Peter Deng (no relation to Jany; the name Deng means "rain" and is common in Sudan) found his way to Phoenix in 2001. When he arrived, he recalls, "I was thinking about food." During his nine years in a refugee camp in Kenya, he ate food provided by American relief agencies. "So I was thinking that America is a good country," he says. "Maybe if I go there I will make money; I will go to school."

In his first year in Phoenix, Peter was beaten up, carjacked and wrongly accused of fathering a child. He was fined $1,200 for driving without a license or insurance, which he had no idea he needed. He learned about the U.S. court system when he had to file a restraining order against a former girlfriend, who threatened him by saying, "You are just a refugee here in America. I can kill you." These days, Peter rarely goes out in public, especially at night, and he says he fears going to jail. "If I go to public places, the mall or a club, somebody might hurt me for that," he says, seated inside the Arizona center one afternoon.

Peter has received important assistance from the center, which helped him find a job as a file clerk for a company that sells concert tickets. Located across the street from the state capitol in a dodgy part of downtown Phoenix, the center shares a parking lot with a plastics recycling plant. Sudanese folk art and black-and-white portraits of Lost Boys at the Kakuma refugee camp add touches of familiarity to a place that offers help with foreign struggles like disconnected phone lines, eviction notices and shopping for groceries and clothes. (Lost Boys in Phoenix, according to Wheat, have been bilked for thousands of dollars by disreputable companies.) The center has partnered with Target, PetSmart, Phoenix's Sky Harbor airport and other businesses to arrange some 150 jobs for Lost Boys.

Peter earns $8.50 an hour in his clerk job, and works on his skills at the center's computer lab in his spare time. He watches a lot of television and movies, citing "Rush Hour" as a favorite film. Like many of his brothers, he says he wants to earn enough money to move back home to Sudan, find his missing family, marry and help rebuild the war-ravaged country. For now, Peter remains a homebody, struggling to make it day to day in Phoenix.

Jany, the center's outreach coordinator, shares Peter's ambitions, as do a great majority of their brothers, of helping to rebuild Sudan. These days, of course, the country faces a grave crisis in the western region of Darfur, where genocide at the hands of the notorious government-backed Janjaweed militias has created a new generation of physically and psychologically brutalized refugees. To date, the U.S. government has not formally resettled any of them here.

Jany points out that the prospect for peace darkened considerably on July 30, when longtime southern Sudanese rebel leader and newly elected Vice President John Garang died in a helicopter crash, plunging the country's fragile peace into an unknown future -- and hitting the Lost Boys community across America with a new wave of grief and fear. "It's a huge blow," Jany says. He adds that many Sudanese people don't believe Garang's death was an accident, and fears that the Sudanese regime is going to kill more of his community's leaders back home. "It's on everybody's mind," Jany says.

The plight of his fellow refugees in America also continues to weigh heavily on him. Jany, who plans to graduate next May from Arizona State University with a bachelor's degree in social work, says he loves his work counseling his brothers and helping them to find and keep jobs. But cultural differences, he acknowledges, continue to exacerbate the Lost Boys' problems. In Sudan, he says, young people don't trust police, who regularly kill civilians. "We were taught to fight our own battles," Jany says. So it's no surprise, he continues, that many Lost Boys in America are wary of police and governmental authorities.

Some Lost Boys also have had trouble adjusting to American sexual mores. Unfamiliar with America's system of dating, Jany says, the younger men sometimes mistake friendliness for sexual interest, and so being rejected by women can stoke feelings of frustration and alienation, and even lead to violence.

Eight years after his brother's death, Jany keeps his spirits up by immersing himself in his work at the center. He is also a marathon runner, which he calls his passion and "getaway thing" -- he has qualified for next year's Boston Marathon. He says he's so busy taking care of everyone else that he sometimes doesn't look after himself enough. Jany seldom has the energy to make it through his homework after a full day of school and work. He has suffered from anemia; he collapsed last January while running a marathon.

Last December, he fell asleep behind the wheel of his car. The car flipped over three times and was totaled, but luckily Jany managed to escape without a scratch. Lately, he says, his grades have started to slip and he sometimes feels dizzy -- yet, his own training aside, he says he isn't sure what else he should do. "I'm abusing myself," he says, smiling, when asked if he thinks he might suffer from PTSD.

Aydin Bal, a researcher and doctoral candidate at Arizona State University who has worked extensively with Arizona's Lost Boys, affirms that the upbeat image of this remarkable group of survivors is authentic. In spite of a harrowing past, he says, they remain determined to fit in and succeed in America. "They have shown an enormous amount of resiliency," Bal says. "Of course they are not trying to find food or drinking water now," he says. "But they are still trying to find their past, their memory."

Unfortunately, support services for the Lost Boys are drying up. According to Wheat, if the Arizona center can't raise $250,000 before a core grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services expires on Sept. 30, the doors will close. Several Lost Boys organizations in other U.S. cities are also strapped for funds. In 2002, the federal government's Office of Refugee Resettlement cut general mental health funding, previously about $2.8 million per year, from its budget.

In the meantime, some Lost Boys in America who struggled the most with fear and grief reverted to the one way of escape they knew best. Earlier this year, a 23-year-old Lost Boy, diagnosed with schizophrenia and convinced that people wanted to kill him, disappeared from his home in Syracuse. By June, he'd wandered more than 2,100 miles to Mexico City. And then there was Abil, the Lost Boy who was shot and killed on the Arizona freeway. "After all the miles he walked in Africa to escape hell, he returned to walking," Wheat says. "I wonder where he was heading. I wonder if he knew."

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