The Lost Boys

In Peter Pan, there were lost boys who fought off pirates and crocodiles before flying off to Never Never Land.

In Sudan, thousands of lost boys fought off crocodiles and other dangers we can barely imagine and, as 60 Minutes II first reported 18 months ago, are happily flying off to a new life in the United States.

Their incredible journey began 15 years ago, Correspondent Bob Simon reports, in the midst of Sudan's civil war in which two million people died. Their parents were killed; many of their sisters were sold into slavery. Many boys died, too.

But the survivors started walking. How many more died of starvation or thirst or enemy fire in the years that followed will never be known. But in 1992, five years after their long march began, thousands walked into a refugee camp in Kenya. And for more than a year, many have been getting ready for another journey to a strange and foreign land.

Every Sunday, a plane arrives at the camp to take the boys from Kakuma to New York - and beyond Bridging The Gap Project Inc. The Lost Boys Foundation 100 Auburn Avenue Suite 200 Atlanta, GA 30303 Phone: 404-475-6035 Email: btgonline.org

Don Bosco Center The Lost Boys Contact: Meredith Hollingsworth 531 Garfield Kansas City, MO 64124 Phone: 816-691-2914

More than a thousand boys have taken this journey, and at least 3,000 more are slated to go. It's the largest resettlement of its kind in American history.

Sasha Chanoff, an American at the camp who helps prepare the boys for their journey, says many have never been exposed to lights or to a fork or a knife or to a TV. “It's a group that's lost in time,” he says.

They call themselves the lost boys, but strictly speaking, they're not boys any more. Most were 7 or 8 when their troubles began in 1987. That's when their predominantly Christian villages in southern Sudan were attacked by Islamic forces from the north.

When the invaders struck, many of the boys here were tending their herds. When they saw their villages burning, they started walking. Within days, streams of boys became rivers. Hundreds became thousands until an exodus of biblical proportions was happening. Where were they going? No one really knew. And no one could have guessed they would continue walking for years.

Paul Deng was one of the boys. He was seven when he began the walk. “You have to urinate so that you can drink your own urine,” he says of the walk.

It was the “Lord of the Flies” in reverse. They walked for three months across Sudan, barefoot, taking care of each other. At 11, Joseph Taban was one of the elders. He tried to protect the others from wild animals.

Twelve thousand boys made it to a refugee camp in Ethiopia, where they stayed four years. But then civil war broke out there and the boys were chased out at gunpoint to the Gilo River. Many were shot. Many drowned. Many were eaten by crocodiles.

“If you don't know how to swim, then you remain in that water,” recalls Zachariah Magok. "We saw so many people who were just floating on the river.”

The survivors of the Gilo started walking back into southern Sudan. They walked across deserts, over mountains. They had no food or water and ate wet mud.

In the spring of 1992, after walking more than 1,000 miles, the boys made it over the border into Kenya, to a desolate place called Kakuma. For the UN, it was an emergency of vast proportions, these emaciated children. For the boys, it was the safest they'd been in five years. Amazingly, many had carried books with them all the way from Ethiopia. Somehow the boys knew that what they now needed to survive was an education.

“They feel that education will speak on behalf of them where their parents can't,” says Chanoff, the American aid worker. ”So they have a saying, it's actually a very important saying that they have, education is my mother and my father.”

For nine years, they've been surviving on one meal a day - wheat flour and maize – in the camp. In 2000, U.S. government began bringing them to America. Before they go, Chanoff gives them a crash course in America 101.

One lost boy, Abraham Nial, is 21 now and an ordained minister of Sudan's Episcopal church in Kakuma. From what he's heard, America is a good place to go on preaching the gospel. He hopes to get there.

“I don't know much about America,” he says, “but one thing I like America very much because you think of others. You don't think of yourself.”

Joseph Taban continues to take care of the younger ones, but now he’s a medical assistant at the camp clinic. If he gets to America, he wants to go to medical school. Joseph says he has little hope that might actually happen.

“Maybe tomorrow something, something else may happen in which I may involve in - or innocently I may be killed,” he says referring to a fight in which eight refugees were killed.

Zachariah Magok, like hundreds of other lost boys, has been told his file is missing. He's watched cousins and friends go to Aerica, week after week.

“Of course, I'm worried about it. If I remain here, I will remain in darkness place,” he says. “In darkness. This one is a place where there is no future. There is no future in Kakuma.”

The future is on a bulletin board where every week another 90 names, the name sof th elucky ones, appear. Joseph Taban has taken the walk to the board so many times that now he takes it slowly and tries not to get excited.

But this week, it is different, his name is on the board and he is going to Kansas City, smack in the middle of America.

Abraham, the preacher, took the walk 25 times before he learned he was going to Chicago.

They had four days to pack their luggage. They took little, left less behind. Abraham was taking the Bible he’s had for 10 years, the one he carried from Ethiopia.

“I have been called a lost boy,” he says. “But I'm not lost from God. I'm lost from my parents.”

A last-minute switch sent him to Atlanta. Like the others who came before him, Abraham was greeted by volunteers from resettlement who introduced him to his new apartment. In a few months, he'll have to start paying his own rent. Eventually, like all refugees, he'll have to reimburse Uncle Sam for his $850 airfare.

“Here are these boys that are products of this horrific civil war and they're coming to our heartland and they're coming to our homes,” says Chanoff. “And you know what? People are falling in love with them. They think they're the sweetest, most amazing kids in the world and they're going to be a part of America now and that is unbelievable.”

Before their arrival in America, the lives of the Lost Boys had been one long saga of war and suffering caused by the Islamic fundamentalists of northern Sudan who had destroyed their homes and killed their parents. The fact they came to America to escape from terror meant there would be some rude surprises ahead.

Joseph Taban arrived in Kansas City and Abraham Nial got to Atlanta four months before Sept. 11, 2001.

A Kansas City investment banker, Joey McLiney, took Joseph under his wing, even offering up his brand new car for Joseph's first driving lesson. The lesson ended with a minor crash, but with no injuries; the incident was laughed about soon afterwards.

Within a few weeks, Joseph Taban had his first full-time job in a sweltering fabric factory. He didn't mind the heat, it reminded him of home. What was a bit confusing, though, was his first paycheck.

“How can somebody handle just that small paper,” he asks, “and say, this is money?”

In Atlanta, Abraham Nial was invited to be guest deacon at All Saints, one of the city’s largest Episcopal churches. Before long, he met one of Atlanta's most famous Baptists, former President Jimmy Carter, who invited Atlanta’s lost boys for a chat.

“He was moved by our word when we talked to him,” Abraham says. “He was really moved by our words.”

He believes a lost boy will some day be president of Sudan. But first, they must learn to survive in America.

Sasha Chanoff, who taught the boys in Kenya and visits them often in America, knows it's not easy for them to figure out what is real and what is not.

“They're hearing that people have gone to the moon,” he says. “If you're telling me people have gone to the moon, then they're seeing on TV that a horse can talk. Why is a horse talking so different from someone getting to the moon? It's hard to distinguish what is reality and what is not. Some boy saw a street sign that said, 'Dead End.' And they thought, well, if I go down there, am I going to die?”

After three months in America, Abraham felt he'd reached a dead end. He was still preaching at a small community center, but that didn't come with a paycheck. In a few weeks, financial help from the government would be cut off. But then he got the first paying job of his life working for the newly-formed Lost Boys Foundation, a group dedicated to raising money for the boys' education.

Joseph, meanwhile, wasn't satisfied with just one paycheck. He wanted two. So he got a night job, seating guests at one of the most exclusive steak houses in Kansas City. When he got home from his two jobs at 11 p.m., it was time to study for that medical career he's always wanted. A local doctor heard about him and came up with a book on microbiology.

But then came Sept. 11, and the lost boys who thought they had left a life of terror far behind found that it had followed them to America.

Abraham's boss, Mary Williams, was with him that morning. “I think they had a better grip on what happened than I did,” she said of the lost boys. “Because this is something totally foreign to me. I don't understand random acts of terrorism on that scale. They did. And they do.”

Joseph and his mentor Joey McLiney had talked about Islam before Sept. 11. “I had talked to him about Muslims and he had given me a pretty negative response,” says McLiney. “And I wanted to tell him in the United States it's different, you need to think this way and that way. And basically on Sept. 11, I was re-educated because it wasn't a surprise to him.”

In Atlanta, they offered to donate blood for the victims in New York, but were turned away because doctors didn't think they had any blood to spare. So they collected money - $400 in donations of $1 and $2.

Sept. 11 is still taking its toll on the lost boys. Relief flights bringing more lost boys from the refugee camp in Kenya have been stopped for now. And the recession cost some of the boys their jobs.

“Their biggest nightmare,” says Williams, “ is that one day they might be homeless. They're terrified when they see homeless people and they don't understand why there are homeless people in America.”

In Kansas City, Joseph Taban has changed jobs again and is working for a company that makes office furniture. Nothing will keep him from his paycheck: not even a long walk at 4 a.m. to catch the first of two buses to start his workday at 6 a.m.

“He's living the American dream,” says his mentor, McLiney. “He's already got jobs, he's self-sufficient. You've taken someone literally in the stone age and dropped him into a modern civilization and said after four months you're on your own. And he is, and he's fine. It's the most remarkable thing I've ever seen.”

With winter, the cold weather the lost boys dreaded is finally upon them, and they have discovered it does have some fringe benefits - like ice skating.

Watching the group of lost boys struggle on the frozen skating surface, one might think they were young men in the throes of a second childhood. But you can't really call it their second childhood. It's their first – and they are making the most of it.

Joseph still doesn't have his driver's license. Since he hopes to start school in a few months, he might not have time to take his test for some time. Abraham is already in school, taking courses at a Christian college in Atlanta. And those lost boys still stranded at the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, there is still no word when they will be allowed to fly to the United States.

I always here the Democrats crying about the jobless, but this guy found not only 1 but 2! jobs, because he needed more money.

Maybe the jobless and Democrats need to re-evaluate how the American Dream is supposed to be achieved in their eyes.

Certainly not with Hand Outs!

I just was really touched by Joseph's story. You have people on welfare, that refuse to work, because, "I don't work in a furniture factory, or that's not what I wan to do."

I had parents that worked two jobs for years to provide the dream for me.

Now, I'm well educated, wealthy, and provide a wonderful home for my family including my parents.

Yet, the only thing I hear from the Democrats is, "You filthy rich don't deserve any cuts. We poor need it."

My answer, "My parents were poor when they came to this nation, and never asked the government for a dime, and now they are well off."

They have their prescription drugs, their Social Security, and their medicine in their retirement, including some extra cash in their savings, and a wonderful home on the coast.

Many American's today, have lost what it takes, and the majority of them are leaning towards the Dem's, because their mantra/Agenda... "We'll give you what you need, no worry to work for it."

Look at their pathetic last leader. Clinton lived on the Government dime his entire life. The guy didn't buy a home until he was in his fifties.

I had two before I was thirty and think that means a hell of lot more than what Slick accomplished, which to me is nothing.

Yep, I plead guilty, I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt and extra priveliges to Americans over immigrants brought here by government welfare or that come here illegally.

If you think these people won't join the Democrats you hate so much, you are dreaming.

Regards.

These boys were given only a certain amount of time to find a job, and then the government dime was cut off, no matter what. Read the article.

Nothing like a little pressure to find a job. Maybe somthing these 2million need!

Tell me how their limited government dime is the same as extended Unemployment benefits that the Congress wants to extend to crack heads, lazy union workers to proud to wash dishes, and homeless people (to name a few)... all US citizens.

Sincerest Regards,

"Nothing like a little pressure to find a job. Maybe somthing these 2million need!"

Trying to insult some freepers (most with families) that are out of work? I'm sick of Moron Posts like yours with this kind of Flame bait. It's been going on alot these days. Hope your Job and lifestyle are secure.

BTW you could never upset most people here. So don't try next time

Yep, I plead guilty, I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt and extra priveliges to Americans over immigrants brought here by government welfare or that come here illegally. If you think these people won't join the Democrats you hate so much, you are dreaming

Not hard-hearted are we? Did you already give up on the American Dream? These people are the best and the brightest that you are going to find in immigrants. They know the value of education (they carried their books with them on their escape). How many American kids if forced to flee an area because of a terrorist attack would take their books with them. How many could fend for themselves? Each of these lost boys has demonstrated their survival skills just to get to the point where they could catch the flight to the US. The less intelligent and weaker boys died along the march.

They were selected to come to the US by an aid association, not by the government. The only funding from the government was loaning them the money for their flight here. After six months, these kids were expected to make the transition and be on their own. From the stone age to the 21st century in six months.

Lets see, these are young christian boys, educated, motivated and willing to work multiple jobs to achieve the American Dream. Yeah they are your classic Democrat prosect. Yep these boys are goign to be the next group of socialists. Yeah right. Probably much less so than your average college student. Certainly much less so than your inner city with no schooling and no parents.

I visited Cuba last week. Third-world conditions back there. You have to beg to get toilet paper out of the high-end restaurants. (The low-end ones don't have it at all).

Cubans in the US are doing awfully well. I think that when you've worked in or seen a third-world or communist government, the US looks awfully good, a lot better than it does to natives.

Sometimes that kind of perspective is valuable. I certainly found it so.

D

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