zalehear hendryks bohemian
Ranee Wates
Twelve years ago, 60 Minutes aired a story about Lost Boys from Sudan who fought off unspeakable dangers and then flew off to the United States. It all began in the 1980s, during Sudan's civil war in which more than two million people died. The boys' parents were killed; their sisters often sold into slavery. Many of the boys died too. But the survivors, thousands of them, started walking across East Africa. Alone.
Five years later they walked into a refugee camp in Kenya. That's where we first met them, when many were hoping to go to the United States. Well 3,000 did, as part of the largest resettlement of its kind in American history. We followed the boys for more than a decade and couldn't resist revisiting them, to see how they're doing. But first, we'll take you back to northern Kenya, to the Kakuma Refugee Camp. Springtime 2001.
Every Sunday, a plane arrived at the camp to take the boys from nowhere to somewhere, from Kakuma to JFK and beyond. Not all of the Lost Boys got to go. Joseph Taban Rufino had walked to the board so many times, he tried not to get excited.
They were known as the Lost Boys because they were between five and 11 when their Christian villages in southern Sudan were attacked by Islamist forces from the north. When they saw their villages burning, they started running. Streams of boys became rivers. Hundreds became thousands until an exodus of biblical proportions was underway. They walked for three months across Sudan, barefoot. Twelve thousand found refuge in Ethiopia. But after four years, they were chased out at gunpoint, chased to the Gilo River where the waters did not part. For Joseph Taban, that day will never go away.
In the spring of 1992, after walking more than a thousand 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.
Abraham found a job, preaching the gospel in a church built of mud. The Lost Boys couldn't go home to Sudan and Kenya didn't want them. Then, in the year 2000, the State Department decided they deserved a break and invited them to come live in the United States.
Abraham the preacher man was supposed to go to Chicago but at the last minute that was changed to Atlanta. Volunteers introduced them to their new apartments, to American mysteries like a sink or a stove...
You won't be surprised to learn that Abraham found his salvation in church. All Saints, one of the largest Episcopal churches in Atlanta. A month after his arrival, he was invited to be a guest deacon.
Confusing? Try to imagine what a fountain looks like to a man who walked a thousand miles through a desert. Sasha Chanoff, who taught the boys back in Kenya, said it was not easy for them to distinguish between what was real and what was pure fantasy in America.
Sasha Chanoff: They're hearing that people have gone to the moon. 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 going to the moon? It's hard for people 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?
As it did once again. The boys weren't surprised by it, not the way Americans were. For them, Islam and terrorism went together. Always had. Their reaction was immediate. Help the victims. In Atlanta, they offered to donate blood for the survivors in New York. But they were turned away.
But they weren't coming any more. After 9/11 the flights scheduled to bring over more lost boys were stopped. And the boys already here were having a tough time of it. That dreaded American winter was now upon them. They'd been warned, but it still came as a shock.
Before their arrival in America in 2001, the Lost Boys of Sudan knew very little about what would be a totally new world for them. For the U.S. government, it was quite a social experiment. America may be a country of immigrants, but it's not often that the State Department organizes an airlift of people who know virtually nothing about the modern world.
The Lost Boys were sent all over the place from Fargo, N.D., to Phoenix, Ariz. Joseph Taban Rufino landed in Kansas City. Abraham Yel Nhial was sent to Atlanta. We never forgot about them and their fellow Lost Boys and we felt good when it appeared they hadn't forgotten about us.
There was more bad news at work. Joseph was laid off a few times from his job at a grain company, a victim of the tough economy. He's back at work now, and in his small, dimly lit apartment still studies medical books, even while his dream of going to med school is slipping away.
Some have had problems with drugs and alcohol. A few are in jail. But some Lost Boys who were orphaned by war, have been wounded fighting for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Daw Dekon made it out unscathed.
Dominic Leek: When I came to this country, I was helped by the government of this country and the people of America. So, what I did was, I thank them for the opportunity they gave to me and my fellow lost boy.
Abraham feels he has a mission - to make sure people will not forget. He speaks at universities across the country. Here he was at Yale, explaining to students why he believes God kept the boys alive.
Joseph Taban Rufino: Oh, indeed, a lot. During the young age where we were when I was there, we're not supposed to see the dead body, or bury the dead body. And we did that. And that's all come, like sometimes in form of dream.
Sasha Chanoff:: I think so. They created a political environment in the U.S. where people were finally realizing what was happening in this remote genocide in Sudan that nobody had really heard of on a large scale before.
Not long ago, Sudanese flocked by the hundreds to a town called Aweil for a celebration. It wasn't Independence Day or anything like that. They came to a newly built brick cathedral to witness the installation of that preacher named Abraham as the first Episcopal bishop of his region in South Sudan.
Joseph hasn't gone back to Africa, has had no reason to. His whole family was dead, as far as he knew. Then, incredible news: his mother Perina was alive, had survived the war, had made it to a refugee camp in Uganda.
And there was another miracle: Skype. So, a few months ago, Joseph ironed his best suit and went over to his mentor's house. His mother had been driven three hours to the offices of IOM, the international resettlement agency in South Sudan. It was the first time mother and son were going to see each other since they were separated by war 25 years ago.
But there were light moments too, shared memories of Joseph's happy childhood in a country village before the war ended childhood and everything else. And, of course, his mother wanted to know why, after all these years, Joseph had not married a nice American girl. After almost an hour, their time was almost up. His mother asked Joseph what all mothers ask their sons: When will come see me? And Joseph answered the only possible answer: As soon as I can mom, as soon as I can.
The first half-hour is set in Africa and focuses on South Sudanese children forced on journeys of more than 1,000 miles on foot after violence claimed the lives of their parents and siblings. (The 22-year conflict between the government and rebels, which ended in 2005, is estimated to have killed 2 million people and displaced 4 million more. Problems of hunger were so great during the war that, as Jal described, people often died of starvation and a few resorted to cannibalism.) Against all odds, a few survived and made it to the infamous Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.
One of those children was Ger Duany. A tall man who speaks in quiet tones, Duany estimates he walked thousands of miles between South Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya in the 1990s as new threats kept materializing. Spontaneous attacks and violence was one hazard; a lack of water was another, often more fatal, danger.
Those feelings helped him in some very specific ways. The movie concerns one of the men coping with guilt that his older brother volunteered himself for the army so his sibling could run away. It was a dynamic Duany understood all too well.
Eventually, Duany and Jal won everyone over, as did Kuoth Wiel, a young woman who had fled South Sudan with her family as a little girl. (The third male lead, Arnold Oceng, traces ancestors to East Africa but grew up in London; he is a professional actor.)
For the young versions of the characters, Falardeau had an even more novel idea: Recruit the children of lost boys, who would now be the same age as their parents were early in the war, from churches across the U.S. His casting director, Mindy Marin, set out on a van trip across the country to find those most suitable. When they had a good group, the production flew them and their parents to the South African set for what turned into a kind of group catharsis.
Once on set, Duany was joined by a friend and fellow lost boy from Atlanta. Stoll was in the hotel room with them, and they were all laughing as the man, nicknamed King Deng, literally pulled out his stomach, which was mutilated in the fighting.
Mati Diop: I'm very, very shocked and terrified by the fact that this very tragic situation that some people went through was so disrespected and disconsidered by the main mass media. How the migrants have been filmed on the boats and how those images were consumed. How the essence of the situation has been miscommunicated. This existential, political and economical situation has been so mistreated. I have no words to tell you how angry I am at the disrespect.
Murtada: I think it's the most powerful scene I've seen on film this year. It was just so haunting and I so struck by what you just said right now about how the audience needs to have their own imagination. It finally came to me, why this scene has haunted me so much. I was imagining what happened.
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