Friday, Jul 4, 2008
It was supposed to be a storybook tale of young refugees triumphing against all odds. But an alarming number of Sudan's "Lost Boys" have spiraled into alcohol abuse, crime and even fratricide. What went wrong?
Aug 25, 2005 | When Joseph Abil arrived in Dallas in 1995, he represented the first wave of extraordinary refugees, mostly young men, who became known to the world as the "Lost Boys of Sudan." Abil, 20 years old at the time, had fled civil war in his native country that wiped out his village. He survived a perilous migration across Africa, endless hunger, and harsh conditions in a refugee camp in Kenya. When he settled in Texas, with the help of the United States government, he was finally free to lead a life of hope and promise.
But life in America presented Abil with struggles and dangers of a different kind. In 1997, feeling isolated, he moved to Phoenix, where other refugees from his Sudanese community had been resettled. He lived alone in an apartment and worked as a stock clerk at a Fry's supermarket. Although Abil took medication for mental health problems, his friend Martin Abucha said Abil had no trouble holding down a job.
Early this year, Abil stopped going to work. One afternoon in February, he left his apartment and headed for the I-17 freeway, miles from where he lived, and started wandering north along the median during rush hour. A highway patrol officer approached Abil, and according to a report from Arizona state officials, Abil grew "agitated" and refused to move off the median to a safe location. The officer fired a Taser at Abil, who retaliated by throwing "baseball-sized rocks" at him. Pulling out a handgun, the officer fired three shots at Abil. The refugee who triumphed over years of hardship in Africa fell dead on the Arizona freeway.
Since the late 1990s, the Lost Boys have made headlines around the world. In 2001, their sojourn was hailed as a remarkable success story on "60 Minutes II." "In Sudan, thousands of Lost Boys fought off dangers we can barely imagine, and are now, happily, flying off to the United States," reported CBS correspondent Bob Simon. In a second story that aired the following January, Simon said of the Lost Boys' lives in America: "There were dark moments. There were bound to be, but they passed." A Kansas City man, featured in the show, said of one Lost Boy he mentored, "He's living the American dream. He's already got a job; he's self-sufficient. You've taken someone literally, almost literally, in the Stone Age and dropped him into a modern civilization, saying after four months you're on your own, and he is, and he's fine."
Many of Abil's "brothers," as the Lost Boys call each other, have indeed made better lives here. They are earning high school diplomas, attending community colleges and universities, and holding down a variety of jobs, typically low-paying ones. Today, nearly 4,000 Lost Boys call America home.
Last December, Arizona's Deng Majok Chol, 27, became the first Lost Boy to graduate from a major U.S. college, Arizona State University, with a double major in political science and economics. In February of this year, People magazine profiled three Lost Boys who had returned to the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya to help their brothers still stuck there. "In less than five years," reported the magazine, "they transformed from wide-eyed immigrants who had never seen a kitchen freezer to young men working their way through college in San Diego."
But for an alarming number of Lost Boys, their journey to America has taken a much darker turn -- into unemployment, alcohol abuse, petty crime, murder and suicide. Unresolved cultural differences and a lack of support, training and education have led them to fall through the cracks of the social and legal system. Many Lost Boys, advocates and researchers say, suffer from some degree of trauma-related mental illness, most notably post-traumatic stress disorder.
"We want our Lost Boys happy, polite and grateful -- and during the first couple of honeymoon years, that's what we saw," says Ann Wheat, co-founder of the Arizona Lost Boys Center in Phoenix. The center, which opened in 2003, offers more than 400 Lost Boys a place to gather, speak with career counselors, and get legal and medical advice. "But we do the Lost Boys and ourselves a huge disservice by perpetuating a one-dimensional image of them. If they were all models of emotional health, we might as well conclude that war is good for children, save our time and resources, and all go home." Wheat, who also works as a supervisor for Phoenix's city parks, says that reports of troubling incidents around the country often reach the center through the Lost Boys' own word-of-mouth network. Lately, she says, "It has started to feel like an epidemic."
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