Lost Boy, Lost Girl

by John Bul Dau

  Mary had wired me $200 so I could pay for my expenses and buy things I needed. I bought clothes for myself and my sister and even some for other members of our foster family. All too soon, though, I had to go back to Kakuma, and to the old man still waiting there to marry me.

  I didn’t want to marry that older man for a lot of reasons. I was already responsible for two people, myself and my sister, and I didn’t want more responsibility. I had seen other girls get married, and their situation became even worse than the one I was already in. They worked all the time and had kids right away, even though they were just kids themselves. It was a depressing life.

  Some of my friends thought I should get married, though. Traditionally, all Dinka women marry because it gives them a sense of belonging. But I wanted something else. I had been to Nairobi, and I had seen women who had educations and their own careers. I didn’t have to marry, at least not now, not when I was so young. After all Tabitha and I had been through, all I wanted was to make a better life for us.

  I had heard about Lost Boys going to America, so I asked a friend of mine who was a coordinator among the boys how that worked. He explained that if a boy wanted to go he filled out an application, and then he had to wait and see if he was accepted. “But what about the Lost Girls?” I asked him. “Can you find out if there’s any way a girl can apply?”

  He did this for me, asking an American woman who was a social worker at Kakuma. And her answer amazed me. She didn’t even know there were Lost Girls! She thought the girls in camp were all living with their parents. She didn’t know we were living in foster homes, where our guardians could marry us off for cattle or treat us almost like their servants. Girls in foster households took turns doing all the chores—some fetching water, others cooking or cleaning or scrubbing clothes by hand. The foster mother didn’t have to do much. That’s how it was in our household. We girls did most of the work. Again, part of that was just Dinka custom. Women were supposed to educate young girls—to teach them all these household chores. Yar had always taken good care of us, and she was trying to do what was right for us, but she was not our mother. If she had been my mother, she might have encouraged me to go to school instead of work so much. And she would have tried to protect me from the older man who wanted to marry me. I knew I would have to protect myself from that.

  I asked my friend the Lost Boy coordinator where I could find this social worker so I could talk to her about the Lost Girls. He said I should go to the UN compound, just outside Kakuma. It was very hard to get in there unless you had a good reason to give to the security guards who protected the compound. But I went and waited and waited in a line at the gate. After I had been there almost all day, I finally got to the guards and told them I wanted to go in and talk to the white woman who was working to get Lost Boys to America. But they said, “No, you can’t go in,” and sent me away.

  That night I told my Lost Boy friend what had happened, and the next day, he came to the compound with me. He explained to the guard that he was a coordinator for the Lost Boys and that the woman inside had asked to see me. Finally, around three o’clock that second afternoon they let us in and we found the social worker.

  She was in a meeting, but she came out and asked what was wrong. She thought I was one of those women who had come to the compound because they didn’t feel safe, because they thought they were going to be forced into marriage. There was a place for them to stay right next to the compound. But I explained, in my broken English, that I had come to tell her about the Lost Girls. My friend also helped me explain that I had heard about the Lost Boys going to America, and that some of us girls wanted to go there, to be educated instead of being forced into marriage.

  She said that the program had been specifically set up for boys because no one even knew the situation of the girls at the camp. I realized in talking to her that we had been invisible.

  But this lady was nice, she was listening hard to me, and she said she would get things fixed quickly for the Lost Girls. Then she asked if I was in any danger and if I needed to stay at the compound. Even though I was very afraid that my uncle would make me marry the older man, I couldn’t stay at the compound. There would be no way for me to get Tabitha out of the foster home if my foster parents found out I had escaped from the camp. Tabitha was reaching maturity, and I knew that soon men would be coming to ask to marry her, too.

  So I went back home, and in a couple of days, my Lost Boy friend gave me two applications to go to America—one for me and one for Tabitha. I was really pleased the social worker lady had done what she said and acted so quickly. I filled the forms out in secret so my foster parents wouldn’t know—and with no high hopes. It was too much to wish for. But after about three weeks, I was called for an interview.

  Soon other Lost Girls found out they could apply to go to America. Some of them didn’t think it was a good idea, because they didn’t want to leave their friends and the culture they knew to go to a strange land. But when I told Tabitha that I was trying to get us to America, she wasn’t afraid. Whatever I was doing was fine with her. I was getting really excited. I just wanted to get away. I was running away from marriage.

  Within the month, I found out that our applications had been accepted. We were escaping, going to a place called America. That was about all I knew about it—and that we could get an education there and no one would force us to marry. I didn’t even know that most of the people there were white.

  Once we were accepted, we had cultural orientation courses, with movies and books that had pictures of America. Americans also explained to us about American culture—about not getting into physical fights (people in the camp fought all the time, sometimes even women and girls). They also told us how to interview for a job and how you should explain what a good person and hard worker you were. That was shocking to us. It seemed immodest. A lot of things were shocking to us. We were really excited, but we realized it was going to be very different in America.

  Tabitha and I had to sneak out to these courses, because now I had to be very careful around my foster parents. If they found out I was leaving, they would surely try to marry me off before I could escape, so they could get the cows that man would give them for me. To try to throw them off my plan, I told them that, yes, maybe I would be willing to marry this man the next year. And I began being very nice to him, just trying to keep things calm until I could get Tabitha and myself away from Kakuma.

  When I knew that we had been accepted to go to America, I told John. He was surprised and wanted to know why I hadn’t told him before that I was applying. “Oh well, you know I didn’t know that it would be successful,” I explained. “I don’t talk about things that I don’t achieve.” I saw a little concern in his eyes because I was leaving, but I couldn’t allow myself to care about leaving anything or anybody in Kakuma. Still, I was hoping that he would be one of the Lost Boys who would come to America. I was happy when he said, “Oh, maybe I will join you. Maybe soon”—even though he didn’t know whether he would be able to or not. “Good, maybe you will see me there,” I said, but coolly. Dinka girls never give men too much encouragement. That is just how it is in our culture.

  Really, I wasn’t thinking too far ahead, about anything. I was just escaping from the situation I was in, and America seemed to be our only option. After all, it was supposed to be good.

  But what if it turned out to be bad? Where would we go next?

  John

  In 1999, when I was twenty-four years old and Martha was sixteen, the U.S. State Department decided to allow certain refugees from the Sudanese civil war into the United States. The UN agreed with the decision. It said Sudanese children without parents could not be safely sent back to Sudan.

  Interviewers from the outside world began coming to Kakuma. They represented social service agencies in the United States and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. They began screening Lost Boys to see whether they had living relatives in Africa, and whether they had fo
ught in the war. In either of these cases, you were not eligible for their program. About 3,600 Sudanese passed the interviews and began being processed for relocation to America.

  One American interviewer who spent a year screening refugees at Kakuma said those who had tried very hard to get a good education in camp seemed to have survived with better mental health than those who had not. “Because they can see a way forward for themselves, they didn’t lose hope,” the interviewer said.

  I was invited to apply to go to the United States. A refugee resettlement office called the Joint Voluntary Agency opened a file on me, took my picture, and scheduled me for an interview. I had to write my life story and give it to the interviewers. They asked me lots of questions, trying to see if they could catch me saying something that conflicted with my written autobiography. They knew that some refugees were so desperate to get to America that they would tell lies.

  I had no trouble with the questions. I kept saying the same things over and over because those were the things that had happened. I told how I had lost my family the night the northern soldiers came to Duk Payuel, and how I fled across Sudan with Abraham. I told of how many people had tried to kill me, but that I had never become a soldier for the SPLA. I told of my years in Pinyudu and Kakuma. And I truthfully said I knew of no living relatives.

  That was all very good. The interviewers said that I had passed, and they sent me to get a medical checkup. All the doctor could find, besides my being extremely thin, was a case of malaria. That could be kept in check with medicine, so the doctor sent me on my way to a final interview with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

  I had trouble following everything the interviewers said, but fortunately a translator repeated everything in Dinka. I learned that if I went to America, the government would take care of me for ninety days. My apartment, groceries, and utilities would all be free. After that, I would have to get a job and pay for everything. I did not stop to tell the translator or the interviewers that I did not know what apartment, groceries, and utilities were. When we were all done, the interviewers told me I would get a letter at the compound of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in about two months telling me whether I had been accepted for relocation to the United States.

  Believe me, when the letter came in May 2001, I was very happy. “You have been accepted,” it said. I did not know exactly where or when I would go, but I did not care. I was going to America!

  I began taking classes on how to be an American. I learned many of the things that American children learn in school, as well as some things they pick up at home. For example, I learned how to use a telephone. Perhaps the biggest surprise was learning about cold weather. A teacher told me, “I will show you how cold it gets in America.” He pulled something out of a box and showed it to me. It looked like glass, only it had rounded edges like a river rock. He put it in my hand, and the rock burned the skin with intense cold.

  “That is water,” he said. “It gets so cold in America that water sometimes turns hard. We call this an ‘ice cube.’ Feel it, and feel the cold in America.”

  I had never seen ice. I could not imagine a country where water turned to stone. But I was aching to go there.

  Part Six

  PEACE

  Martha

  The day we left Kakuma forever, I had to sneak away from my old life. I told my foster parents that I was going to visit a friend in the camp for the day, and I explained to Tabitha that she needed to leave after I did and meet me at my friend’s house. We each took just one extra outfit, hiding it under our clothes so our foster parents wouldn’t notice.

  When Tabitha got to my friend’s, we left right away and hurried to the UN compound. A lot of Lost Boys were gathered to leave as well, and six of us Lost Girls. The UN people led us out to a plane that was very small and hot. We felt cramped in it, and very scared. I had never been on a plane before. As it began to lift off the ground, I looked down on all the Lost Boys gathered around the runway to say good-bye to us. Once we got higher, I couldn’t look out the window, I was just too frightened. The plane kept lurching down suddenly, as if it would fall out of the sky. I was so, so happy when we were back on the ground again. But an even longer, harder flight lay ahead of us.

  We knew we had to cross a great huge body of water, an ocean, and some of the Lost Boys said the water could pull the plane down into it. But when the time came, we walked up the ladder and into that the big plane anyway. We were going to try to get to America, whatever it took. There was no going back now.

  In fact, this flight was okay, and the food was good, even though we didn’t really know what went with what. We ate the bread and butter separately, ate the dry lettuce leaves, and drank the little container of salad dressing. And after a while, I dozed off to sleep, but every time there was turbulence, I would jerk awake, thinking the plane was falling out of the sky and into the ocean.

  When we got to John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, about 30 of us Lost Children got off the plane, relieved but not knowing exactly where to go next. Suddenly we came to these stairs that moved and we didn’t know what to do. We were scared to go down on them, and some of the boys said that these stairs were there to take people to a grinding machine, to grind us up. They were probably the same boys who said the ocean could pull a plane out of the air. After we stood there for a while, we finally decided we had to go down. Each of us stood in front of the moving stairs for a few minutes before we had the courage to step on. We thought we would miss our step and fall.

  Tabitha and I and two other Lost Children, a girl and a boy, were headed for Seattle. On December 19, 2000, our plane landed there. We had made it! It had been a long, long trip away from the Africa we had known all of our lives and to a new set of foster parents in America. We were tired and anxious when we stepped into the airport waiting area, but there to meet us was a group of people holding a big cardboard sign that said: “Martha and Tabitha, Welcome Home.”

  These people seemed excited to see us, and they gave us each a little wrapped box with a gift of earrings. We were astonished but so tired that we couldn’t quite take it all in. Except for one Lost Girl in this group, everyone else was white. Amazingly, two women I had known at Kakuma were there. One was the social worker I had told about the Lost Girls, and another was the woman who interviewed us about coming to America. The rest of the people were our new foster family—Karen and Kirk Brackebusch, and their children Kyle, Christopher, and Kara, and another foster daughter, the Lost Girl whose name was Teresa.

  We got into the Brackebuschs’ van and drove out of the big city and away from the lights of Seattle that seemed to slash at the car windows. We were going to our new home—a smaller town in the countryside called Duvall. Our days-long journey finally ended at a house that seemed huge to us, with a big open kitchen and dining area with windows all around that let the outside in. To Tabitha and me the inside of the Brackebusch house felt like a large open field, not like a house at all. We were used to Dinka houses—all enclosed with just a little crack or door to let air in. We felt lost inside that house. We just stared and stared, trying to understand it all.

  It was Christmastime, so there were lights and decorations everywhere and a big tree inside the house, glistening with ornaments. That seemed amazing, too. So many new things to adjust to. Would we be able to?

  As the days went by, things got better and better. When Christmas Day came, my foster mom’s other family members gathered and there were another 50 people in the house. It was fun, and all the people were nice to us. They taught us games and gave us gifts. I felt very, very excited. We were finally with a loving, warm family. Somebody in this big group was always asking how we were doing and hugging us and taking care of us. When you feel that love for the first time, people caring about you, it’s a wonderful feeling. No one had treated us like this since we had lost our parents. Finally, I could relax. Things were going to be okay.

  After the holidays, we started school. It
was cold, and we had to get up early in the dark. High school was not like the Brackebuschs’ home at all. I was the only black person there. I felt like an odd person, and Americans seemed to close off from me. I confess I didn’t reach out to them either. I didn’t know the language or customs well enough, and anyway, I was too shy. I spent my time at school alone.

  I’m used to white people now, but then they all looked the same. It was hard to learn the names of people and put them together with faces because all I saw was white. Also, it was hard to understand English because Americans seemed to speak through their noses, with a humming sound.

  The classes were really hard for me, too. I took English literature and health and American history. But I had no connection to the history I was learning. It wasn’t anything I had ever heard about before. And trying to follow classes taught in English was just plain hard. Reading went slowly, slowly, so doing homework was overwhelming. Everything I had to do every minute of the day was new—the culture, the schoolwork, the customs.

  Then a strange thing started happening. All the emotions I had covered up before began to surface. Maybe it was because I had let down my guard a little for the first time since I was six. Now I could go to bed without worrying that somebody was going to come shoot Tabitha or me. At first that felt like a great relief, like a big weight lifting from my shoulders. But then I began having nightmares—people shooting and running, all the things that had really happened—and I began feeling very down. I tried to get over it, thinking it would go away, but it didn’t. I think the dark, gray days of a Washington winter didn’t help my mood much. I found myself crying a lot. Finally, I told my foster mom how I was feeling. She was a good woman, and she asked other foster parents how their Lost Children were doing. It turned out that a lot of them were going through this. Happily, Tabitha wasn’t. She didn’t have the memories I did, so she wasn’t traumatized by them.