Lost Boy of Sudan finds himself
NOW IN CALGARY, SURVIVOR WANTS TO BRING WATER TO HIS HOMELAND.
He was always a good boy so he ran.
It was what his mom had urged him to do. Pleaded with him in fact. To run east, where the sun breaks each day, when the bad men come.
And come they did. Before that sun had even risen. They came with their guns and they killed everyone they could find.
They didn’t find James Nguen. At seven years old he was gone. That awful morning he had set off, unwillingly, along the lonely road of becoming a Lost Boy.
Today he lives in Calgary, as far from the horrors of the brutal civil war in his Sudanese homeland as could be imagined.
And each day he gets closer to being found. Not by the gunmen who killed his father and many of his brothers back then in 1988. No, it is his place in the world he has searched for and now he feels he is almost there. He is almost home.
He doesn’t intend going back to live in that land, now split into two countries.
He is a Calgarian now — a proud, married man with three young sons and a university degree.
But he wants to bring a simple gift to those who could not flee as far as his young feet travelled, including the mom who, for years, he thought had perished in that pre-dawn slaughter. He wants to bring them water.
Nguen is now 31 and works with disadvantaged children at Wood Homes.
It is something he relishes. He tells his story to the ones who ask.
“I ran away in the dark by myself. It was sincerely terrifying. I thought when the guns stopped firing I would come back to the village, which is what I did.
“I came back to see my mom, but it didn’t happen. She was gone. There were people lying on the ground dead. I realized I was on my own.
“So I went east, like my mom had told me. For three days I met no one on the road. At night I’d climb into the trees to sleep, it was safer than being on the ground. I couldn’t find any water so I had to drink my own urine.
“Then I saw others walking east. When I met up with a group there were lots of kids but the walk was so long that some of them couldn’t make it. Some died of thirst and starvation,” Nguen said.
He smiles as he recalls that harrowing journey, which stretched 2,400 kilometres, first to Ethiopia and then to a refugee camp in Kenya.
The memories, though brutal and disturbing, remind him of faces and voices of those who finally became known, in the language of the United Nations, as the Lost Boys of Sudan.
“If someone got sick you took care of them. If they died you buried them. It was a very communal thing.
“So there is a bond. The lost boys and girls are my relatives. They are the ones that took care of me when I was sick. I am there for them and they are there for me,” he said.
After almost a decade in the camps he arrived in Canada as a refugee in 2001. He was 20 years old with the equivalent of a grade seven education.
“I thought ‘why don’t I just work and forget about education?’ But I knew education was the only way to go forward.”
He enrolled at Chinook College and managed in two years to advance five grades and graduate.
He lived on $600 a month in student assistance and relied on the food bank. He was unable to work because his government help would end if he made more than $200 a month in income.
After getting his high school diploma Nguen enrolled at what was then Mount Royal College before transferring to the University of Calgary to complete his bachelor’s degree in development studies.
During his studies he was reunited with Elizabeth Chol, a former Lost Girl herself who by chance had also being relocated to Canada. They married and now have three children: Dor, 6, Kam, 4, and Nyol, who is seven months.
He also met the mother he thought had died 20 years earlier in that fateful pre-dawn attack.
“I went back to Sudan for the first time in 2007 and I met my mother.
“I thought she had died, but she had run north.”
However his mother was now blind, a result of trachoma from the tainted water in her village. The Lost Boy had found a path. “Clean water. We take it for granted here in Canada. I thought I should do something,” he said.
He started a charity and named it after his mom — the Biluany literacy and water project.
Nguen began speaking publicly about his life and was a regular visitor to churches and schools. In return he asked for a speaking fee of $250, which went directly to the clean water fund.
With the first $9,000 he was able to fund a well in his home village. Now he wants to do that across the newly formed country of South Sudan.
He is hoping Albertans in particular will respond, both to the charity appeal and also providing help to the country’s struggling energy industry.
“In South Sudan we have oil and in Alberta we have oil. The expertise we have here in Calgary we don’t have in Sudan so I think it would be a good fit for Albertans to share the knowledge base they have here with their counterparts. That would make a big difference.”
Nguen wants to be part of that difference.
He intends to continue studying and wants eventually to be part of public policy making in relation to his homeland.
James Nguen, once a Lost Boy, has found himself.