by Majok Marier
On September 11, 2001, Ann Mahoney was a volunteer ESOL tutor interested in helping people who were truly marginalized improve their English. She lived in the Little 5 Points neighborhood of Atlanta, and after the fall of the Twin Towers, she saw a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about Makuol Akuei being attacked near his apartment in Clarkston after the terrorists’ attack.
“It seemed in the article he’d been targeted as a non–American,” she said, “and he looked vulnerable to some other people, too. He was caught in that violent response by some desperate people following 9/11 of ‘getting even.’”
Ann met Makuol and his roommates at that time, including Majok Marier. Makuol later went to live with Waal and Mading, “who were from his clan,” she said.
Ann worked with Makuol on his English skills. Fred Rossini, her late husband, a Georgia Tech physics professor and former provost of George Mason University, “taught several of the guys to drive. They did the practice things so they could go take the test”—no easy task for men who’d never even ridden a bicycle.
Makuol’s front tooth was abscessed and Ann took him to their dentist, whose heart was touched by his situation and discounted her services.
After Makuol got training as a nursing assistant (CNA), the couple tried to help him get a job in a nursing home in the Atlanta area.
“That was difficult,” she said. “Sometimes he would know they’d hired other people…. He recognized the prejudice here.” Eventually, he moved to Iowa where he could get financial aid for college classes, and was successful in working in a nursing home there. Ann said she felt this was due to his love and respect for old people, a key element of Dinka culture.
Ann said there were problems in the jobs the boys held early in their lives in Georgia. At the farmers’ market where they worked, there was a dispute with an Ethiopian in the area where one of the boys worked.
“There became a bad scene with bad feelings, and they all walked out in solidarity,” she recalled. From there, some went to work at a meat-packaging plant south of Atlanta.
“They’d be picked up early to go to the plant. They’d have to stay until the very last person was allowed to leave at night—often very late at night.”
After Majok finished training as a plumber’s helper, Ann asked her plumber about openings in his business, and as he did not offer benefits, he referred Majok to his current employer, M. Cary and Daughters, where he could earn benefits, which they all thought important.
“That’s what people who transplant themselves from a different culture come and arrive without,” Ann said. “The scariest thing is that there’s nobody to fall back on if you’re in a pinch.” She became that backstop for Makuol, paying for his travel to Sudan and back a couple of times as, after the war ended, he married a Dinka wife and had a son. Tragically, this baby died of malaria. Makuol is currently studying at the University of Northern Iowa and is close to completing his bachelor’s degree. He and his wife had another son earlier this year.
One of the things Ann noticed when she went to the boys’ first apartment was that they laid down textiles—all colors, not just bright colors—on the floor.
“It made me wonder if that’s what you do when you have a dirt floor,” she said, referring to their homes in South Sudan. “It did create a feeling of coziness.
“They cooked these big pots of soup or stew for everyone.” Ann was impressed “that they knew how to take care of each other. I know there were four people in the original apartment. Eventually when Simon [Makuol] was staying with Mading and John, it impressed me that it was somewhat flexible who would be staying there. I kinda had the sense that they didn’t have this wall around ‘these are who live here.’ Different people would be there at different times.”
Ann admired the Lost Boys’ basic skills and mindset of survival that caused them to overcome extreme hardships in their trek across East Africa. Now she sees the “element of being really vulnerable and not having most of our American-style defense mechanisms—all those things that worked so well for them in the beginning part of their life,” and wonders, “how are they working now in our culture?”
Those good qualities—the reliance on elders for guidance, perseverance that helped them survive, their lack of defense mechanisms—“those are what people in this country overlook when they speak negatively about immigration,” she said. “We have to learn to notice these values, for goodness’ sake. It seems like our [American] culture is getting impoverished in a lot of human ways, and I think an infusion of people who are so close to what’s really basic to the heart and survival” is good for the United States.
“I feel enriched by knowing these guys,” Ann said.
About a year after we’d arrived, we four left our jobs at the DeKalb Farmers Market. Mama Gini was a big help when I was looking for work and planning to go to school. She helped me find a job fair for part-time jobs, and I worked a little while for Regal Cinemas. Mapour found another job with Walmart. Tingke went with Makuol to work at a meat-packaging company in Newnan. I later got a job with Grand Hyatt working in banquet services.
One of the volunteers who was working with us found out about the Job Corps program. Makuol and I went for the training that they offered. It was in Washington, D.C.; I attended from May 2002 until the end of 2003, and I was able to complete high school and to get diplomas in plumbing and in data entry. Makuol was able to complete high school and to get a diploma as a nursing assistant. One of the good things about Job Corps was that we could get some training, and then we could stay at the Job Corps Center and eat our meals there and work during the day while stopping out of the Job Corps programs for a while. That way we could work and use the skills we were learning and not lose our place at the school. Then we could finish high school and graduate.
Once we returned to Atlanta, Ann Mahoney knew we were looking for jobs, and she offered to help. It was through Ann that I met my current employer, M. Cary and Daughters Plumbing Company, where I’m a plumber. Makuol tried to get a job in a clinic or hospital, but he was unsuccessful. So he left for Iowa, and he is working in nursing there even today. One of the things that I am grateful for in my employer is, first, I am able to work in the field for which I was educated, and second, my employer allows me to travel overseas for an extended visit when I am able to save money to travel so that I can be with my family. As long as I am back on the job when I say I will return, they allow this leave of absence.
When I was a young boy, I was lucky to survive the bombing and gunfire at my village, the long walk to Ethiopia, then back to Sudan, and then to Kenya, even though thirst and starvation and wild animals and enemies with spears or guns and bombs threatened us. As young men, we had difficulties in our transition in Georgia, but we survived this also with the many volunteers and organizations who helped us. There were so many who helped whose names I do not recall, and many whose names I never knew. With their many actions and gifts of generosity and God’s aid, we are here today. But we think constantly about our brothers and our families back home and what to do to help them.
Eight
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America’s Struggle Ends Sudanese Airlifts
After my companions and I lifted off from Kakuma, many others followed. In time, 4,000 Lost Boys, including the 400 underage boys and girls who left in 2000, were flown out of the camp. Lost Boys went to cities all over the United States as various groups sponsored their resettlement in their towns. While many agencies we knew were providing us assistance in Clarkston, similar aid was going to the boys in those other cities.
A network among all the boys was begun through their sponsoring organizations. As our sponsor was the Lutheran Services of Georgia, and they had associated ministries in other states, they were able to tell us where other Lost Boys were and how to contact them. We had telephones in our apartments, and as soon as we knew where some of our friends had resettled and we got their phone numbers, we called them. Today,
we still keep in touch, either by phone or the Internet. Or sometimes we hear through visits of others to those other cities. In a few cases, we have visited other large groups in other cities. For instance, we traveled to Syracuse and to Nashville. We stay in close touch with groups in Greensboro, North Carolina, and other cities not too far away.
The War on Terror had great implications for us. This was the United States going against the types of enemies we had suffered from for decades. There was an instant recognition that this was our fight as well.
On the other hand, because of the nature of the attack and the fact that it had come by terrorists using commercial airlines, the airlifting of Lost Boys stopped. Perhaps another flight or two came in, but that was it. It was as though the terror brought to the U.S. shores also brought a heightened fear of those from the continents where Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaida on the Arabian Peninsula had been active. Again, Sudan was not Somalia. But it was close enough to be caught in the group of nations from which the United States now wanted to protect itself. It definitely shifted the focus of U.S. efforts to resettle more Sudanese. It was a dramatic change, to say the least.
Majok and friend decorate apartment for Christmas 2009, Atlanta.
Now we knew that just as the United States went after Osama, there was little hope for those many other boys in camps like Kakuma. The closing of the door to them left us feeling that we needed to do whatever we could to help. And it pushed us to become the best that we could so that we could make the refugee camps no longer necessary in East Africa.
While there were great needs overseas, we found that our minor celebrity in the Atlanta community helped to create bridges and more understanding of our country and its plight. People in the Atlanta community helped us with finances and came forth when there were difficulties among our members. Gabriel Buol, one of our boys, was diagnosed with liver cancer. He died in 2005 in a Hospice Atlanta facility, after receiving many, many visits from us, his volunteer “mother,” Janis Sundquist, and loving care from his Nigerian nurse, Matthew Ojo. It was difficult to see Gabriel die after he had survived so much in Sudan. The news media wrote stories about him that went around the country, and his death greatly saddened all of us. Corpus Christi helped us raise the money that is necessary for a funeral in the United States—even a very simple burial. Our profile also helped the other Sudanese in the Atlanta community. When a mother lost a daughter to a stabbing death in Michigan, the body needed to be returned to Atlanta and a funeral provided. A three-year-old Sudanese boy, here only a week, was struck and killed by a car. The Lost Boys, who knew English and who now were becoming skilled in working with organizational structures, were able to access aid and translation help for the Sudanese newcomers in their dealings with local authorities.
With the assistance of Mama Gini at Corpus Christi Catholic Church in Stone Mountain, we began meeting to find ways of helping our communities back home. Lost Boys from other cities who were from Dinka tribes gathered several times in Stone Mountain. We formed an organization called Rumbek Youth Vision, as most of us were from villages in or near Rumbek, and most of these are from the Agar Dinka tribe. The association was incorporated with the assistance of a lawyer in Nashville, Tennessee. We used the foundation as a means of assuring donors that we were not taking the contributions for ourselves, but to directly benefit our home community.
In Sudan, each of us lived in villages without water wells. All of us could have easily said that was the most pressing need. The cost of drilling a single well, because water is about as deep as an 18-story building is tall, is about $50,000 to $100,000. We also need medical clinics in our areas. All of those expenses are far beyond what we can provide. But we raised funds anyway, knowing that whatever we gathered would be more than what was available to young people in southern Sudan at the present. The enthusiasm of the boys to help those back home was very high.
During this time, about 2004, we were befriended by another of our American “mothers,” Judy Maves. Judy and her husband, Bill Snodgrass, were very helpful to us over many years, and she helped the boys with immigration papers for themselves and the wives, when the marriages occurred. Judy helped me buy a car, my used Toyota that has been so necessary for work. She and others also were a key part of another important history-making event for the Lost Boys, an incident I’ll relate here soon.
John Manyok Anyieth, with parents Bill Snodgrass and Judy Maves at May 2012 graduation from Georgia Perimeter College.
Judy became so involved with us that she and Bill adopted John Manyok Anyieth, one of the boys she met when she volunteered to mentor Lost Boys. Since then, after many years of assisting us, she and Bill have retired to Kenya, near Mombasa, hoping to be closer to boys returning to South Sudan. John has begun work on his bachelor’s degree at Clayton State University after finishing his associate’s degree at Georgia Perimeter College.
JUDY MAVES AND THE MANY WAYS OF MOTHERING
Judy Maves was an Atlanta-based sales representative and traveled by air a great deal when 9/11 occurred. Like many Americans whose work lives were affected, she flew less and made some career changes afterwards. In 2004, she said, “I read a little article in the Dunwoody Crier looking for mentors for the Lost Boys.”
She was given two names to call, and one was John Manyok Anyieth, a now 30-year-old man but at the time a young refugee with a need for assistance negotiating the complex American systems. During Sudanese Army attacks in 1987, he had fled his home area of Bor in southern Sudan, lived in refugee camps for many years, and survived many traumatic events. In 1991, Bor in South Sudan was the site of a two-week long massacre in a feud between two groups fighting for control in the rebel SPLA.1
“John ended up living with us, and we adopted him,” Judy said. She met Majok and many of the young men in their circle. She and her husband provided financial assistance for many needs of the other boys as well.
“I spent my own money and time helping the guys out,” Judy said. “Day or night. Clothes, doctors, car purchases. I used to joke that I have become everything from a lawyer to a mechanic.”
John recently completed his associate’s degree at Georgia Perimeter College and is now studying for a bachelor’s degree in business at Clayton State University in Morrow.
Judy and Bill have retired to an area near the Indian Ocean outside of Mombasa, Kenya. But it’s probably more a location from which to do more for South Sudan.
“After working with the Lost Boys, I grew to love South Sudan and Africa and wanted to live there,” she said. “I knew we’d need to make the transition before we got too old to make that change because living in Africa is a very different experience. I hoped to be near South Sudan when the boys came back.” Yet she finds herself coming back to Atlanta frequently due to the boys continuing to live here rather than in their original home. And she needs to visit her son, John.
“After having John live with us for nine years, leaving him to finish school was the hardest thing I have ever done,” she said of her only child.
In 2011, she helped organize the caravan of cars traveling back and forth from Nashville when the men went to vote in the historic independence referendum. Hit with a historic snowstorm on their return to Atlanta, they slid into a car at the highest point of the elevated freeway ramp leading from I-75 South to I-285 and got stuck with many other cars on that ramp.
“Eighteen-wheelers were just barely missing us, we were really frightened,” she said. “We pulled the cars out, then John drove the car down to 285 going five miles an hour. Then 12 of us—including Majok—locked arms and walked very slowly down the ramp to get in the car and the other one we’d freed.
“There are several of the guys that I have helped with immigration papers for themselves and their wives,” she said. On the ways she was asked to help: “The list is endless, but rewarding. I helped solve problems with some I never thought I was capable of.”
Her many efforts have extended to South Sudan itself. She represents
Raising South Sudan from Atlanta, a nonprofit project with support from Mothering Across Continents, a Charlotte-based collaborative that works to bring schools, water and other needs to third-world countries. Patricia Shafer, who also was on the trip to Nashville and hired a professional film crew to accompany the group, is the chief catalyst, or executive director, of Mothering Across Continents. She actively provides technical resources and development assistance for needed facilities in South Sudan.
So far, one school with four classrooms, two offices, latrines and a rehabilitated well has been built in one location in Unity State, South Sudan, and another is under development. Both of these have Southern U.S.–based Lost Boys, James Lubo Mijak and Ngor Kur Mayol, working with the local villages on the schools and raising funds in the United States.
“I wanted to try to help each one achieve his goals, whether it be in education, to marry, help their people back home or just find a job,” Judy said. Her desire to help led to a new home in Africa, becoming a mother, and providing hundreds of acts of assistance to the Lost Boys as they continue their journey both in America and South Sudan.
Finally, in 2005, a cease-fire was declared in the war with Sudan, a war that had started when the Sudanese government tried to enforce sharia law throughout the country. The Sudanese Army and the Sudanese Liberation Peoples’ Army reached an accord, called the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), that laid out a plan for ending the fighting. In the agreement, it was stated that in five and a half years, in January 2011, there would be a referendum that would allow the people of southern Sudan to decide if they wanted to be an independent country. There was great rejoicing—not only in southern Sudan, but in Clarkston, Syracuse, Nashville, Greensboro, California, Vermont, Mississippi, Kansas City, and all the places where Lost Boys and other large Sudanese communities lived. Now peace had come, and there would be a new country. We could plan a future that included going home. We would possibly be in the United States for a while yet in order to become educated with skills to lead the new country of South Sudan. But we would be able to go home.