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THE LOST BOYS: THE SERIES

Part One, 1/7/01
The Lost Boys

Part Two, 3/18/01
Dinka values, teenage rites

Part Three, 7/08/01
Illusions fade in reality of city life

Part Four, 12/30/01
African and American

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The Boston Globe OnlineBoston.com Boston Globe Online / City | Region

The lost boys: Deng walked out of the ancient world of the nomadic cattle-herder to become a different kind of person. After a year in America, is he still his mother's son?

African and American

Lost Boys
JET LAG: After his long journey to the United States last year, a weary Deng - now known as John - needed some recovery time. (Globe Staff Photo / Bill Greene)

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, 12/30/2001

    Last in an occasional series.

    MARENG, Sudan - Two months ago, a man walked 15 miles through the bush to tell Nyanwel Joh that her son Deng was alive and attending high school in America.

    He also told her: America is another country. It is not located in Africa. If you walked, he said, it would take three months to get there.

    America was the fourth place Nyanwel had ever heard of outside the stretch of plain where she lives, after Ethiopia, Kenya, and Khartoum. But looking at photographs of Deng hunched like a gangsta rapper on Huntington Avenue, or with arms slung around his classmates at Arlington High School, she allowed her mind to slip its old boundaries.

    "When I look up, I see blue unending space. At night, I see the stars and moon. Horizontally I see the end of the earth, the end of the sky, and beyond that I cannot imagine," she said, and fell silent.

    A few moments later, she ventured, "I wonder if you live the same as we do there."

    There was much in his life that Deng could not have explained to the woman who, 14 years ago, sent him away from the village to become a different kind of person.

    He could not explain Avogadro's number, or the wind chill factor, or financial aid, or why, after all he had been through on the way to America, he had nearly wept to see a man beaten in the film "Uncle Tom's Cabin." A year after he arrived in Massachusetts, Nyanwel's son - now a tall 18-year-old known as John - was eligible to receive a green card, which gives him permanent residency in the United States.

    Like the other Massachusetts high schoolers who left the same Sudanese village that same day, he was looking out at the dark street from lighted windows this Christmas. And although his future in America was far from assured, he also knew for a certainty that he didn't belong in Mareng anymore.

    When news of Deng's whereabouts arrived in his mother's village, a 2,000-year-old way of life stopped and rearranged itself.

    Head men carrying umbrella spokes and hammered metal crosses walked out of the bush and converged on the homestead Deng had left. His elderly aunts got into the sorghum wine and trilled girlish songs about bulls, finally collapsing into a deep sleep on a corner of a tarpaulin. His brothers called a truce in their hut-burning feud over the family's 10 remaining cows.

    And his mother, Nyanwel, who has shrunk with age and hunger to the lightness of a wren, slaughtered a goat and boiled it in pond water.

    "I just heard the name of America," she said. "I don't know whether you go there by car or by foot. I don't know where it is located. I don't know whether America owns cows. According to the stories I have heard, it contains white people.

    "Since he left, I am failing to imagine how he lives," she said. "I only pray to God to bring him back to me." The choice to send Deng away was partly hers. In 1987, with southern Sudan racked by its fourth year of civil war, word came from the Sudanese People's Liberation Army that several hundred children from Mareng were to be taken from their homes. They would be led in the direction of Ethiopia, where, parents were informed, they would be taught to read.

    It was the month of Mareng's chief joy, the cattle camp, where every year villagers forget the hunger of August and guzzle cow's milk to see how fat they can get. Young boys covered themselves with ashes. Pale smoke rose around white song-oxen.

    Nyanwel's older sons, 19-year-old Panchol and 14-year-old Koryam, had no desire to leave. But her strong-willed 5-year-old saw the other children preparing to go, and he grew eager. Nyanwel - who had borne 10 children in a mud-walled hut and lost six in infancy - agreed at last. Deng went.

    She expected to see him again at school holidays.

    Fourteen years later, when his message reached her, he had passed from the hands of the southern Sudanese rebel movement to the Ethiopian government, to the Kenyan government, to the United Nations, and finally to the United States, where he was already in his second year at Arlington High School.

    Some of the children who had left Mareng with him had drowned in the terrible crossing of the Gilo River, and others, too tired to continue, curled up beside the road to die. Those who survived were stranded in a Kenyan refugee camp until their story inspired the US State Department to arrange the largest resettlement of children since the Vietnam War.

    Last winter, Deng and more than 3,100 other young men were flown to the United States and delivered to subdivisions and apartment buildings, where a small army of volunteers has worked to ensure that the cattle-herders' sons successfully make the transition to Western life.

    The view in Sudanese villages like Mareng, where many of the boys' families still live in the pre-modern state they left, is quite different. When the process is complete, the parents ask, will they still be our children?

    Under a tamarind tree, in the glow of the news about Deng, one man questioned whether the children would want to return to the village, where progressive-minded local officials still promote the wearing of clothes as "an indication that you are somebody, that you are not an animal."

    Until 1993, he said, villagers here still worshipped a piece of zinc named Lorpyo.

    People are happy here, he said, but only until they leave.

    "He will not fit with the condition of this place. Here life is very simple. You have five or six cows and you run after them," said Garang Kuei Mel, 48, a longtime official in the humanitarian wing of the rebel movement.

    "Most of these people are illiterate. You will not waste your time reading books about Shakespeare.

    "These are stories," he added, with some contempt. "You do not tell stories to people who do not read or write. They will not make use of you."

    Nyanwel Joh - who has never been told what year it is, or how old she is, or that the Earth revolves - was not thinking about his return. Instead, she appealed to Deng to save the family from a gathering catastrophe.

    The message she sent him from Africa was this: Your brothers have become enemies. Nuer raiders left us with only 10 cows, and the younger, Koryam, used them to marry. Furious at the usurpation of his birthright, the elder burned our hut down.

    Without cow's milk, Deng's mother reported, I am starving.

    She also added, sweetly, almost as an afterthought, that she was considering joining him in America.

    "If there is a vacancy," she said.

    Arrival in the US, and thoughts of home

    John Deng, suburban 10th-grader, had shaken off the sadness that gripped him on the day of his arrival.

    He flew in on Dec. 20, 2000. Moving airport sidewalks had come at him first, and they were followed rapidly by hothouse vegetables, climate control, and the complex night machinery of New York City. He watched with fascination a beer can talking on television. He complained with hurt dignity about the teenagers in Roxbury, whose pants revealed their buttocks.

    But the worst injury seemed to be to his self-esteem. His eyes still red from jet lag, Deng shook his head at the realization that his people had somehow been left out of 2,000 years of human progress.

    "In part of education we are so backwards and in everything we are backwards," he said. "We are very backward in English speaking. Maybe our country is so backward."

    For months after they landed, many of the boys were still dreaming about hump-backed cattle. They drew them on notebook paper and gave them to their teachers for Valentine's Day.

    They thought about home. During the long years at the refugee camp, Deng's cousin Peter Thon had ached to return to Mareng; it took all his friends' efforts to convince him that village life is useless. Now, on the other side of the world, Thon shuttled from one high school class to another with only the foggiest understanding of the information he was being given.

    This spring, as a math teacher scribbled long columns of numbers on the blackboard, he turned to a near-stranger beside him and asked, "Can you find my father?"

    Some of that longing faded this year, replaced by more local aspirations. In the spangled interior of the Burlington Mall, 14-year-old Philip Mou darted like a homing pigeon into Abercrombie and Fitch, where he spent most of his savings on a shirt that read, "Got a Sister?" William Wol, his tribal markings now set off by gold spectacles, had focused his affection on Arlington High School's track team.

    When he saw photographs of African cattle, Wol still broke out in a luminous smile and thrust his arms into the air in imitation of their long horns, as 20 generations of his ancestors would have.

    "I still love them," he said of the cows. "But I do not think I will be with them."

    Their embrace of their new home did not mean they were succeeding as they had expected. Many of the boys under 18, who had been desperate to go to school, found themselves struggling. Those over 18, fed directly into the work force, worried that the education they had been promised would never come at all.

    It was an outcome that had troubled Francis Mading Deng, a top UN official who is himself the son of Dinka cattle-herders, from the moment he heard about the resettlement.

    "At best, maybe a few will distinguish themselves. But a lot of them are going to just disappear into situations where they make ends meet in a basic way," he said, from a book-lined office in Manhattan. "Then the country loses them, their own people lose them, they themselves fundamentally lose that clear sense of identity and purpose."

    If there was a living exception, it was John Deng, who matriculated at Arlington High School and tore off like a racehorse through the new curriculum. He turned his attention to the Holocaust, to the volume of spherical objects, to the awful triangle of the Atlantic slave trade. In the group home where he lived, he regularly clashed with his house parents over disciplinary matters - but he was a conspicuous top student. A year after he arrived, his report card listed an A in English, an A minus in chemistry, and an A plus in Algebra 2.

    "He had an outwardly rebellious body language," said Walter Mau, an engineer who began tutoring Deng over the summer. "But he showed me his math, and I was astounded."

    Franco Majok, a case worker for Lutheran Social Services, said many of the minors were frustrated at their performance in school. Deng was different.

    "Deng can make it," he said.

    After successes, a setback

    On the anniversary of their arrival, the boys' house in Arlington was crowded with tutors and volunteers and neighbors' children. Albino Mayar had learned to sing the "Dreidel Song" and Philip Jok had acquired a fuzzy elf hat; in the corner of their room stood a small artificial tree. They unwound tangles of ribbon and ripped paper off a slim box that contained the board game Monopoly. Their dreadful first week in this country - when they huddled around heaters and thought their skin was shrinking on their bodies - seemed faint and almost forgotten amid the lights and music of Christmas.

    The one face missing was John Deng's.

    Deng was arrested the Sunday after Thanksgiving after a fistfight with one of his roommates. When the police arrived, a resettlement worker was already on the scene, and pleaded with them not to arrest him.

    "She states that residents of Sudan have a difficult time managing conflict in the United States and learning the customs and laws, but are trying the best they can," reads the police report in the case.

    Despite her plea, that morning found Deng posing in profile for a mug shot. Two weeks later, a house parent called the police again to report that Deng had shouted an obscenity and thrown a shoe.

    Only gradually, after Deng had been placed in a temporary foster home, did his roommates realize that the incidents could, at the very least, jeopardize his immigration status.

    At worst, if he was convicted and immigration authorities stepped in, they could result in deportation.

    It was a predicament that troubled his old friend Philip Jok, who had accompanied Deng for years.

    "Fighting is something printed in the blood of Sudanese generations," Jok said. "We cannot say we are not going to."

    John Deng waited in a foster home this Christmas, puzzling over the lawyer who had not yet asked him whether he was guilty. In school he was laboring through "Go Ask Alice," the 1971 antidrug parable that purports to be the diary of a good girl turned junkie-stripper. He had been assigned an essay about racist hate mail. He was working on finding the mass of an atom of aluminum.

    He thought about his bird-boned mother at the moments when he thought she might be cooking dinner.

    He thought about his brothers' archaic rage.

    "If I go there, I may say that is really kind of primitive. They are really just quarreling like that is the end of the world," said Deng, in English that has loosened to near-fluency over the last year. "I will tell them, the world is wide."

    This is how he celebrated the day of his arrival: Half married to the Western world, half living in a place he can barely see through memory.

    But as proud adults remarked on the enormous changes he has seen in the past year - the year he first encountered the light switch and the microchip - Deng did not give America any credit for transforming him.

    If he changed at all, he said, it happened long before he had even heard of America.

    The great change came in one day, when he held hands with the other children and left Mareng.

    "I am not like my people anymore, and I am not like the rest of the other worlds," he said.

    "I am just between," he said. "I am just Deng."

    At the request of resettlement workers, the young men are referred to by their first and middle names.

    This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 12/30/2001.
    © Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.