Newspapers and television programs were calling them the "Lost Boys of Sudan." They were youngsters who had been orphaned in childhood by the Sudanese civil war and who had trekked by themselves across East Africa. They had fled from their homes as children, some as young as four or five, others nine or ten. As many as 20,000-nobody really knew the numbers-started out.
At first they found refuge in Ethiopia; then when revolution came to Addis Ababa, they were driven from their camps with great loss of life before eventually finding their way to the United Nations safe haven in Kenya's Kakuma refugee camp. Six thousand or so had been living there since 1992; some were girls, but most were boys (hence "The Lost Boys"). Approximately 3,800 were later admitted to the United States. Most were Dinkas, from South Sudan's largest tribe, but there were also Acholi, Shilluk, Nuer, and others. About 170 of them were bound for Boston.
Until coming to the United States, the young Sudanese men had never ridden in a car, switched on an electric light, watched a television, or used a flush toilet. As children, they had lived in conical grass houses and followed their cattle. As refugees they had slept in mud huts, subsisting on a daily bowl of corn porridge.
This is the story of how one of these Lost Boys, a historically unique group of young Africans, their minds formed and conditioned by the age-old patterns of life on the Upper Nile savanna, are transforming themselves and living in 21st-century America.
