ANOTHER COUNTRY: "There is no one to welcome you," says John Garang, 22, (left) of his long journey. He now lives in Lynn with Ezekiel Mayen (center) and nine fellow Sudanese. "You just go there and you know you will be suffering for some time. America is just a land." (Globe Staff Photo / Bill Greene) A gallery of 'Lost Boys' photos IF YOU WANT TO HELP The following agencies are soliciting help for the ongoing resettlement of Sudanese young adults in Boston. Lutheran Social Services of New England still needs foster homes for unaccompanied minors. Contact Karen Santella at 617-964-7220, or contact Martha Mann at 508-650-4400 to send cash donations. Refugees over the age of 18 are in need of employment, housing, and cash assistance. Contact the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston (Deborah Hughes at 617-625-1920 ext. 301); the International Institute of Boston (contact Christine Hilgeman at 617-695-9990 ext. 156); and the International Rescue Committee (contact Rita Kantarowski at 617-482-1154 ext. 201).

By Ellen Barry, Globe Staff, 7/8/2001

Third in an occasional series

YNN -- When he was a small boy scampering after calves in the village of Mading, Jok Mading was told that there were people in the world whose skin was white, but he was a clever child and did not believe it.

Sometimes, when an airplane flew overhead, the children would stare up at the line of vapor hanging behind it and say: America. But there were older people -- maybe two generations older than Mading -- who could live and die in the belief that their people, the Dinka, were the principal residents of the earth.

So it was odd, days after Mading had left Africa at age 19 and been resettled in a rented apartment in Lynn, to find himself addressed -- by children, no less -- as a "monkey without a tail."

He and 10 other young Sudanese men sat in their cramped apartment, conferring about the meaning of this term. Like "nigger" -- another word they had heard people yell at them -- "monkeys without tails" sounded like a "word of abuse," as Mading put it, and the young men were frozen and alert in the face of it. When he finally was told the definition of these words, Mading sat back slowly.

"I now know the meaning of that word," said Mading, who was wearing a donated Lynn Rotary Club T-shirt. "Now, what can one do? If someone call me nigger, what can I do to it?"

Six months have passed since the first of the refugee group known as the Lost Boys of Sudan were whisked off to new homes in America. In 1987, the boys of Bor and Bahr el Ghazal provinces were driven out of their war-torn villages on a trek that would bring them nearly 1,000 miles across Africa. Since then their lives have been so bound together that they shared a single, government-issued birthday.

But here in Massachusetts, where dozens of Lost Boys have landed, the young men have embarked on different paths. The 40 who came in under the age of 18 joined foster families, often in the suburbs, and are enrolled in high school, with tuition waived at Massachusetts state universities if they are admitted.

Meanwhile, their older comrades -- about 90 Sudanese in their late teens and early 20s -- are living in groups in apartments around the region and have entered into urban life. The shocks came immediately.

For the first time, the color of their skin was charged with tense meaning. More difficult, though, have been the day-to-day frustrations of looking for low-wage jobs while trying to grasp the most basic facts about American culture, which some pursued by watching television game shows.

There was no way to warn them about America's more complicated truths, said Julianne Duncan, a child welfare worker who, at Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, was the first American most of them knew well.

"It's kind of like trying to explain cold to people who have never experienced cold," she said. "They were really, really focused on what it was going to be like to get on an airplane. The part about after six months, you're going to be depressed . . . they could absorb certain amounts of it, but not all. People can only learn so much at any one time."

For some, the difference between expectations and reality has felt like a betrayal. A few weeks after he arrived, John Garang, a mordant, clever 22-year-old who has become the informal leader of the group living in the Lynn apartment, sat down to write to Timnit Embaye, the cultural trainer at Kakuma Camp whose job it had been to prepare the Sudanese for life in America.

"I curse the day I joined the process to come to the US," he wrote to her. "I would go back if possible."

Abroad in the city

Innocent of technology, armed with an archaic British vocabulary, they had been seen off from Africa to become a new, educated Dinka elite.

"We hope they will get all the chances of life," said Joseph Kuir Maker last fall, as one of many flights left Africa from a tiny Kenyan airstrip. Maker, a former official in southern Sudan, had helped watch over the group for a decade. "They will get education in all things. They will be the people to build up this nation and they will be the people to be defending the nation and they will be the ones doing every job."

And some seem headed that way. In Massachusetts, six months into the celebrated resettlement, 18-year-old John Alith was studying hard at Oxford High School. He had decided not to try out for football, concluding that "if you have a small muscle like this one the possibility of getting an accident is there." And his interest in Edgar Allen Poe had grown: "It demonstrate the macabre. It demonstrate the darknesses, the badnesses."

But he didn't see his future in literature. "My blood," he said, "is telling me to be a doctor."

Bol Thiik, 18, had become a strong runner on Winchester High School's track team, and was headed to a summer job at a camp on a lake in New Hampshire. He had begun to notice social differences on trips in and out of Winchester.

"Here in America, the poor person is the fat guy, and the rich person is the thin one, and I don't know why!"

Six months after his arrival, he still saw America as a "second heaven."

Their older compatriots came in with the same otherworldly naivete. Never having used an alarm clock, one household of Sudanese refugees in Chelsea had developed their own system for waking up: Every night, one of them was designated to stay up all night, waking up his housemates when the sun rose.

And 21-year-old David Diing found his whole understanding of human skin color thrown into disorder by posters for the Blue Man Group. (Although, he added, gravely, "I have not seen them physically to confirm that.")

Without the protection of host families, though, the older Sudanese also have had to face serious, adult situations. On a June night in Chelsea, one of the refugees received a deep gash in his arm during an altercation with a neighbor. The neighbor said she slapped him after he swatted at her 10-year-old daughter, who had been teasing him on the porch of their house, but denies that anyone in her family cut his arm. (Police suspended their investigation because the victim was unable to identify his assailant, said Sergeant Thomas Dunn.)

Since then relations in the apartment building have improved, and have even become friendly, thanks to the intervention of a Spanish-speaking volunteer. But the incident sent waves of anxiety through the apartments of resettled Sudanese throughout the area.

"I flew 36 hours above the sky to come here from Africa," said the young man, who now has a wound snaking up his forearm. "I was innocent. I did not know where I am going. I was not expecting to come get such a thing here."

The quiet zone

They had been informed that the transition might be rocky. Before leaving Africa they received a packet of information that contained, alongside instructions not to engage in female circumcision or polygamy, a graph of their projected happiness over time. The graph starts high, with arrival in the United States, then spikes during the "honeymoon" stage, in the month after arrival. The line plummets during "Stage 2: shock/depression." A few months later, the happiness graph rallies and lifts toward "Stage 4: balance."

The promise of reaching Stage 4 was not much consolation to the 11 young men in Lynn, who spent much of their first weeks in the United States holed up in a small apartment playing cards and chatting in Dinka, re-creating the life they had left in the camp. For three days after they arrived, in an apartment so cold they had "smoke" coming out of their mouths, they didn't step outside, Garang said.

Outside was great confusion. They wondered what kind of death waited on those streets labeled "DEAD END." The words "QUIET ZONE" posted on a tree outside their apartment made them wonder what would happen if they made noise. Warned in Africa about the aggression of American drunks, they crossed the street warily every time they went near a bar.

They were crestfallen every night when their neighbors, returning home from work, passed them by wordlessly instead of stopping to chat. And as the young men walked the streets, too tall and too dark to blend in, comments rang out from the sidewalk. Garang began to believe the advice of an elder who had warned him, "even if you're in America, you're still in the bush." They came home, the unfamiliar epithets ringing in their ears, and tried to figure out what they meant.

"We know that in Africa a gang is a group of thieves, and we wonder why people call us gangs," Garang said. "We realize here in America, 'gang' is not depending on a group of rebels alone. Whenever you walk in a group you will be called a gang."

All those complaints paled, though, beside the growing fear that they were not going to receive a proper education. That was the promise that drew them out of the cattle-herding villages in the first place. Imagining work in the United States, they had a vague picture of themselves in an office, or wild hopes of finding employment at a Sudanese-style cattle camp. Now, having come as far as America, without marketable skills, they were interviewing for jobs washing dishes and loading laundry.

No one was more depressed than Garang. He had left Africa six months short of graduating from secondary school, hoping to return to his country as a doctor or a teacher or a priest. Now he found himself applying for a sanitation job at Logan Airport.

"You talk of a graph having honeymoon, depression, and balance, but for me it start by depression, and I don't see the possibility of the other two come in," Garang wrote to the woman who had taught cultural orientation at Kakuma. "The only thing which can solve my problems is education and not money."

'I am ready to work'

The official answer to their troubles, however, is money -- and finding a way to earn it.

Upon arrival, resettled refugees are entitled to $428 a month in federal cash assistance, in addition to transportation money for up to eight months. But resettlement agencies encourage them to get into the work force -- and end federal payments -- as soon as possible. Agencies help arrange for adult education or night school classes once the refugees are settled in their jobs.

So for refugees intent on enrolling in school, the first few months "becomes a little bit about the dream deferred," said Robert Meek, director of resettlement at the International Institute of Boston, which arranged the Lynn group's resettlement.

Because of the employment push, the average refugee resettled by the International Institute is off assistance in 4.5 months, said Westy Egmont, the agency's executive director.

LIFE LESSON: 'What can one do?' asked Jok Mading upon learning the meaning of a racial epithet. (Globe Staff Photo / Bill Greene)

"That's a remarkable testimony to the economy and immigrant culture," he said. "Countries like the Netherlands . . . provide social welfare [for a longer period], but people end up dependent on the state."

For the Dinka, who would be the first in their ancestral line to do anything but subsistence farming or cattle herding, the quest for a job has meant learning everything at once.

Alison Lutz, an employment coordinator for another resettlement agency, Catholic Charities International, recalls driving a young Sudanese man to a job interview, getting out of her car, and watching him clamber after her out the driver's-side door, not knowing how to open his own. On an employment application, another listed his emergency contact number as 911.

To the Dinka, who consider self-promotion deeply shameful, the job interview itself was a challenging concept. Twenty-five-year-old Joseph Garang (no relation to John), while waiting for an interview for a janitorial job at an Old Navy store, expressed some doubts about the training he had received at the resettlement agency.

"How am I to say I am a hard worker, and I will come to work on time? What if I am not?" he asked. The boss "will disqualify me, saying I am not a truth person."

Across town, in Chelsea, John Garang explained that he had grinned through interviews at the Omni Parker House and Walmart. He shook hands firmly, and he made eye contact, but he couldn't help laughing afterward. If he ever behaved that way in Africa, his reputation would never recover.

"People see you, they will laugh so much you will start hiding from them," he said, shaking his head incredulously. Asking for work in Africa, "you just say, 'I am ready to work.' Not, 'These are the adjectives to describe myself.' What Americans like is to keep smiling. It really is quite funny," he added, "to smile when you do not like it. I don't know if they realize is not genuine."

Still, when he went to interview for a job working the night shift at a coffee ship, he said what he was supposed to say.

"The man ask me what time are you available," Garang said. "I said I am available when you need me. He said how much money do you require. I said any amount that you decide. He ask me also which shift do you want. I say any that you choose. He say when do you want to start. I said I will start when you like."

But the man didn't call.

'Another place'

One by one, the young Dinka men in Lynn began leaving the quiet of the apartment for jobs. The first to leave was Alier Agok, who took his place at $11.53 an hour beside one Haitian, one Liberian, one Vietnamese, two Chinese, two Puerto Ricans, one Dominican, and one Salvadoran in the laundry room of the Omni Parker House.

The laundry room was all compressed steam and pounding extractors, which caused a painful throbbing in the place where, two years ago, an arrow had lodged above Agok's left ear. After he returned from his first day, he said he understood why "all the men in America they have a hump like a cow."

Agok's thoughts, as he shook out pillowcases on the evening shift, were about the future, about saving $5,000 for the cows he needs to trade for a Dinka bride. He felt sure he would not be in the laundry room for very long, and had heard of a less taxing job that quickly became his ambition: security guard. But at this point, he cannot see ever saving enough money to buy a car or own a home or pursue an education.

Sometimes, in the laundry room, he thinks about what it would be like to go back to Sudan and fight in the rebel army.

"Sometimes I feel this is not America," he said. "All the people are not speaking English, and I hear that this is where the English came from. America must be another place. We are just on the way to America."

For his part, John Garang watched his roommates leave for work but made no gesture to join them. By the beginning of his third month here, he had given up in disgust on the job interviews. His vision of the future now centered dreamily on Salem State College.

Garang spent hours sprawled inside the apartment, poring over test preparation books. He left on a recent Thursday for what seemed to him like his last shot at charting his own course: the Test of English as a Foreign Language, which foreign students must take to attend most four-year colleges in this country.

Garang had been gently warned by his pastor at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church that he couldn't expect to pass the test, whose grammar and reading comprehension sections regularly stump recent arrivals in this country.

But he set off that morning, anyway, full of hope. It had become clear what he had to do.

The following Sunday he went to St. Stephen's, a parish that has swelled with Africans from former British colonies. Garang asked to make an announcement, and climbed up to the pulpit.

"I am here to thank you for what you have done," Garang told the congregation. "When I first come here, I was thinking that Americans don't concern of other people. I was thinking if there is any possibility, I will go back to Africa. But when you show concern it bring a change in my life.

"One of the very great changes is that three days ago, I took the TOEFL exam. I passed the exam, and it is because of you people."

Someone started clapping. The clapping spread, and someone pumped her fist in the crowd, and a full house of worshipers hooted and cheered. John Garang stood there, smiling.

At the request of resettlement workers, only the young men's first and middle names have been used.

This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 7/8/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.