Eighteen years after civil war pre-empted his childhood, African “Lost Boy” Khor Bher finally found his way back home from Denver to reunite with his mother.
A Russian pilot ferried him and Denver volunteer Carol Rinehart to a ravaged village in southern Sudan. There, an emaciated woman ran through hard rain, clapping her hands. She flung herself on the son who now towered over her.
Khor Bher, 26, hugged his mother tenderly. His body relaxed after so many years of yearning. He hadn’t seen her since he was 7, dodging bullets as government forces attacked. For years, he didn’t know if she was alive.
Her face radiant, Yar clasped him, patting his back, as captured on video. She sang him the lilting Dinka tribal lullaby she’d sung to him as a baby: “You are very strong, my very strong lion.”
Today, more and more Lost Boy refugees are trying to re-connect with Sudan like Khor Bher, who escaped slaughter during the 21-year war by trekking barefoot a thousand miles.
Going home has become possible because – while genocidal killing continues in Darfur in western Sudan – a tenuous peace holds in Texas-sized southern Sudan.
That hug last year “released” Khor Bher from a “sickness” of unnatural separation that torments Lost Boys in America, he said back in Denver, where he works as an apartment repairman.
Assistance from afar
Americans are embracing the effort.
Denver-area high school students have raised more than $30,000 to build a boarding school for girls in Sudan and reunite six or so other Lost Boys with relatives. In a reversal of the usual scenario – Americans teaching refugees English – volunteers eager to work in southern Sudan are learning Dinka from Lost Boys in a classroom at St. John’s Cathedral in Denver.
Artists creating Sudan-related works plan to donate money from their sales to the campaign, which has attracted attention in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum.
In Congress, Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., who has visited southern Sudan, recently introduced legislation to waive college student loan payments for Sudan refugees who return home.
Sudan “needs people with skills,” Tancredo said. “We need them to stay there and put in practice what they’ve learned.”
The push to reunite war survivors and improve living conditions in a war zone marks a new twist in the saga of Sudan’s tall and exquisitely-mannered refugees who survived an extraordinary exodus.
Some were as young as 5 when soldiers for Sudan’s Muslim government attacked their Christian villages, cutting boys off from families. They fled without food or water, fending off lions and hyenas that turned vicious after eating human corpses.
More than 20,000 staggered to Ethiopia and then, when war broke out there, back across Sudan to desert camps in Kenya. Thousands died – shot, drowned, eaten by crocodiles. Surviving boys sustained themselves by singing about their parents and praying to see them again.
U.S. officials eventually accepted 3,300 as refugees and placed them in 30 cities, including Denver, where about 70 reside, now in their 20s, busily combining work and study – still hurting in ways not fully understood.
“I don’t think there’s anything worse than being separated from your family. It’s really the worst. You dream about it. Think about it. It just takes up your whole life. You can’t think about anything else,” said Lual Awok, 26, a refugee in Boulder who plans to meet his mother and father in Sudan this year.
Today, he works as an electrician, wiring single-family custom homes so spacious “it blows my mind,” and studying industrial motors by night at Red Rocks Community College.
Yet sometimes he just sits, blue.
“The time I really needed my mother is past,” Awok said. “But I still need her.”
Pain of separation
Social workers sent some to psychiatrists. But the Lost Boys mostly rejected such help, insisting what they need is to re-connect with relatives.
Fending for himself without parents “affects me in so many ways. I am distressed; I have too much going in my mind. Thinking. It changes my mood. … It makes me negative,” said Majok Gai, 25, a warehouse worker and a psychology student at the Community College of Denver.
“I can’t concentrate on things. I’m not even a boy any more. I’m a man now. What am I going to do? If I keep thinking about them, I might not succeed at what I’m supposed to do here.”
Gai located his mother through other refugees in camps who relay messages.
“I want to see her face to face,” he said. “If I see her physically, it seems to me, it will change my entire life. If I see her, it will look like a new day for me. Like being born again.”
Others who want to re-connect aren’t sure how to begin. “There’s nothing at all that I can remember,” said Yiep Koch, 24, a store clerk who won a scholarship to the University of Denver.
When Koch cut his foot fleeing soldiers and a severe infection set in, Khor Bher and others carried him on their backs for hundreds of miles rather than leave him to die. Denver surgeons later saved Koch’s leg.
Khor Bher began searching for his parents almost as soon as he arrived in Denver in 2001, when a co-worker showed him the Internet. He gazed dumbfounded at a 1997 newspaper photo showing his father at a camp in Uganda. The caption described the father as anguished not knowing what happened to his children.
Khor Bher telephoned Uganda. He learned his father had died. But his mother might be alive. He received a newspaper photo showing his mother. Refugees in Uganda then told him she’d returned to Sudan.
Denver interior decorator Carol Rinehart, 55, one of dozens of volunteers helping Lost Boys in Colorado, coordinates the project to reunite families and build a school there. Revered as “Momma Carol” among local refugees, she carried letters and money for relatives when she accompanied Khor Bher to his village in Sudan last year. “Help them re-connect. Then they can go forward and rebuild their lives,” Rinehart said.
A school built by students
Construction of the school has begun.
The project took off after Arapahoe High School students arranged a Sudan awareness event and more than 400 people showed up. That sparked other Sudan events drawing hundreds at Eaglecrest, Dakota Ridge, Heritage, Thornton and other Denver-area high schools. Lost Boys attended, talking with students.
At a recent Arapahoe-Heritage soccer match, Arapahoe student Julie Sorensen sold raffle tickets to raise money for the Sudan school. “You can do a lot from here in America,” she said. “Someday, I’d like to actually see Sudan.” Teachers plan to visit next year.
The Colorado campaign caught government attention. One snowy night, an adviser in Sudan’s new north-south unity government traveled unofficially to Denver and addressed the Lost Boys and supporters.
“We need your help,” Majak d’Agoot said at a benefit dinner, saluting “the boys, now men” who want to reunite with relatives. “I always remember your innocence and courage.”
Khor Bher listened. He remembered being in Sudan with his mother, weighing whether to stay there with her instead of returning to Denver, where, in addition to work, he can study.
They discussed this, he said. “And we understood each other. I have it in my heart to go there. But I have to go there and do something. I can’t just be there crying with them. That wouldn’t be a solution.”
Staff writer Bruce Finley can be reached at 303-820-1700 or bfinley@denverpost.com.
Update on Sudan
Sudan’s government has rebuffed a U.N. request to send a team to assess conditions in the Darfur region, where militias have been slaughtering civilians.
United Nations officials accuse the government of trying to hide a worsening situation.
U.S. officials responded Thursday by calling on the Sudanese government “to provide visas to the U.N. assessment team immediately.” U.S. diplomats at the U.N. lamented “more stalling tactics and roadblocks” from Sudan’s Arab-dominated government.
A three-year conflict between Darfur rebels and pro-government militias has killed 200,000, mostly from hunger and disease, and uprooted 2.5 million.
No U.S. forces are directly involved. NATO refuses to deploy troops. Warring factions are negotiating in Nigeria, where African Union hosts set an April 30 deadline for a peace deal.
U.N. leaders propose sending peacekeepers. A U.N.-mandated African Union force has failed to stop the killing.
– Bruce Finley
