The Lost Boys of Sudan Part One: The Long Journey

Written by Stephanie Kriner , Staff Writer, redcross.org

August 14, 2001 —  The sound of automatic weapon fire blasting through his small hut startled the small boy awake. He called for his uncle who lay beside him, but fell silent when he felt the pool of hot blood. Terrified and confused, the child fled barefoot into the dark woods where it seemed that thousands of others were running, in all directions.

Part of a swarm of fleeing children, John Deng James only knew that he had to somehow escape the horrifying scene. He had no way of knowing that those first harried steps were the beginning of an epic and torturous journey. Although James and the other children eventually stopped running, they kept walking. They walked for days, then weeks, and finally, months before realizing that they would never return home or see their families again.

James belongs to a group of refugees referred to by aid organizations as the "Lost Boys of Sudan." Named after Peter Pan's cadre of orphans, some 26,000 Sudanese boys were forced by violence from their southern Sudan villages in the late 1980s. After walking hundreds of miles in search of peace and then spending nine years in a Kenyan refugee camp, James is among 3,600 Lost Boys whom the U.S. government is bringing to the United States and settling in cities throughout the country.

James was too young to notice the civil war that raged throughout southern Sudan, until the night when the conflict between the northern, Khartoum-based government and Christians in the south abruptly ended his tranquil life of herding cattle and tending to his blind uncle in his village called Duk.

The roughly 1,000- mile journey seems an impossible feat for a 5-year-old boy, but when the pain in James' legs became too much to bear, one of the older boys would pick him up and carry him. When he had gone days without water, he sucked liquid from the mud, and when he was so weak from hunger that he felt he could not take another step, he ate leaves or wild berries. Some boys -- too exhausted to go on -- simply sat down and died of starvation or dehydration. Others lagged behind, becoming easy prey for lions. But James was one of the lucky few who made it.

"Some children died from eating poisonous leaves, and sometimes that dirty water we had to drink caused a stomach ache and you worried that you might die. But, you know, God was with us," he says softly in near perfect English (learned at the Kenyan refugee camp) while sitting in his apartment outside Boston.

Most of the Lost Boys, like James, are from the Dinka or Nuer tribes of Southern Sudan, where hundreds of villages have been burned, livestock stolen and families decimated. The systematic destruction and violence is considered one of the century's most brutal wars. Again and again, civilians have been targeted, their access to food often blocked as part of a military strategy resulting in widespread famine. According to U.S. State Department estimates, the combination of war, famine and disease in southern Sudan has killed more than 2 million people and displaced another 4 million.

As government troops blazed through southern Sudan — reportedly killing the adults and enslaving the girls — scattered groups of suddenly orphaned boys converged and headed toward Ethiopia, where they hoped to find peace and their families again.

The orphaned boys trekked almost endlessly through sub-Saharan heat and wilderness. Older boys — some just 9 or 10 — looked after the youngest ones and small cliques of boys formed their own family groups. Their only relief came when Red Cross helicopters dropped them food or water. However, humanitarian groups could do little more to help them because of the raging violence in the region.

The boys walked for roughly two months across Sudan to Ethiopia, where they spent about three years in various refugee camps until being forced away in 1991 by yet more gunfire. Chased by Ethiopian government tanks and armed militia, the boys frantically tried to cross the River Gilo, where thousands drowned, were eaten by crocodiles or shot.

After leaving Ethiopia, those who survived the river crossing walked for more than a year back through Sudan to Kenya, a destination for thousands of African refugees forced out of their homes by war or natural disaster. Emaciated, dehydrated and parentless, only half of the original boys — some 10,000 who survived the journey — arrived at Kakuma Refugee Camp in 1992. The majority of them were between the ages of 8 and 18 (Most of the boys don't know for sure how old they are; aid workers assigned them approximate ages after they arrived in Kenya). James was thought to be about 10. The young age of the refugees was not surprising — children under the age of 8 make up about half of some 50 million refugees worldwide.

Relief workers from the United Nations and Red Cross scrambled to provide them with shelter, food and medical attention. However, the needs were overwhelming, and many of the "boys" — which is how they, regardless of age, still refer to one another — who are still there continue to suffer from hunger, disease and dehydration. They receive subsistence-level food rations and a gallon of water a day for cleaning, cooking and drinking. Aid organizations, already struggling to help other refugees at Kakuma, can do little more. Some 65,000 refugees from seven African nations reside at the camp. They depend on humanitarian groups for food, water, shelter, medical care and education.

James shrugs off memories of the harsh conditions. "Eating one time a day really wasn't that hard," he says. Although he admits that always going to class on an empty stomach was difficult, even before learning that he would live in the United States James knew he could work to get more than what life had doled out to him. He recalls being so dehydrated and weak that he fainted one day at school in Kakuma. "I was hoping for my bright future," he says. "That's why I went to school."

It's still difficult for James to imagine a world without constant loss and fear. In Africa, he walked with a feeling of terror that has followed him here to the United States. When he first arrived, he was so afraid of the traffic rolling through Arlington's downtown, the Boston suburb where he was settled, that he sometimes needed 30 minutes just to cross the street. Such caution can even be seen in the guarded way that he speaks, slowly and contemplatively choosing his words, and the way he grows suddenly silent and deep in thought. "Some things are crazy on my mind," he says. "I wonder, who will I be in the future with all these problems. I think that sometimes I still have these problems."

Nine years and a horrific journey later, James is far from the terror that once consumed his life. But the nightmares continue. While lying in bed at night — his lanky body dangling over the foot of his twin mattress — 6-foot- tall James is haunted by nightmares in which he watches behind his back for hungry wild animals stalking him in the bush, swims with frantic strokes as crocodiles chase him in a swirling river and dodges the bombs that explode, taking the lives of others running all around him.

Believed to be 20 years old, James says he will never outgrow these horrible dreams. It's hard to believe that they actually happened to the mild-mannered Sudanese refugee, whose quick, easy smile raises chiseled cheekbones from a thin, angular face.

The Lost Boys of Sudan
Part Two | Part Three | Part Four

Related articles:

• The Lost Boys of Sudan: Main Page

• The Lost Boys of Sudan Part Two: Out of Africa, In to Boston
• The Lost Boys of Sudan Part Three: A Friend in the Storm
• The Lost Boys of Sudan Part Four: A Bright Future

• The American Red Cross in Africa