‘Lost Boy’ leaves mark on Lynchburg

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As a boy, Abraham Garang desperately wanted to undergo initiation rites for his Dinka tribe in Sudan. But his father didn’t allow it.

“Part of my culture is, sometimes as a kid you get your lower teeth removed. Sometimes, you get a mark on your forehead,” said Garang, thinking back about 25 years to his childhood.

“My dad would say, ‘No.’”

“He said, ‘You never know; One day… you might be living with your enemy.’”

That was before Garang fled his home as a young boy to escape certain death or capture as civil war engulfed Sudan.

For nearly 15 years, he struggled to survive the war and hunger and disease rampant in the surrounding wilderness and in refugee camps. Eventually, he made his way to the United States through a special refugee program.

Now a rising senior at Lynchburg College, he realizes that those tribal marks he wanted as a boy would have made him a bull’s-eye among enemies as he struggled for survival.

A well-known presence at LC, Garang (pronounced Ga-RANG) shares bits and pieces of his story with anyone who asks. His ready smile and enthusiasm for volunteer work have made him an inspiration for many who know of his earlier years, said Lisa Whitaker, who initiated the program that brought Garang to the college.

“Despite what he’s gone through, he’s just such a positive, remarkable spirit,” she said.

Acquaintances might not guess that this man carries a heavy burden.

Garang recently sat down with The News & Advance and recounted his years-long journey to find peace.

Garang was born in southern Sudan, a country in central Africa.

The area had no doctors or schools, not even birth records.

“Me and most of my friends who I grew up with, we don’t really know our age,” he said.

Garang’s mother died when he was very young, and he was raised by his father, a farmer.

Although his father was disabled from leg injuries that never healed correctly, he cared for about 10 orphaned children from the area.

In late 1987, the war raged ever closer to their home. Garang, who estimates he was between 2 and 5 years old, escaped along with thousands of children from the southern part of the country.

The “Lost Boys of Sudan,” as they are now known, set off toward Ethiopia, 200 miles to the east. They trudged through swamplands and expansive desert that transforms into flood plains during the rainy season.

“We were just a bunch of kids,” Garang said. “I can picture all of us walking in a line — we were walking all day and night, all the time.”

“You never know where you’re going to; you just go where you feel you might be safe.”

Many children died on the months-long journey, Garang said. Some succumbed to hunger or drowned in rivers; some were attacked by wildlife.

Garang estimates it was early 1988 when he arrived at a refugee camp in Ethiopia.

There, thousands of refugees faced a new danger: disease.

“Most of my friends got sick,” said Garang, who survived a bout of dysentery. “The disease just spread like wildfire. Every day, there were dead bodies.”

Food was also scarce; refugees survived mostly on wild fruit, when it was in season, and an occasional tractor of corn shared among all.

One night, Garang was preparing for morning cooking duty when a snake bit him.

He was taken to a clinic and given an injection and pain killers. His foot and the right side of his body swelled, and his usually ebony skin turned a sickly yellow.

“From that day, I crawled like a kid anytime I wanted to go outside,” he said. “For almost two years, I didn’t walk.”

Eventually, Garang visited a traditional doctor who cut into his foot to initiate bleeding. A week later, he began regaining sensation and slowly learned to walk again.

Soon after, the boys left the camp and spent several months living on their own, fishing in the Gila River on the Sudan-Ethiopia border and eating edible fruit, leaves and roots.

As the war intensified in 1992, they made their way southeast to Kenya and another refugee camp.

There, the danger was within. Tribes that considered Dinka their enemies brought those prejudices with them. Garang was relieved that he couldn’t be identified as a Dinka by his outward appearance.

“All the things that (my father) told me when I was a child started making sense to me,” he said. “And I started realizing, how did he know? How did he know I would be going through this?”

The group started going to school at the camp and fell into a routine. In 1999, they were visited by a group of U.S. officials.

“They saw the suffering that we were all going through,” Garang said, and he was told that some boys would be moved to another country with better education and work opportunities.“When the process started, it was just like a joke. It wasn’t something that (we thought) was really going to be successful.”

Then, interviews and medical exams began. Six months later, he learned that he was destined for Charlotte, N.C. But danger remained in the meantime.

A few months before Garang’s departure, a fight broke out at the refugee camp between competing Sudanese tribes.

Men ambushed Garang as he walked toward the camp.

“They shouted my name, and they asked me who I (was) with … I was thinking, ‘If I run, there is no place close by (to go),’” he said.

“I looked back and there was two, three guys all dressed in black suits. And I said, ‘I’m with those people.’”

The men escorted Garang safely back to camp. Fifteen minutes later, another man was killed in the same spot.

“That could have been me,” Garang said.

In June 2001, he left the camp for Charlotte.

He had survived.

In Charlotte, Garang took high school classes at a community college to earn his GED and soon met Becky and Jason Barnett. They had signed up through their church to mentor one of the Lost Boys.

Becky Barnett recalls the first time she visited Garang.

“He was watching cartoons so he would learn better English,” she said, laughing at the memory.

The process began with weekly visits to talk to him about life in the U.S. and skills that he had never needed to adopt before, such as time management.

Soon, she was dropping him off at school each morning with a brown-bag lunch; the Barnetts became like Garang’s second family.

“He’s definitely ‘Uncle Abraham,’” Becky Barnett said, referring to what her twin children call Garang. “He’s so tall (at 6-foot-6), and they’re only 7 years old. So it’s almost like (they’re) climbing a tree, they get so excited when they see him.”

She’s still surprised by stories of Garang’s childhood.

Once, they took him to an oral surgeon, who found metal in Garang’s gums. It got there, she learned, when Garang hit his face against a metal pail of water while in a refugee camp.

“It seems like we find something out all the time,” she said. “You just never know what story will come up next.”

Garang finished high school and started community college coursework in 2003. He planned to transfer those credits to a four-year collegeHe came to LC through a scholarship program that Whitaker initiated.

Director of LC’s Bonner Leaders Program, a national college organization that encourages service and volunteering, Whitaker had heard of colleges in North Carolina that had created scholarships for the Lost Boys.

Whitaker encouraged LC’s cabinet to sponsor a Sudanese refugee, and members agreed to provide full tuition, room and board for one student.

It was Garang.

He started at LC with a major in accounting in January 2008, and is on track to graduate in May 2010.

Garang, an LC Bonner Leader, also keeps busy outside of school through volunteer work at Lynchburg Grows, Rebuilding Together and the YMCA.

“My life has been about getting help,” he said, “because if there was no help, I wouldn’t be here today.”

LaToya Scott, another Bonner Leader at LC, has worked with Garang coaching basketball and soccer at the YMCA.

“He’s so positive about everything,” she said. “When the kids would get discouraged, he was like, ‘never give up.’”

When he graduates, Garang said he hopes he can visit Sudan and help build a school. He’s been working with the Sudanese Empowerment and Development Agency, a group that one of his friends formed.

The civil war ended in 2005, but millions were killed and millions more displaced. Education still is a great need in Sudan, Garang said.Back in Lynchburg, Garang constantly educates others about the situation in Sudan, and doesn’t shy away from sharing his story.

“Sometimes, it’s another way of relieving myself from thinking about it too much,” he said. “It’s not going to leave my mind for the rest of my life. It’s something that I’m going to live with.”

Someday, he hopes to have a family that can have a life free of those burdens.

“I want to change the course of the generations of my family, starting from me,” he said. “I’m the first person to go to school in my family. I want the next generation to think that everything is possible, regardless of your past history.

“They can accomplish more than I did. They can be anything they want later on in life.”