lost, but then found

Wed., Sep 05

When Abraham Maker asked teachers at Darien High School for advice about where to attend college, they suggested Southern.

They pointed out that Southern has strong academic programs and is smaller than other schools he was considering.

"They told me I would not be lost here," recalls Maker, a Southern junior and Darien resident who is working toward a degree in accounting.

Lost is something Maker has been all too familiar with during his life. A refugee of war-torn Sudan, Maker is one of more than 3,800 boys and young men who recently found new homes in the United States through a project of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) called Lost Boys of Sudan, which is also the title of a critically acclaimed documentary film.

The effort involves the resettlement of young Sudanese refugees displaced or orphaned during the Second Sudanese Civil War. Most were forced to leave their villages or go into hiding to escape murderous sweeps by militias targeting young boys. "When they attacked the villages, mostly they killed the boys and took the girls and ladies," Maker remembers.

The war, which officially ended with a peace agreement in January 2005, continues to this day and is one of many successive conflicts to devastate Sudan and its people during the past several decades. The war was fought primarily in southern Sudan and was a continuation of a north-south conflict spanning 1955 to 1972.

The Second Sudanese Civil War, which began in 1983, took the lives of more than 1.9 million civilians. More than 4 million people, including Abraham and his older brother, Wil-liam, were forced to flee their homes.

Maker is tall, thin and quiet - and about 21 years old. In Sudan, he explains, people mark birth dates anecdotally in reference to significant local events, rather than by number.

He grew up in a village called Mareng. Neither of his parents had an education. They raised their family in the traditional ways of nomadic life, grazing cattle and battling the severe climate and landscape.

Maker wrote about his upbringing and family life in an essay titled "My Destiny to Education" for an English composition class with John Mark McFadden, an adjunct faculty mem-ber, in the fall 2006.
"I grew up not knowing how to read and write because my dad couldn't let me go to school," he wrote, explaining that young boys had responsibilities to help the family tend to herds. "One thing that encouraged me to abandon traditional life was how difficult my parents' life was.

"The roof of our house was made of grass and the wall with mud," he continues. "When one wanted to go inside this mud hut, he had to bend down in order to fit through the door."

Maker knew at a young age that education would be the key to a better life. But when the civil war came to his village, Maker and his older brother did the only thing they and an entire generation of young boys could do for survival: they fled to the African bush.

Maker thinks he was about 4 years old when he and his brother left their home, their parents and three sisters. "He was carrying me," Maker says, guessing that his brother was probably about 12.
The brothers walked alone and among other larger groups of boys also escaping near certain death or slavery in their war-ravaged villages. They walked for days and weeks at a time without the guidance or protection of adults.

"We ate fruits and wild food," he says. "Some kids died because they got sick from the things they ate. There was not enough water. It was very hard."

The boys made it to Ethiopia where they stayed in a refugee camp. When conflict erupted in Ethiopia, the children ran again, this time returning to Sudan. But they could not locate their families. International organizations, such as the United Nations and UNICEF, loosely controlled and guided the boys, keeping them together and eventually helping them reach a refugee camp in Kenya. The camp offered limited food and protection, and an opportunity to receive some schooling.

"Here in America, when a family has dinner, each person has their own plate," he says. "In the camps, we put all our food in one bowl and we shared. We ate just dinner or just lunch, not lunch and dinner."

When the fate of the Lost Boys captured the attention of the West, Western officials would occasionally walk through the camps to assess the situation firsthand. The boys in the camp were aware of their presence, Maker says.

"Everyone was excited," he remembers. "From the beginning, even though we didn't know anything about America, we knew that it was a good place."

Whenever a plane flew overhead, the boys would point to it and call it "America," he says.

As the Lost Boys program gained momentum, Maker found himself among the fortunate young men selected by the IRC for resettlement in the United States, where sponsor fami-lies and individuals waited to help them assimilate to American life. A Catholic Church organization sponsored his brother.

Maker arrived on Sept. 4, 2001 - a week before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent tightening of U.S. borders, including the curtailment of the Lost Boys resettle-ment program.

Maker began high school in Atlanta and then moved to Connecticut with his American sponsor, Kathy Hewitt. His brother's resettlement route took him to Phoenix, where he re-mains today.

"I had read a lot about the Lost Boys of Sudan and had seen stories about them on 60 Minutes,' but when you actually meet someone who has been through all of that, it's unbe-lievable," McFadden says.

Maker routinely wrote and re-wrote essays three and four times to refine his English. "His work ethic is unmatched," McFadden says. "He makes you believe that the American dream is alive and well."
Maker now lives with Mallory and Conrad Weymann in Darien when classes are not in session. Mallory worked at Darien High School and invited him to live with her family when his sponsor moved out of the area.

It has been a joy to welcome Maker to her family, which includes four grown children. "He is such a good, fine person," Weymann says.

Though the war that led to his exodus is officially over, Maker is concerned about the future of his country. President George W. Bush recently characterized as "genocide," an on-going and bloody conflict in the Sudanese area known as Darfur. The terms of the 2005 peace agreement ending the civil war are among the factors fueling the present conflict.

Unfortunately, Maker and his brother learned as refugees that a rival killed their father while he was grazing their animals. But they learned after arriving in America that their mother and sisters are living in a refugee camp in Kenya.

His dream is to bring his mother and sisters to America someday.