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Dateline ACTSudan 03/01Coming to America
California, USA,
June 2001 Some
4,5000 young Sudanese were recently repatriated to the USA. Journalist
Helle May has follow the "Lost boys from Sudan" since 1992 and Dateline
ACT asked her to take a look back on how a few of the boys escaped death
in unimaginable ways to end up in the "Land of Oportunities" Text by Helle Maj, Photo by Jørn Stjerneklar On the barbeque there are enough steaks and sausages to supply a small
army. Thon is bemused by it all: He has only been in the United States
for two weeks. To call his journey to get here long would be a vast
understatement. It started when he was four years old. |
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A
rude awakening The
war in Sudan Kakuma
Camp What
they wrote |
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During his 14-year
long travel to the Silicon Valley, Thon has been shot at, bombs have
been dropped close to him, he has seen friends drown in rivers and others
be eaten by lions and hyenas. He had to escape from Sudan in 1987, he says. He vaguely remembers his life in southern Sudan, when the most pressing problem was to keep the lions away from the cattle that he was shepherding. Then the war reached his home. - I was herding the cattle far away from home when the government army attacked the area. That’s why only my brother and I escaped, Thon Alok Dot explains. They were not the only ones to escape. Nobody knows exactly why they all started walking towards Ethiopia, but around 20,000 boys left their homes in Sudan in the mid-80s and walked across the border to Ethiopia. Their account of why they started walking was that they had heard that they could go to school in the refugee camps there. - When I hear people talk about food they absolutely wouldn’t like to taste, monkeys for example, I just look the other way. We ate everything on our way to Ethiopia. We didn’t have water on our way, so sometimes I forced one of the other boys to urinate in my hands and then I drank it. The words come from one of Thon Alot Dot’s travel companions, Napoleon. The enemies of the rebel movement, SPLA, called them "the child soldiers", and this was not altogether wrong. SPLA had a base just 37 kilometers from the refugee camp in Ethiopia. They took the strongest boys from the camp and made soldiers out of them. The rest of the boys they sent to school, so that there would be an educated elite for government positions, once the fight against Khartoum had been won. - In Ethiopia we were controlled by SPLA. They were in control of the whole camp. Sometimes they came at night and woke you up and said: "Come". No questions - we just had to obey, Napoleon says. - It was bad, but it was going to get worse. THE LUCKY
BOYS This is March 1992. Thon Alot Dot is now eight years old. Along with the rest of the boys, he has been thrown out of the refugee camps in Ethiopia, following an agreement between the Sudanese government and a new Ethiopian government. Thon reaches Kapoeta, and here he sits in long straight lines with the other boys under the scorching sun. Each boy has a little white knapsack made from old emergency supply sack cloth. A man with a long stick maintains discipline among the boys. - I call them the lucky boys, he says to a visiting journalist. For over a month the boys have fought their way through southern Sudan, constantly escaping the approaching war. Some 2000 more are on their way, it is said. The man’s name is Mecak Ajang Alaak, and officially he is the boys’ teacher. Everyone knows that he too is part of SPLA, the resistance movement fighting the fundamentalist Islamic government in Khartoum. He has been following the children all the way through southern Sudan. Another of Thon’s travel companions is Nyak, who is seven years old. He and his mother fled the war in 1988 and walked towards Ethiopia, but she died on the way. - I have heard my father is still alive and I would like to see him. But most of all I want to go to school. We are on our way to a place called Narus and there we will be able to go to a real school, Nyak says. To the question of what the best things in life are, he responds: -To go to school. And the most fun thing? Nyak thinks about it for a while, and then says: - It would be fun to have food to eat all the time.
THEY LACK SOMETHING
THEY DON´T EVEN KNOW WHAT IS - Thousands died. Thousands. Especially when we crossed the Gilo river, Alfred Kolnyin tells. He is yet another of the lost boys. - I really felt shameful when they were sent off from Ethiopia, out on this 700 kilometer trek. All of these children are in a terrible position. They lack something they don´t even know what is. I would say they lack to be loved. The wind would send red dust into their eyes, in their noses, in their throats. There was a severe drought here. And here were 14,000 barefoot children full of optimism. "We are on our way to Narus, where we can go to school". This is what 7-year-old Nyak and all the others thought. But in Narus nothing but dry land met the boys. Only scorpions and snakes thrive here. Here were now thousands of little white knapsacks belonging to an army of disillusioned children. Their paradise was without water, without shade, without schools and without trees to build houses from. And there were no fish in the rivers because the rivers were dry as blackboard chalk. It was not even peaceful because the war was coming closer every day. Another dream was broken for "the lucky boys". OUT OF SUDAN By now the media had named them "the lost boys". They took the name from Peter Pan, who in that fairy tale lives with a group of orphans. As the years went by, the boys abandoned more and more of the traditions of their homeland. Few of them celebrated the traditional initiation to adult life by scarring their faces and having the lower front teeth pulled out. None of them married. Tradition demands that they give cattle to the family of the bride, and they owned no cattle. The Kakuma camp grew steadily up through the 90s with refugees from other African wars and catastrophes. But the number of "Lost Boys" diminished. Some were lucky to find their families, while others returned to their country to fight. A few got the opportunity to study at the university in Nairobi. - And many died in the camp. I have lost a lot of friends. Some died from diseases, others were shot, Alfred Nak Kolnyin says. One day Thon, Alfred and the rest of the lost boys about 4,500 of them received important news from the UN: They could move to the United States and start a new life, if they want to. Most of them did.
THE LAST STOP But that is not what pleases him the most about having moved. It is something much more simple: The joy of going to bed without the fear of dying. This is a feeling that Thon has not enjoyed for fourteen years. - That is the best thing about moving to the USA. We were always afraid, even in the refugee camp. It was not so much the SPLA we were scared of - it was the Turkanas (the tribe living around the camp), they attacked us again and again. There were also a lot of fighting among the different refugees. In that perspective it is nice to have left, he says. Thon hopes that one day he will be able to study social science at a university in the United States, but first of all he needs to find a job, he says. He looks at the children in the playground in the park. They have colorful swings and merry-go-rounds. He is a young man who lost his childhood to war, then he was pulled from a dusty, African refugee camp to be put on a plane and flown to the richest valley in the world in the land of opportunities. It seems to do him good and to hurt at the same time. - If peace returns to Sudan one day I will go home. I miss Africa. The food, my friends, the weather. This is not really food, he says apologetically, lifting up his burger. Pictures to go with this story is available from Photo Oikoumene
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He has walked thousands of miles barefoot, surviving on leaves and roots,
with the belief that if only he walked long enough, he would reach a
better life. 
For
many it became a trek that would be a nightmare of several months. 
-
They are lucky because we give them education. To us a class room is
a tree that brings shadow, the man with the stick continues.
The
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) knew the boys’ escape
route through Sudan and sometimes managed to get emergency supplies
and water to them. But it was no easy task. Conradin Perner from ICRC
says: 
For
Thon Alot Dot, the Kakuma refugee camp in the Turkana desert in Kenya
became his home for the next nine years. Maybe he was a lost boy, but
at the same time he was one of the lucky boys. Of the 20,000 boys that
started fleeing the war in the mid-80s, only 9,000 reached Kakuma. There
are no statistics for how many died on the way, how many tried to return
home, or how many voluntarily or by force had to stay and fight in Sudan.
86
per cent of the refugees in Kakuma are from southern Sudan. The rest
come from Somalia, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, Congo and Ethiopia. 
"When
one of the refugees, Wieu Garang, makes his first visit to the grocery
store, he is amazed by the automatic doors. "I have not been to
where there is electronic houses that when you get into the house, the
house opens itself", Wieu says. "This is one of the confusions".
Gazing around in wonder, Wieu stops and asks, "Does one man own
all this food or does the goverment?".