One of Sudan’s ‘Lost Boys’ Is Home in a Strange Land

Sometimes the boy dreamed a hungry lion was stalking him, coming ever closer, ready to pounce.

Or a huge bird was swooping down, digging its dagger-like claws into his skin.

Or there was the pop-pop-pop of gunfire, and people were falling and dying. The boy would run, but the bullet was always faster.

When friends would rouse him, his face was often wet with tears. Then the terror would ebb and he would say, “I just had a dream.”

But the nightmares often mirrored the real-life horrors of the boy’s life on the run, separated from family, fighting for survival in a chaotic corner of East Africa.

He is one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, refugees of a civil war that forced thousands of children and teens into exile, leaving many of them orphans. By the thousands, they walked hundreds of miles across wind-swept deserts, swam crocodile-infested rivers, ate bitter-tasting leaves when there was nothing else, drank rainwater, saw friends devoured by lions and huddled hungry and frightened in refugee camps.

The lucky ones survived. Emmanuel Makender is among them.

A journey that began with the crack of a rifle in Africa has ended at last in a red brick house on a peaceful street in this quiet suburb in middle America.

Many years have passed. Emmanuel’s father, three brothers and two sisters are dead. His childhood is over. His days in the Dinka tribe are a memory.

Emmanuel no longer herds cattle in the tall Sudanese grass; he bags groceries in a busy American supermarket. He no longer faces ferocious beasts, just a harmless iguana--in his science class.

He no longer fears for his life.

Emmanuel has a foster family to watch over him. A roof above his head instead of a leaky canopy of leaves. Plenty of food, to say nothing of shoes--four pairs now.

And peace.

“I sleep at night,” he says. “Without worry.”

For Emmanuel and the other Lost Boys, the journey began in Sudan, a land racked by a civil war that has left 2 million people dead from fighting or famine.

Up to 4 million others have been displaced in the 18-year conflict that pits the Islamic government in the north against Christians and animists in the south.

When fighting escalated in the southern provinces in 1987 and 1988, thousands of boys, some fearing conscription as soldiers, joined an exodus to neighboring Ethiopia.

Many were in their teens, though some were as young as 4. Some older boys carried baby brothers and sisters on their backs.

But many children, including Emmanuel, set off alone.

No one is sure exactly how many children fled Sudan or how many starved or were mauled by animals. But by some estimates, 17,000--including a small number of girls--made it to refugee camps in Ethiopia.

Political turmoil there forced them out after four years, and many trekked back to Sudan and finally to safety in Kenya.

Refugee experts debated the question: Where is the best place for the children?

For some 3,800 Lost Boys, the answer is America.

For each, the move is a giant leap of faith, says Julianne Duncan, who recently spent a year in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp and supervises refugee foster care at Lutheran Social Services of Washington and Idaho.

They know nothing of America, she says, but are bold enough to take a risk.

“They say, ‘I don’t have a future. I don’t even have food. I just have to take a chance and hope that I will survive.’ ”

*

“I was asleep when I heard the sound of guns. I run. If I wait, they will kill you. You don’t know where you are going. You just run.”

*

Emmanuel was born a Dinka, a member of the tall, ebony-skinned Sudanese tribe that measures a man’s wealth by the size of his cattle herd.

As a child, Emmanuel helped his father tend 100 cattle, goats and sheep in their isolated village in southern Sudan, one of the poorest spots on Earth.

Emmanuel lived without electricity, running water or a single link to modern society. He had no sense of what existed beyond his horizons. “I thought we were the only people in the world,” he says.

Life had its own rhythms: rainy and dry seasons, cattle bartered for brides, scarification as a rite of passage. Emmanuel’s wide forehead is scarred, indicating he went through a manhood ritual before he fled those many years ago, which would make him older than 18, the estimated age given to him by relief workers.

But no one really knows his age.

Emmanuel remembers little about the night that gunfire spread pandemonium in his village. His mother and some of his brothers and sisters ran one way. He ran the other, wearing a shirt and shorts.

After hiding for days, Emmanuel joined thousands of Sudanese refugees heading east toward Ethiopia, trudging over scorched sands, slogging through swamps. Scorpions and snakes were a constant menace.

He saw death almost daily.

He remembers the anguished moans of the dying, but there was no time to bury bodies, no time to rest. “You can take five minutes to stop,” he says. “But if you sleep, maybe you die.”

Emmanuel found a place in the middle of the human caravan, knowing if he lagged behind and fell he might not be rescued.

Though weak, he helped an even weaker boy, feeding him corn kernels to keep him from giving up. “He fall down,” he recalls. “I pick him up. I give him three pieces of maize. He walks again.”

Sometimes others helped Emmanuel. He remembers a man who played Pied Piper to hundreds of weary children.

“He decides to tell us a lie,” Emmanuel recalls. “He said, ‘You children, keep walking. There is a big river there. Let’s go, we will reach it.’ Everybody hopes. . . . We walk until we become tired. We say, ‘Where is the river?’ ”

Then, almost miraculously, there was water. Not a river. But rain.

“We just scream. We feel happy,” Emmanuel recalls. “We just jump up and down.”

Emmanuel unfurled a two-foot plastic sheet he slept on and placed it on the ground to collect the water.

As the drops fell, he lapped them up desperately.

*

‘We talked about what led us here. Only war.’

*

After three months, Emmanuel’s blistered feet had carried him to Ethiopia.

He had walked hundreds of miles.

He settled in with thousands of others at the Panyido refugee camp, where they built huts, schools and churches from mud and felled trees. He was baptized.

Emmanuel began studying English in school, learning the alphabet and how to count to 100. With no pencils or paper at first, he and the others carved letters and numbers in the dirt with their fingers.

Eventually relief agencies brought food and books, including a primer with two characters, Tom and Mary.

Emmanuel wanted to go home.

“If I have wings, I would fly to see my mother and father,” he says. “But I don’t have the power.”

The refugees also had little control over their future. When the Ethiopian government was overthrown in 1991, they were ordered to leave the country.

This time Emmanuel had time to pack. He gathered a few pieces of clothing, a pair of shoes, maize, cooking oil, salt, his “Tom and Mary” book, a pencil and an eraser for his trip back to Sudan.

He was stoic about his fate.

“I know I am going into danger, so I go prepared,” he says. “If my day come and I die, then I go. But I’m not going to worry again.”

*

‘My heart is beating. I think, how can I make it? . . . I just fell into the water. I just swim and swim and swim. God is the one who takes me across the river.’

*

After a five-day walk, Emmanuel stood frozen with fear at the banks of the fast-moving Gilo River, on Ethiopia’s southwestern edge. A crocodile crept along the bank.

Emmanuel stands, imitating how the animal’s giant jaws opened and shut like scissors. But this was only half the horror, he explains, his almond-shaped eyes widening.

Soldiers who chased the refugees had opened fire. People screamed as they were hit. Some who couldn’t swim jumped on the backs of those who could, hoping to be carried to safety. Then both would disappear beneath the turbulent waters.

When Emmanuel climbed breathless up the opposite bank, he found a friend, Daniel, who blurted: “You’re alive!” They stood there for a moment, patting each other on the back.

But more danger lay ahead.

A day or so later, as the procession wound along a trail just inside the Sudanese border, Emmanuel noticed the group suddenly scattering.

A lion had attacked a man, who was crying for help--too late.

The trip back to Sudan was not a return home. Instead, Emmanuel spent seven months in a city called Kapoeta, where mosquitoes spread disease and he slept on a bed of grass. Food was scarce.

“I know now,” he says proudly, “I can go three days without food and stay alive.”

When fighting erupted there, Emmanuel joined thousands of Lost Boys on the road again. By 1992 he had a new home.

*

‘I tried not to cry because my father was lost.’

*

The Kakuma refugee camp is a city of the dispossessed.

Some 69,000 people live along a 15-mile stretch of parched earth about 80 miles inside Kenya from its border with Sudan.

Temperatures reach the mid-90s year-round. The riverbed is often dry. Even the thorny acacia trees with their gray leaves look dusty.

For seven years, Emmanuel shared a mud hut with six boys.

Every two weeks they received food rations--including oil, beans and wheat flour, which they used to make chapatis, a flat bread.

Some people would gobble up their meager rations in five days, leaving them too weak for school. Emmanuel carefully measured out his portion, determined to make it last, so he wouldn’t miss class.

Soon after he arrived in Kakuma, a man from his village returned to Sudan, located Emmanuel’s mother, two brothers and sister and gave them the miraculous news:

Emmanuel was alive.

But when one brother wrote him through the Red Cross, he had tragic news:

Emmanuel’s father and five siblings were dead.

Emmanuel wanted to return home to take revenge. But, he says, “I don’t have a big gun.”

Besides, his brother urged him to seek out a better life. “Go,” he told him, “follow your education.”

Relief workers made repeated attempts over seven years but were unable to locate Emmanuel’s family. Tracing is very difficult in Sudan, partly because so many people are displaced.

At Kakuma, Emmanuel and other boys formed a surrogate family--cooking for one another, tending each other when ill, keeping lookout for bandits.

Emmanuel spoke of the camp’s insecurity and food shortages when interviewed in November 1999 by a resettlement expert for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the agency that operates Kakuma.

He also spoke of his goal.

“I want to become a pastor,” Emmanuel said then. “The most important thing I need right now is an education and a safe place to live. If I have knowledge, I can save our people.”

Last year when Emmanuel received word he would be leaving, he packed two treasured possessions: a black-and-white knit tablecloth and a floral-decorated bedspread, given to him by an uncle.

He gave away his mattress, shoes, watch, blankets and books.

“I leave all that I have to my people,” he says.

*

‘If you do things like a small child, you die. If you take care of yourself, you can stay alive. That’s why I’m here.’

*

He had to learn about lightbulbs.

Toilets. Telephones. Toothbrushes. Running water. Refrigerators. Toasters. Microwaves.

“You have a machine to do everything,” he marvels.

Emmanuel has not only traveled 7,000 miles; he has journeyed across time.

Each day there are new lessons. His teachers are his foster parents, Lois and Steve Krogh, who, with their five children--a sixth is on the way--welcomed Emmanuel last November to their home in western Michigan.

When Lois Krogh read a newspaper article last summer about the Lost Boys, she suggested to her pastor husband that they do their part. After consulting with their children, the decision was made.

“We have plenty to eat,” says Steve Krogh, who heads the congregation at Grace Community Church. “We have a nice house. We have clothes. We met somebody who doesn’t have clothes, who doesn’t have a house, who doesn’t have food. The question should be, ‘Why wouldn’t we do it?’ ”

The Kroghs’ oldest son, Derek, 13, gave his room to Emmanuel, who now sleeps with a radio on his dresser tuned to the BBC.

Emmanuel calls the Kroghs “mother” and “father.” He doesn’t like to be left home alone, so he attends all the family outings: church, movies, Derek’s basketball games.

At Christmas, he had a stocking with his name on the mantel and there were gifts under the tree-- including a mirror and a camera.

“People welcome me very nicely, like a child who was lost and found again,” he says.

He is quickly getting accustomed to having all the food he wants. In three months, Emmanuel, who stands about 5 foot 10, has outgrown his 28-inch-waist pants for pairs two inches larger.

Lois Krogh says it sometimes has been exhausting trying to explain things to Emmanuel, but “he has amazed us with his strength and resilience. He doesn’t give up.”

Others notice too. His science teacher says he’s conscientious. His boss at the grocery where he works part-time told him he doesn’t always have to run.

Like all the Krogh children, Emmanuel was given a scrapbook to chronicle his life.

His book is filled with recent snapshots of friends, his plane tickets to America and tissue-thin report cards from Kakuma with grades and comments: “He is a good, polite, cooperative boy.”

Asked what he likes about America, Emmanuel doesn’t hesitate: Education, he says.

Then quickly, he adds, freedom.

But Emmanuel would like to return to Sudan someday.

At night he sometimes dreams he has been reunited with friends. When he awakes, Emmanuel is far from misery--but far from a world where he belonged.

“I feel sad,” he says. “But then I pray. I pray--and I remember the good things.”

*

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees: https://www.unhcr.ch