Published: April 06, 2009 12:13 pm      

From Africa to America, the journey of a Lost Boy of Sudan

CLINTON — Like 30,000 or more Sudanese children (accounts of the total numbers who left and did not survive the initial walk are uncertain), Joseph Akol Makeer walked away from his village. He was 10 and it was 1987.

On Tuesday, April 7, Joseph will share the sad yet hope-filled story of his exile and survival with students from Clinton’s Prince of Peace College Prep and Washington Middle School students and the public at Clinton Community College, 1000 Lincoln Boulevard, at 11:45 a.m.

A second public presentation will be at The Canticle, home of the Clinton Franciscans, 841 13th Ave. North, at 7 p.m. The students have been preparing for the presentation by viewing Joseph’s new film, “African Soul, American Heart.”

Joseph survived the walk to Ethiopia and later to Kenya, and, with minimal materials and teachers, educated himself. His traumatic childhood was not dissimilar from the lives of 20,000 other young boys who survived the exodus and resulting exile, growing to manhood in refugee camps in Kenya. Nearly as many died.

His father and mother had encouraged him to escape the genocide perpetrated by the Arab Muslim government of the north against the African Christian tribesmen of the south, but he didn’t know that he would walk for months before reaching Ethiopia. He witnessed lions attacking and killing defenseless children and saw countless numbers die of dehydration and starvation. Some were left behind because their feet were too swollen to continue walking. Though Joseph wanted to turn back, he didn’t know how he would make it. He couldn’t know when he left that it would be more than 20 years before he would return to his homeland, and that he would never see his parents again.

The young boys who made this walk (there were also some girls) were dubbed the “Lost Boys of Sudan.” This is also the name used for the U.S. program which resettled about 3,800 teens and young adult men and women across the United States in 2001. Now grown, most of these refugees have prospered in America in spite of a myriad of cultural and material differences, as well as dramatic climactic and geographical changes.

But Joseph was unable to travel with this initial group in 2001 due to additional responsibility he has shouldered since age 20. Hearing that people from his village had arrived at Kakuma, the refugee camp where he lived in northern Kenya, he traveled to the registration area for news of his parents. The sad report of their deaths was made bearable by the discovery that three young sisters and a young nephew (who considers Joseph both a brother and a father) were in this group.

From that point, he took on the role of parent to these dependents, ages 4 to 14, moving out of the Lost Boy area of the camp to an area that allowed him to raise his mixed-gendered family. Though the challenges of caring for four siblings in his early 20s might have been a burden for many young men, for Joseph, raising those siblings who survived has been a blessing.

Offered the chance to settle in the United States with his friends in the initial Lost Boy resettlement program, Joseph refused because he would have been forced to leave his siblings behind.

And by then, he also had a wife. Aided by extended family who had previously emigrated to America, Joseph worked for two years to get permission for his wife and siblings to emigrate with him.

They all arrived together in Fargo, N.D., in 2003, exchanging the searing heat of Kakuma's desert for Fargo’s frigid winter snowfalls; exchanging a life without future, for a future that includes college educations for himself, the older two sisters and eventually the two siblings who are still in secondary school.

To tell this story, Joseph wrote “From Africa to America, The Journey of a Lost Boy of Sudan.” He began to talk to people he met about the Christians of southern Sudan, their desire for independence from the Muslim North and the enormous obstacles they face in rebuilding their lives. The issue will be decided by vote in 2011.

Although many Americans have heard of the Lost Boys of Sudan, few realize that thousands of Sudanese remain in refugee camps — not only young boys were forced out of their country. The tribesmen who survived the civil war and remained in southern Sudan have little education and few resources. What little infrastructure once existed was destroyed, making it difficult or impossible for many refugees to return to their homeland.

To spread this story to a wider group, Joseph envisioned a film to tell a tangible story about these real people, their suffering, their endurance, and their will to survive and provide a better future for their families.

“African Soul, American Heart” Joseph’s vision on film — shows the human spirit at its best. The film re-traces his journey back to his home village, Duk Payuel, in southern Sudan, where he found that orphans make up more than 20 percent of the village. To shelter and educate them, he is raising funds to build a boarding school by traveling around the Midwest with filmmaker Kevin Brooks. Brooks is a faculty member at North Dakota State University, where Joseph studied. Brooks earned his Ph.D. at Iowa State University and has family in the Cedar Rapids area.

For more information on the free, public presentations, call Sisters of St. Francis at 242-7611.

The program is co-sponsored by the Clinton Franciscan Center for Active Nonviolence and Peacemaking, Clinton Community College, Iowa Division, UNA-USA, Prince of Peace Pax Christi, and the Clinton Peace Coalition.