The Lost Boys of Sudan
Compiled from multiple sources, including Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org. The US Committee for Refugees, http://www.refugees.org, the Alliance for the Lost Boys,  http://www.allianceforthelostboys.com/history.html, and the Cultural Orientation Resource Center, www.cor.org

The United States opened its door to about 3,800 Lost Boys in 2000 and 2001, resettling them as refugees on the grounds that they would be persecuted in their native Sudan. They were resettled in 40 cities, averaging about 100 per city. Halted after 9/11 for security reasons, the program that brought the Lost Boys to the US restarted in 2004, but peace talks were underway in Sudan, and so other refugee crises in other countries took priority.

The Lost Boys were named by aid workers and journalists, after the Peter Pan characters who are tossed as children into a world of adults. Most of the boys were orphaned or separated from their families when northern Sudanese government troops systematically attacked villages in southern Sudan, killing men, women, and children at random. Over two million people have died in this genocide, which still continues.

When villages were attacked, girls were raped, killed, taken as slaves to the north, or became servants or adopted children for other Sudanese families. As a result, relatively few girls made it to the refugee camps. Many of the surviving women and children were captured and taken as slaves in the North. The younger boys survived in large numbers because they were away tending herds or were able to escape into the nearby jungles.

Most of the Lost Boys are from the Dinka and the Nuer tribes, the largest tribes in southern Sudan. Both tribes greet the dawn by singing. Both live in square huts with round, uneven roofs. And both honor their scrawny, hump-backed cattle as the center of the temporal world, at once wealth on the hoof and a mystical link to the spiritual plane.

Orphaned and with no support, the Lost Boys made epic journeys lasting years across the borders to international relief camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, evading thirst, starvation, wild animals, insects, disease, and one of the most bloody wars of the 20th century. Examiners say they are the most badly war-traumatized children ever examined.

The Journey of the Lost Boys
Orphaned as young as four years old, they fled into the bush and began walking to Ethiopia. As many as 30,000—40,000 children originally fled on foot to Ethiopia in the late 1980s–a journey that took as long as 4 months. They walked in large groups for approximately three months before reaching the safety of Ethiopia. They had little food or water. Many died along the way due to starvation and disease or attacks by wild animals. Aid workers flying over southern Sudan could identify the route from the air by all the bodies of boys who did not make it.

The boys were moving toward the promise of safety in refugee camps in Ethiopia. They stayed about four years. Most learned English and attended Christian church services. Then in 1991 civil war broke out in Ethiopia, and they were forced to flee once again to their war-torn country of Sudan.

More boys died during several additional months of wandering. When crossing the deadly Gilo River, those unable to swim were swept away in the turbulent currents. Others were eaten by crocodiles, attacked by hippos, or killed by enemy gunfire.

The survivors remained in the bush of Sudan, hiding for approximately one-and-a-half years before making their way to the safety of the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. In all, these young men had walked some 1,000 miles by foot before reaching their destination.

In 1991-92, they were forcibly returned to Sudan, where they were again met with hostility. They fled again on foot, this time to a United Nations refugee camp in Kenya called Kakuma, where they lived beginning in 1992.

Education has been an important part of refugee assistance in Kakuma, with more than 30 schools serving more than 33,000 students. Child welfare workers note that the Sudanese youth generally have very high expectations about education, which is seen as a "recovery strategy"–a way to take back control over their lives.

The Lost Boys arrived in the United States with little knowledge of life in the modern West. Most had never used telephones or seen tall buildings. They had never flicked on electric lights, ridden a bus or cooked on a stove, but the U.S. government gave them four months to get their bearings and support themselves.

The Lost Boys are young men now. They are making their way through everyday life in the US with the generous help of American volunteers. Most have settled into a routine of working and pursing what they want more than anything else – an education.

About Sudan
Geography
Located in North Africa, Sudan is geographically the largest country in Africa with approximately 1 million square miles (roughly the size of the U.S. east of the Mississippi). Sudan shares borders with nine countries including Egypt to the North. The Nile River and its tributaries dominate the country, with deserts in the North and a more tropical climate in the South.

Population
Sudan has approximately 34.5 million people from as many as 400 different ethnic groups. Arabic-speaking Muslims dominate the North. In the South, at least 100 different languages are spoken, and most southern Sudanese follow indigenous beliefs or have become Christians.

Education
At this time, because of war, government neglect, and the lack of supplies and trained teachers, few schools [in the south] remain open, and two generations of southern Sudanese children have not received education.

Economy
Four out of five Sudanese make their living either farming, raising livestock, or both. In southern Sudan, food production is the single activity that absorbs the energy of the people. Women tend to the farming and domestic chores, while males [handle] grazing and herding. The civil war has destroyed much of the economy in the South and caused significant loss of people, cattle, and crops. Rudimentary subsistence is all that exists in the South.

Sudanese Society
The southern Sudanese come from a very patriarchal society, with clearly prescribed roles for men and women. Cooperation within the group is critical, and it is taboo to promote one's self interest above the community interests. For the Dinka and Nuer, marriages are usually arranged, and dowries play a major role for an entire extended family.

History of Sudan in Conflict
Sudan is a divided country, separated primarily into the Arab Muslims of the North and the black Christian/Animists (those who practice tribal traditions) of the South. Following its independence in 1956, the Northerners gained control of the country seeking to form a united Islamic Sudan. This created considerable conflict with the Southerners, who were not Muslim. As a result, the North declared a holy jihad against the South, beginning a civil war that would last over two decades.

There was a brief peace from the 1970s until the early 1980s. In 1983, the war against the Arab north entered its current phase. That year, the Khartoum government imposed Islamic law on the entire country, including the parts that were not Muslim, like the south, where people mostly adhere to traditional beliefs or Christianity. Rebellious southerners formed the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, and young Dinka and Nuer began to carry AK-47s.

Until 1991, the guns were used mostly against northerners. But that August, there was a split in the rebel army. The fault line was tribal. A Nuer rebel officer, Riek Machar, tried to topple the rebels' supreme commander, a Dinka named John Garang. When the coup failed, the rebel escaped with forces loyal to him, mostly Nuer. The war had entered a new phase. Southerners started killing each other, while the North-South conflict continued.

The root causes of the conflict are multiple and should not be oversimplified. There is racial tension between black southerners and Arab northerners. Religion pits the Muslims in the North against Christians in the South. There has always been inter-tribal conflict in the South, and the North has fomented more conflict by providing arms.

During the conflict, many people have been enslaved. All sides have been known to commit violations such as conscripting child soldiers, raiding and attacking civilian populations. People are ambushed as they flee, and there seems to be "no safe place." Most sources agree, however, that the government and its allies bear the largest responsibility for the continual suffering.