Did you see this one? About the Lost Boys of Sudan?
I get a complaint about this being too large, so I'm posting it in two parts. The second part is in my reply to this post. Or just use the link at the bottom of this post.
What the Lost Boys of Sudan found in America
* After surviving a horrific civil war in Africa and years of refugee camps, a small group of San-Diego-based "Lost Boys" are learning that life isn't always easy in paradise.
Alepho Deng missed the 10:52 p.m. bus. He sighed and sat down on the damp bench. The storefronts of east San Diego's Euclid Street were shrouded in winter fog. A Mexican ballad played from somewhere. He shivered and pulled up the hood of his black parka.
Two Latinos wandered out of a Mexican café and headed toward him on wobbly legs. They whispered, then their laughter echoed across the deserted street.
Alepho knew the next bus would come in 13 minutes, putting him downtown in time to catch the 11:30 trolley to Mission Valley. He could still make his midnight shift. As the two Latinos began to pass, Alepho noticed the odd curve of the short one's mouth--halfway between a grimace and a smile. He wondered if he should say hello.
BAM! The air crackled with tiny webs of lightning, and his head jerked forward. The asphalt rushed up, smacked his mouth and broke a front tooth. He started to stand, but someone kicked him in the stomach and he fell again. Alepho knew he had to get up quickly or soon he wouldn't be able to. He scrambled to his feet and wheeled on his attackers. There were three. Alepho's jacket hood had obscured the one who had sneaked up behind and hit him.
"What do you want?" he asked.
Without answering, they came at him. Fending off the blows, he asked again, "What have I done?"
They kept hitting him, saying nothing. He had seen hatred in eyes like theirs many times, but not here in his new country. He rose to his full 6-foot height, his thick chest and arm muscles tight. He hit one man in the jaw. He crumpled and didn't get up. The small one threw a beer bottle. Alepho ducked it. Then the small one pulled a knife. Alepho turned and ran.
He kept running, a half mile down Euclid to the two-bedroom apartment he shared with his brother, Benson, and three other young men also newly arrived from Sudan. Alepho burst through the door. Benson saw blood running from his nose and mouth.
"Some guys beat me up," Alepho gasped. He sat down on the couch for a moment, then fell to the floor, hugging his stomach.
"Which guys?" Benson asked. "Where?"
"At the bus stop."
Benson remembered what he had been told months earlier, shortly before arriving in the United States. In this country, you can rely on the law. He dialed the police. An officer promised help would arrive in 15 minutes.
An hour later, Benson and Alepho were still waiting. Finally, they gave up and tried to sleep. But Alepho could not. He lay awake, mind racing. "I thought when I first go to America I could leave behind all the memories of the terrible problems that happened in Africa," he recalls months after the Feb. 6, 2002 attack. "But when they beat me up, all of the memories came back, and I realized they are still in my blood. It can't go away, even though I grow old, I can still remember them."
Those memories were of Sudan and Kenya, of a village set afire by Islamic raiders 12 years ago; of the last time he saw his mother, his infant brother in her arms, as she yelled at him to run; of crashing through the tangled undergrowth, others fleeing around him; of boys, not yet 10, being shot or stabbed or dying of disease; of a lion pouncing on a boy who had been sleeping beside him one night and his dying screams as he was dragged into the darkness.
Alepho and Benson were the collateral damage of Sudan's bitter civil war between the Islamic government of the north and the Christian/animist Dinka and Nuer tribes of the south. The war has yielded more than 2 million dead, so far. The boys and 17,000 others, some as young as 5, were driven from their homes in 1987, when government troops, planes and tanks burned their villages to the ground. Most of their fathers were murdered, their mothers and sisters sold into slavery. The fleeing boys formed a sprawling column that made its way across 1,000 miles of forbidding terrain, staying first in Ethiopia, then being driven back to Sudan and finally finding sanctuary in Kenya's Kakuma refugee camp. More than 7,000 died along the way.
In 2001, with the help of the United States government and such refugee relief agencies as the International Rescue Committee, Catholic Charities and the Alliance for African Assistance, Alepho, Benson and nearly 3,600 other "Lost Boys" of Sudan were airlifted out and resettled in cities across the United States. Their arrival drew a flurry of public interest, much of it tinged with national pride at U.S. benevolence and with expectations that the Lost Boys were certain to enjoy better lives. As the media spotlight faded, however, so did prospects for understanding the truth about their American experience, which only time can provide.
It has now been 18 months since Alepho, Benson and their cousins, Lino Yier Diing and Benjamin Ajak, all now in their early 20s, came to the United States. They were among some 100 Lost Boys sent to San Diego, to America, that place they'd heard of for years--a dazzling Land of Oz where no one ever went hungry or cold, machines did all the work, everybody was rich, and people lived in harmony.
Benson was 7 years old, Alepho 5. Only two years' difference, but in Dinka culture, Benson was old enough to help tend the family's cattle, which is how Benson happened to be sleeping at his uncle's house in a different village from his parents' home when a huge explosion woke him. Muslim raiders had swept out of the night. The day his parents had warned him about had arrived. Government troops were methodically destroying the homes, livestock and stockpiles of food. A few of the Dinka men fought back with spears, but they were quickly cut down.
Benson's parents had told him to run into the forest if the soldiers came. He did, along with about 25 others, fleeing through the night and eventually joining with hundreds of refugees on a months-long journey to the Ethiopian border. His life and those of his brother and cousins over the next 16 years is a hodgepodge of memories and impressions. Their recollections, from a series of interviews, provide a narrative of their African experience.
As Benson fled toward Ethiopia, he wore only lice-infested underpants; his bare feet were always sore. "I used to sit alone and I don't want to talk to anybody, because I am alone," Benson recalls. "Where is my mother? Where is my father? Where am I going? Am I going to die here by myself?"
He lived in an Ethiopian refugee camp for three years, subsisting on meager handouts from relief agencies. Boys at the camp formed their own support network, sitting around the fire at night, groups of youngsters 5, 8, 10 years old, imitating the tribal gatherings of their villages. "When one of us made a mistake, the others helped him see his mistake," Benjamin says. "We became our own parents."
Then civil war erupted in Ethiopia, and in 1991 government troops forced the Lost Boys back across the treacherous Gilo River to Sudan. More than 2,000 died during the crossing. Some were shot, some drowned. "Many were eaten by crocodiles," Benson recalls. Another series of refugee camps followed, some administered by the Sudan People's Liberation Army--Dinka rebels who were only marginally better than the Muslims. Benson, Benjamin and others were forced into army training camps.
Fly bites transmitted parasitic worms to Benson's bloodstream and they quickly spread through his body, causing large cysts on his arms and legs and a painful inflammation of the eyes known as "river blindness." Camp doctors lanced his eyes without anesthetics, relieving the symptoms but not curing the disease. After suffering for five years, Benson took a couple of tablets of diethylcarbamazine citrate--common dog worm medicine--and rid himself of the parasites.
Eventually, he connected with cousins Benjamin and Lino, and in 1992 the three of them made their way to the town of Kidepo, in southern Sudan near the Kenyan border. There, Benson found a half-brother, Yier Deng. Though food was in short supply, conditions were much better. "One day, about two weeks after I arrived, we were in the hut singing hymns when my half-brother came to the door and said, 'Come on out and see if you can recognize this little boy.' "
Benson and the others stepped into the sunlight and blinked at four thin, dusty boys. One seemed vaguely familiar, the one with stringy muscles and intelligent but melancholy eyes. Then he smiled, and Benson noticed a familiar gap in his front teeth. "I asked him his name," Benson says. "He told me 'Alepho,' and then we knew. We threw our arms around each other and cried."
Alepho said the family had spent months looking for Benson, but finally had given him up for dead. Three years later, Muslim troops attacked the family's village and Alepho fled into the forest without looking back. Eventually, after moving among refugee camps at the southern tip of Sudan, he too made his way to Kidepo to find Yier Deng.
Soon after the boys' reunion, the Muslims attacked Kidepo, and the Deng brothers and their cousins fled to Kenya, where they spent the next nine years in the massive refugee camp of Kakuma. They later learned that their father was dead. They heard rumors that they've never been able to verify that their mother and youngest brother were still alive somewhere in Sudan.
As the 100 Lost Boys arrived in San Diego in 2001, each was assigned to one of three charitable organizations to help with their adjustment. For the first 90 days, the U.S. government agreed to pay rent for apartments they shared and issue them food stamps and bus passes. During that period, rescue committee workers would instruct them on everything from language to American customs and social manners to office skills and applying for work. After three months, they were to be self-supporting.
"We thought it was going to be chaos when they got here," says Brianna Higgins, a job developer for the International Rescue Committee, which was assigned 37 of the young men, including Benson, Alepho, Lino and Benjamin. "These men never had any parents. They're all going to get into drugs. They're going to be wild; it's going to be 'Lord of the Flies!' "
But then the first of the Lost Boys arrived. They were polite, cordial and smiled easily. "Everyone who meets them falls in love with them right away," says Higgins. "They're honest, they're clean, they're upstanding, dedicated and very, very caring about everybody. They've been able to maintain this purity and innocence that glows. It's a strong testament to the human spirit."
The staff was also surprised by their English skills and their level of education. After nine years in Kakuma schools, most were highly skilled in mathematics, well-versed in science and spoke three or four languages.
Higgins recalls coaching the boys on using the telephone. "I would sit at a desk across the room and give them my extension number. Then I left them alone. They'd stare at the phone. They'd push the buttons without picking up the receiver. I'd say, 'No, you have to pick that up.' Then they'd hold the receiver at arm's length and hold it so long before they dialed that it started buzzing. It made you realize how complicated a telephone is. I had to explain every facet: dial tone, busy signal, how you can't push the buttons down too long, and so on."
Clearly, the Lost Boys were lost, which is how Judy Bernstein came into the lives of Benson, Alepho, Lino and Benjamin. Bernstein is a vivacious 50-year-old blond. She and her husband, a surgeon, and their 13-year-old son live in Rancho Santa Fe, one of the wealthiest white-bread communities in the United States. Bernstein says she volunteered for the work expecting to live out a Big Sister commercial--taking the boys to the zoo, to theme parks, laughing as they flew kites on the beach.
On their first afternoon together, she took them to Wal-Mart for clothes. They gaped at the endless rows of textiles and gadgets, including some that looked like futuristic handguns. "Those are hair dryers," Bernstein explained. Benson couldn't wrap his mind around it. Why would you buy a machine to dry your hair? It dries on its own.
They came upon a 10-foot-high display of Slim-Fast bars. "What is that?" Benson asked. "You eat those to get thin," an embarrassed Bernstein explained. Benson's brow wrinkled. "Many Americans eat too much and get fat," she continued. "Well, once they get fat, they eat these to get thin again."
And the money we spend to get thin, she thought, could probably feed all of Sudan.
Later, she took them to the supermarket, its bins overflowing with produce, cases filled with marbled meat, shelves laden with baked goods. "They couldn't believe it," Bernstein says. "They asked, 'You mean, you just take the food and put it in your cart? How many?' I said, 'As many as you want.' "
She also took them to the zoo. The young men looked at various African species, nodded and said matter of factly: "I've eaten that."
In her diary, she recorded a visit to McDonald's:
Alepho: "We think Americans are beautiful people."
Bernstein: "Really? Why do you think they are beautiful?"
Alepho: "They look nice."
Bernstein: "I think many Americans are too fat. It's not healthy."
Alepho: "I want to be fat!"
Bernstein: "You won't live long."
Lino held up his arm, pointed to his well-defined bicep and forearm and said: "You see the muscles."
Bernstein: "Americans like to see the muscles."
Lino shook his head. "Look ugly."
Then the Big Sister bubble burst. One of Bernstein's girlfriends had season tickets to the San Diego Padres and gave her seats to a game. Bernstein and her girlfriend always sat next to a retired gentleman and his wife. "He always talked to us throughout the games," Bernstein says. "He was a fountain of baseball trivia and very warm and friendly.
"When I took Benson, Alepho and Lino to the game, I was excited to introduce him to the guys." But when she showed up with the three black youths, the man stared out at the ball field in frigid silence. "He never said anything to me the entire game," Bernstein says. "It shut me down pretty quickly."
On the drive home, she began to recall how when walking with them on the street, hands tightened around purses, body language stiffened, and wary glances were cast their way. The game "was a turning point," she says. "I said to myself, 'This isn't going to just be outings to baseball games and theme parks. I'm going to help these guys get jobs and do whatever else they need to do to get on their feet.' The guy at the ballpark didn't do or say anything, but that's the subtle form of prejudice that my guys would encounter when they went out to find a job. And they wouldn't even know it."
"Filling out job applications, you and I think it's simple, but it's not," says Higgins, the job developer. "Last name first." But the boys would ask, "'Why if it's my last name does it go first?' "
latimes.com |
