stories when we first came, so we were given notebooks and colored pencils and asked to draw what happened. This is my story.” He passed the notebook to me and I turned the pages slowly. The first pages were drawings of fire—bright orange flames eating at small brown huts. I lingered over the last—the one depicting small figures in the flames. “Your village? Your family?” I asked.

He shrugged and flipped the pages until he came to pictures of greenery—shrubs and tall grass and trees. “This was where we hid from the government troops who wanted to kill us. They’d burned our villages, killed our families, and we ran and ran, and hid in there, until it was safe to go on.”

My own heart pounded listening to his story. “How did you know it was safe?”

“When the only sounds we heard were the animals—the lion’s roar was the one we dreaded most—we knew that the lions would eat us before the crocodiles could get close enough. The lions attacked and ate some of my friends, and I could do nothing. I was helpless, so I ran and hid.”

He spoke, not in the fearful way of someone reliving fresh memories but in the practiced, flat monotone of someone who’s grown used to retelling the same story. It seemed to me that he’d released his sadness into his drawings so that he could manage to live again. “This one,” he said, pointing to a rough sketch of a stick figure in the mouth of a lion, “was my friend, Joseph. He didn’t make it.”

“The lions?” I asked.

Francis didn’t answer. He pushed the notebook away and closed it. “Things are better now. You know they are sending some of us to America?”

I shook my head. “To visit? To tell your stories?”

He sat forward. “No, no. We are going there to live.” For the first time since he began to tell his story, he smiled, a wide, toothy grin that made him seem not so far from the little boy who’d escaped Sudan all those years ago. “Your country is taking us in. Understand? Some have left already. More are going this month.”

I’d seen the planes, usually on Sundays, as they’d landed and idled just outside the camp—a line of young man standing nervously, clutching new backpacks, as they’d waited to board. I’d wondered if they were going to Nairobi for work or school. Hundreds of refugees had invariably gathered to watch, their heads all rising as the plane lifted into the sky. I hadn’t known then that the young men flying away were the envy of everyone else in the camp, that just about every single camp dweller—Ethiopians, Somalis, Ugandans, Congolese—all longed to be the next to go. In Pakistan, the Afghan refugees I’d met had only wanted to go home, but here, the refugees, to a person, it seemed, wanted to join those boys on their flights to freedom.

“I hope to be in the next group.” Francis explained that several times a month a list of sixty or so of the Lost Boys who were headed to the United States was posted on bulletin boards throughout the Sudanese section of the camp.

“You don’t know until you see your name on the list that you’re going? They don’t just tell you?”

“There are too many of us. It is better that way. No arguments.”

Days later, I saw a group of young Sudanese men gathered around one of the camp’s bulletin boards. Some were gesturing excitedly, others were searching the list, still others—heads down, shoulders sagging—were turning away. I felt my own shoulders slump knowing that the last group likely hadn’t seen their names on the cherished list.

IOM (International Office of Migration), the agency coordinating the Lost Boys’ migration to the United States, had regular meetings in the recreation center with the young men who’d be leaving soon. Intended as an orientation to American life and traditions, the young men sat and watched as the tutors explained refrigerators, flush toilets, telephones, supermarkets, and more. The boys listened wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and I wondered if they’d remember any of this. Each would be assigned to a different city—Dallas, Phoenix, Chicago, Boston, and more.

They gathered around maps of the United States, studying the places they’d been assigned. “Will it be cold?” a young man named Gabriel asked. He was headed to Chicago and was nervous that the weather would be bad and that his English might not be good enough to get by. The IOM representative reassured Gabriel and the rest, but they shuffled their feet and seemed to pay little attention. “But, will it be cold?” he asked again.

“Yes,” the tutor said, pulling an ice cube from the small cooler at his feet. He dropped the frozen ice into Gabriel’s hand. We watched as he shivered, and suddenly the one hundred degree temperature, the dust and the dirt all faded away as the tutor described snow and ice and bitter winds. Gabriel’s deep blue-black skin seemed to grow pale. “Will I get a coat?” he asked. The tutor nodded and moved on to a description of the next city—Phoenix—which, he explained, had the familiar warmth of Sudan.

The planes continued to take off, a few even landed carrying visitors, and we all watched as several news organizations, including a crew from Sixty Minutes, disembarked to chronicle the Lost Boys’ journeys. I never did see Francis after our day at the clinic. I assumed he’d made the coveted list and left us all behind.

I met several of the boys a year or so later in Boston when they presented to the emergency room where I was working, with minor complaints. They were invariably exhausted from working long hours and adjusting to the pace of life in the United States. Samuel, twenty years old, was working the night shift in a supermarket earning minimum wage and hoping to attend a local high school during the daytime. He shared a small apartment with four other Lost Boys, and together, they were learning to use the stove and to shop and to navigate the confusing maze of Boston’s streets. Although he’d planned to attend high school and then college, Samuel just couldn’t muster the energy it all required.

“I must take two buses to work,” he told me, “and if I forget the stop, I am lost and I must go back to the beginning and start my trip once again.” The simplest tasks seemed to require the greatest concentration and energy. “Our stove has no flame, just coils that get hot and turn red and burn our food. And our neighbors don’t talk to us. I thought, we all thought, it would be different here. I think maybe I’d like to go home.”

“Sudan?” I asked.

“Yes. I’d like to see if any of my family is there. If I can find them and bring them here to be with me, it would be better.”

I saw Samuel and some of the others intermittently in the ER and later in the clinic. They were all lonely, for although they had friends among the Lost Boys’ community, those were forced friendships, and though they had much in common, like all of us, they had many differences. Some wanted to go to college. Some wanted only to go home. A few had discovered the solace that alcohol offered. Samuel was one of those. He lost his job and, later, his apartment. His roommates had moved on, one becoming a kind of minister and mentor to the boys like Samuel, who had such trouble fitting in.

I lost touch with Samuel and assumed he’d been able to find his way home. Then one day a public defender called me. Samuel had been arrested for public drunkenness and lewd behavior. He’d apparently urinated in the middle of a crowded street. The attorney asked if I would write a letter on Samuel’s behalf, explaining that Samuel was a stranger in what surely seemed to him a strange land. I wrote the letter. The judge issued a continuance of the case without finding, which meant that as long as he stayed out of trouble, the charges would be dropped. Samuel was able to get a cell phone. Though he was living in a shelter, he managed to stay in touch—calling or coming to see me at the hospital. And then, he was gone.

Without a trace.

I asked some of the other boys if they’d seen him. No one had. They promised to keep an eye out, but it was as if he’d disappeared into thin air. It’s been a few years now, and there’s been no word. His cell number now belongs to someone else. There’s no way to know how he is, or where he is, so I’ve decided to hope for the best—he’s surely at home in the dust and heat of Sudan, happy at last to just fit in.

But the new reality of South Sudan is one of familiar misery. Civil war and famine have broken out again; young men are plucked away to fight for one side or another. For many, the choice is easy—fighting offers food, camaraderie, and something to do.¹

These days, I rarely see the others. Many have learned to find their way here. Appliances, stores, even bus routes have become easier to navigate. Many are still working several jobs and attending school while they dream of finding success here; others dream only of returning to Sudan, but the war there holds them back. Several have graduated from the University of New Hampshire, a feat of enormous proportions for those boys who, not so long ago, were confused by the workings of a handheld can opener.