Writing It Real member Betty Shafer met five of the Lost Boys of the Sudan during a time that she was mourning personal losses and considering a major life change. Entwining their story of tragedy and survival during an historic upheaval with reflections on events in her own life, Betty arrives at clarity, strength, and renewed faith in the human spirit as well as renewed faith in her own ability to meet life’s challenges.

Lost and Found: On Meeting the Lost Boys of Sudan
by Betty Shafer

I visited my son Mark and his wife Sharon in Washington State early August 2001, just days before terrorists brought down the Twin Towers in New York City. While in Seattle, I met five of The Lost Boys of Sudan. The Lost Boys are not a band staying forever young like Peter Pan’s orphans. They were driven from their homeland by terrorists. As children, they were forced to find a way to stay alive in the African wilderness.

In the 1980’s southern Sudanese villages were caught in the middle of a civil war. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) were revolutionaries, mostly Christian with traditional beliefs, and they fought the Muslim government’s military. 

Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) fighters forced men to fight or be killed. Some of the boys were kidnapped and used as cannon fodder or forced to walk through minefields. The revolutionaries carried off the girls and women and chased away the boys who were too young to fight. Old people were shot. More than two million people died. Beginning in 1987, 20,000 children, mostly boys between seven and 17 years of age were displaced by this war. Only half would survive.

Then the Sudanese government soldiers came and tried to force men and boys to fight with them. The systematic violence and destruction, the terrorism of that war, is considered to be one of the most brutal of the century.

But these five Lost Boys were in America now, safe. John, James, and Anthony, the boys’ new Christian names, stayed with “Uncle” Mark and “Aunt” Sharon. Leno and Augustino bunked with another sponsor who lived a few blocks away. The five, together since birth, were uneasy about sleeping that far from each other. Because they had lost parents and friends and relatives they stuck together, as survivors do.

In sharp contrast to a mat on a dirt floor in a refugee camp, the three guests lived in a spacious family room with a bed for each and a private bathroom. They had only three weeks with their sponsor family to learn how to live in America, where everything, from televisions to telephones to microwaves, was new to them.        

I come to Washington State to consider moving, to think about the “tiny disaster drills” of my normal everyday life, as Amanda Ripley calls them. Experiencing burnout after 20 years of nursing in busy inner-city emergency rooms, I was thinking of moving to the small town where my son Mark and his wife Sharon live, a town closer to some of my other children than LA. I wanted a quieter life away from freeway jams, concrete and noise. I wanted to see green trees, smell the pine air and hear birds sing, to live in a home where I could sit with a cup of coffee and see snow-capped mountains instead of my neighbor’s window.

But I was afraid.

What would moving away from friends and sunshine and sandy beaches, away from southern California where I had lived most of my long life, mean? Could I find work, buy a house, and, most of all, would I be accepted in a tight-knit community where many people lived their entire lives in the same small town?        

I thought of recent losses; the death of a son, a middle child, schizophrenic, who treated himself with drugs and alcohol until he lay cold on a bathroom floor; my mother, at age 94 ravished by Alzheimer’s and wondering why that little girl was sitting in the corner of her room at the nursing home; my only brother, his lung cancer diminishing him like a plague until he was just a shadow, all three passing within four years of each other; and finally, the end of a long-term love affair that grieved me almost as much as the deaths that preceded it.

The five Lost Boys had emerged from their plane in Seattle after a 24-hour trip from Kakuma Camp in East Africa. The clothes they wore were their only clothes. Each clutched a small paper bag that held a passport and other essential documents. At the top of the ramp, they stood frozen, eyes wide, as they took in the panorama of white faces cheering and bearing signs of welcome.

When we met, four of the five were around 19 or 20 years of age. They weren’t quite sure, except for James, who was 17 and lied about his age so he wouldn’t be separated from the others.

In Dinka culture, elders are revered. To meet me, they lined up single file at a respectful distance from the chair where I sat. One by one they approached, bowed and gently shook my hand as if I were a queen holding court. They told me their names, and said, “Hello, Mama.” I later realized that every time they arrived to, or left someone’s house, there was a handshake and a hello or goodbye with everyone in the room.

The young men, their skin undiluted by other races, were black as the original African Mother. Their hair, shorn close to their heads, accented thin faces with chiseled cheekbones. They wore donated pants that bagged on their slender hips and T-shirts with Mickey Mouse or Budweiser logos. Their arms, as they reached a hand to mine, were painfully thin. The men were so tall they ducked through doorways, but because of malnutrition they were still shorter than most Dinka men who averaged six-and-a-half to seven feet tall. Their eyes were alive, even smiling. In the way they stood, walked, and spoke, they wore the countenance of survivors, humble yet proud of what they’d accomplished. Their English, learned in camps, was fairly good. They spoke Swahili and Arabic as well.

John, a natural leader, was the oldest and most verbal. His front teeth were bucked as custom dictated, while the others’ front teeth had not been pushed forward before they were chased from their village. Those without bucked teeth would not have been considered handsome in their culture.

Over the next few days, we asked the men to tell us about life before coming to America.  Sometimes their faces, in grimaces, reflected how painful it was to talk about, but they answered without hesitation because, we later learned, they would think it impolite not to answer truthfully.

We’re told that Muslim government armies were fighting to have the entire country embrace Islam. The resistance were those who didn’t want to be Muslim. Because of the cruelty on both sides, the men feared Islam and Christianity, something they never had feared living in a peaceful village in the area of Marial Bai in South Sudan, both Christian and Muslim families were large with seven, eight, nine or more children. Muslim men sometimes had more than one wife, depending on what they could afford. There was greenery and enough water, and minerals for mining. Christians and Muslims even celebrated each other’s holidays.

Family wealth was measured in cattle and daughters. Daughters brought cattle to the family as dowry from the husband’s father. There were songs about cattle, and dancers shaped their arms like the horns of a bull. If there was a special ceremony a cow was mercifully killed with prayers and songs of thanks.

If a young man wanted to marry a girl, he asked his father to approach her father. If the girl’s father agreed, negotiations began for the number of cows to be given her family. The usual tribute was large if she was very beautiful, less if her suitor was handsome and a good man. A father would consider his daughter’s wishes but if he said she must marry someone there was little choice.

“Do Dinka children always obey their parents?” Sharon asked.

“Yes, of course. They must obey,” John replied.

“But what if they refuse, or what if a boy tells his parents he won’t do something. Is it the same as a girl refusing?”

“Yes, it is the same. If they refuse to obey their parents they will be sent away from their house, to Khartoum perhaps. They will no longer be allowed to live in the village.”

“Does this happen often?” Mark asked.

“No, not very often.”

And what if the father doesn’t have many cows and has several sons. How will they get wives? The sons, we were told, must work to get cows. First the oldest married, man or woman, then the others. If a father died, the oldest son became responsible for the family.

The villagers ate fish, rice, mangoes, and vegetables from their gardens, as well as goat. They kept large hunting dogs to catch and kill antelope. The men, puzzled by the different breeds of dogs in America, knew of only one kind, the kind that hunts. Keeping animals that didn’t work was difficult for them to understand.

Tall fences surrounded their community building. No one left the village at night, especially not to the river where crocodiles and hippos stayed and lions came to drink. The boys had watched the stars at night and memorized constellations. In America, the men stared at the unfamiliar patterns of stars and scratched their heads.

In their village young boys from age five or six weeded vegetable gardens, milked the cows, tended the cattle and moved them from one grazing area to another.

One day while the five boys were tending cattle outside the village, the Government soldiers came. When the soldiers spotted them, they shouted for them to leave, most likely because they were too young to fight. They ran, and banding with other boys and a few adults from nearby villages, they began a 400-mile walk to refugee camps in Ethiopia. What instinct directed their journey, I wondered. Many children would lie down and cry, or return to their burned out village in vain search for their parents. They couldn’t answer my question. They could only say that they realized they had no other choice if they wanted to survive.

They had only the clothes on their back and whatever food or water they could find along the way. They ate leaves and grass and berries when they could find them. When there was no fresh water, they sucked water from mud and drank their own urine. Some adults victimized the children, forcing them to urinate so the adult could drink their urine. The older children sometimes stole urine from the younger children. But often, when the smaller children could go no farther, the older ones carried them on their backs. They hid at night, sometimes in trees, to escape predators and soldiers.

Some boys died eating poisonous leaves. Some became too weak and were caught by predators. Some died from starvation or dehydration. Others drank polluted water and suffered vomiting and diarrhea. The men counted themselves lucky that they had lived, but I wondered if it wasn’t something more than luck. Like other survivors, had they dreamed of a future? Could that have kept them alive?

One day staring at the floor, Anthony told us how a lion chased him and his younger brother. He could feel the hot breath of the lion on his heels. Anthony could run faster than his brother and his brother was killed.

In my brother’s last months dying of lung cancer, he could hardly walk at all. Jim didn’t want to go to a hospital so with the help of hospice nurses, I cared for him at his apartment. He often reached in his shirt pocket for his pack of Marlboros that were no longer there. I had hidden his cigarettes and lighter the day I’d come back from the store to find a fire in the ashtray. Drugged with painkillers, he fretted about the shadowy figures he saw lurking around his window. He died, still reaching into his pocket.

I was a smoker at one time, yet so far I’ve escaped the jaws of that lion. Is that because I finally managed to quit at age 40 and saw a future for myself? Did Jim, unable to quit smoking, die because he couldn’t see any future after a devastating divorce and loss of work?

In 1991, four years after the boys reached a refugee camp in Ethiopia, a new government dismantled the camp and forced everyone to leave. Chased by tanks and soldiers’ gunfire, thousands of refugees frantically crossed the flooded river Gilo. 1,000-2,000 people were shot or attacked by crocodiles.

As the men told us this, their eyes closed and they pressed their hands over their ears as if to shut out the screams they described.

“I could live with you,” my mother said, as we wheeled her into her new home.

“You need more help than I can give, Mom, and I have to work.” It sounded like a weak excuse, even to me. But she did need 24-hour care. “I’ll see you every day.”

Forced from her affordable apartment by new owners who raised the rent, she had reluctantly agreed to assisted living arrangements after several bad falls and a car accident that hospitalized her. She had turned left into an oncoming car and her broken ribs punctured a lung. My daughters and I, feeling as if we were invading her privacy, cleared her apartment while she was still in the hospital.

A few months later she died in her bed, peacefully but still missing her apartment home of 20 years. Had she lost the will to live, lost the vision of a future 

At her death, I became the oldest in our family, the next one to go, I thought. But I wasn’t ready. I was in the process of planning my future.

After surviving the Gila River (how did they float past the crocodiles and escape the gunfire?), the boys heard rumors of a refugee camp in Kenya run by the United Nations High Commission of Refugees (UNHCR). They began, with others, a year’s journey from Ethiopia back through Sudan and on to Kakuma Camp near Nairobi in West Africa. Again they trekked, more than 600 miles that time.

Camp workers later wrote that they had often seen an endless line of boys trudging down their path. They remembered with sadness one boy who staggered into the camp. Before they could reach him, he collapsed and died.

The boys stayed in Kakuma for several years. The camp was overwhelmed with 65,000 refugees from seven African nations. A 15-day supply of food for each person was one kilo of rice, beans, or lentils. Each had a gallon of water a day for cooking, drinking and washing. There was scant medical care. In Dinka culture, men did not cook so the few women in the camp traded cooking for food or other work they needed done. Theft was rampant. The boys were always on guard because southern Sudan soldiers often crossed the border and kidnapped people.

They may have contrasted their life at the camp to the peaceful village they left behind, where neighbors raised each others children as well as their own, where festivals balanced work, where every year young men competed in drinking enough milk to get fat and be judged the biggest of all.

At the camp they ate just once a day and often didn’t know where they would find their next meal. What drove them, I wondered, what kept them going, how did they endure the hardships that looked as if they would never end. Was it again a belief that life would get better, that somehow they would survive?

They didn’t know if their parents were alive, or what happened to their sisters and the rest of the village. They had spent more than 10 years on the run and in refugee camps. They had walked more than 1,000 miles, mostly without shoes or food. They were thin and weak, seriously malnourished. They had nightmares about crocodiles and lions and soldiers with guns. Schooling in the camps was sporadic and they found it difficult to learn when their stomachs rumbled and classmates passed out.

Then World Relief, a Christian organization, contracted with Departments of State to rescue thousands of boys from the camps and bring them to other countries as refugees. America agreed to accept 3,600 boys and help support them here for a year. World Relief found volunteer Christian families to host the immigrants for three weeks and teach them about life in America. It was to be the largest resettlement in the history of the United States, but was interrupted by events on 9/11/2001.

The competition among the boys to be chosen for emigration was fierce and the selection process daunting. There were forms to fill out and many interviews to determine if the applicant was suitable. Applicants were supposed to be single but some married applicants lied. The program required those chosen to be good persons, religious persons, and free of corruption. How to prove this? If a boy sat down at an interview before being invited to do so, he was automatically eliminated. The boys were evaluated psychologically to see if they had any severe mental problems that could hinder their success.

My son John Michael sometimes lived on the streets. He would call me or his brothers from a phone booth, afraid to leave because “they” were after him. He was a talented chef but couldn’t hold a job. He argued with friends and relatives and bosses and sometimes just didn’t show up for work.

John suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was not always a “good” person. He somehow survived to age forty-six despite chasing off the haunting voices and visions with drugs and alcohol. The voices, he said, told him to do things he didn’t want to do, but he wouldn’t say what they were.

I saw his innate goodness when he stooped to talk to a young man in a wheelchair, when he brought me bottles he found because he knew I collected old glass. The family was relieved when he met friends in San Francisco and lived in a house and led a fairly normal life. He volunteered with non-profit organizations and worked sometimes as a chef.

His life ended on my birthday in 1998, I grieved and wondered whether he purposely took too many drugs or if it was an accidental overdose, “polypharmacia” as the coroner said.

I cried and painfully recalled John’s childhood and my parenting. I didn’t like what I saw. Before his diagnosis there were punishments, spankings, humiliations. Psychiatrists agreed that schizophrenia was caused by lack of nurture, not nature. Now they say differently, but at that time I agreed with them and guilt overwhelmed me, made me fragile, unsure of myself. 

John Michael and the Lost Boys met their challenges as best they could. I tried to do right, did what I knew how to d: seek expert help for John, and support him. He refused help and coped with his demons in the only manner he knew.

Every week at Kakuma Camp, a list was posted with the names of those who would be going to a new country. The five boys, who had requested they stay together, scanned the posted list as soon as it was hung, frightened by the thought that if they were on the list, they might be separated. At last their names appeared, all five of them, for America.

At Mark and Sharon’s house John, James, and Anthony learned how to operate a microwave and stove. In America, it was all right for men to cook, Mark explained. The men eventually overcame their fear of cars and crossing a street full of traffic, even with a green light. They learned to use a shower and dry with towels instead of spraying the bathroom walls by shaking water from their bodies. They learned that it was all right to go to the river at night. They registered for part-time classes at the local junior college and searched for work. They also learned that some people don’t like immigrants and others don’t like people of a different color. Some Afro-Americans might not like African men as much as lighter-skinned brothers.

I think of my passionate seven-year romance with a light-skinned black man who embraced the Black Muslim message. I watched his evolution through black power to Christianity and finally to his own definition of the role of the black man in today’s world, a definition that included black men raising their own children instead of abandoning them, of getting an education and working, and treating their women well.

His studies and experience had imprinted a deep distrust of whites, not including me he claimed. He tried to overcome the condemnation of his family and friends for dating me. We ended when he married a black woman. Was his decision, a matter of survival in the culture that he knew and loved, or was it simply the end of a love affair? Does it matter? He survived and so did I.

John was the first Lost Boy to find work. It was in the grocery warehouse of a church member. The others later found jobs, too. The men proved to be the best workers their employers ever had. They showed up early, worked hard, and never called in sick.

One day, Mark drove the men to a nearby suburb to have a meal with other refugees at their apartment. He left them and went to eat in order to give them time alone, but when he returned to pick them up, they still hadn’t eaten because they were waiting for him. Mark learned that for the men to exclude him from their meal would have been unthinkable. So he had to eat again. In the boys’ journey, I thought, to exclude another might mean that he would not live.

Once Mark showed the men how his treadmill worked. John climbed on and the others pushed buttons until John was running very fast. They all doubled over with laughter. I didn’t know what they thought funnier — the sight of John as he ran faster and faster to keep up with the treadmill or the idea of a moving path with no terrain as they covered miles and miles through rough terrain.

As my August visit ended, the men told me that they saw their future as hopeful. Young and energetic, eager to learn, they seemed to easily adapt to a new life. Still they often suffered survival guilt, selection guilt.

They wanted to go home and find that their country had regained its peace. They wanted to return with money from America to re-establish their lives. If they could not return home, then they hoped to find their peace and their wives here in their adopted land. They had a Plan B, a useful tool for envisioning and planning their future.

I left Los Angeles and settled in a small mountain village near Mount Rainier, where every morning I gaze out at the surrounding mountains, the eagles flying over the river or a herd of geese forming a V in the sky. Elk wander through my yard, herds of them, grazing as they walk delicately through the brush.

I recall the fear of trying to support seven children with little money, of working so many hours that I’d fall asleep standing up, of running from an alcoholic husband who threatened my life, of sleeping on the couch with a borrowed rifle across my chest.

I think of a dangerous near rape and how I escaped by using my wits. I think of running from the threats of a mentally ill husband who terrorized my family. I think of surviving the devastation of a third husband’s betrayal with other women. I remember cooking over a wood fireplace because the gas had been turned off, of breaking the lock on the water meter after the water was shut. I think of counting on tips in my waitress job so there would be enough money for food the next day, of eating popcorn or oatmeal twice a day because that was what was left. I remember studying late into the night to pass one college class at a time until I held a nursing degree.

In 2011, a new democratic regime was formed in Sudan, thanks in part to the world’s response to the Lost Boys. But the unrest in Sudan continues to this day. Mark and Sharon have kept in touch with the Lost Boys and I learned that the men continued to make efforts through Red Cross and UNICEF to locate relatives in Sudan and Kenya. Finally, one of the men found his mother and brother alive, hiding in the hills around their village. Another found a brother in Nairobi.

John learned that a girl he knew at Kakuma Camp was with a family in Chehalis, Washington, and they eventually married and had three children, though it’s doubtful that any cows were exchanged. James, Anthony, Lino and Augustino have become U.S. citizens. Anthony has friends and family nearby. Lino and James have worked at the same grocery outlet store for over nine years now. They still don’t drive, but use public transportation. James has visited his family in Sudan several times. Augustino lives with his first American family and goes to school.

 

In November 2011, another son, my oldest — we call him Hap — died after a long battle with leukemia. He had always been an independent guy, working for himself. He never had much money but shared generously what he did have. He repaired cars, fished at every opportunity, and raised two sons by himself. Then suddenly he couldn’t work, couldn’t walk very far, and was dependent on the oxygen tank he carried.

Had I not moved close to where he lived in Washington State I wouldn’t have had as much time with him as I did. I wouldn’t have seen his strong heart, his determination to fight hard against the cancer, his always-cheerful outlook despite the invasive needles and chemicals that weakened him more and more. I might not have been at his bedside holding his hand when he took his last breath.        

I celebrate the Lost Boys, who struggled to survive and redefine their lives in a different culture. And I celebrate my own strength, my ability to make important changes.