Peter and the Lost Boys - Seriously Sick in South Sudan - Part 2

When I returned from my exciting trip to Yei my housemate Peter excitedly told me that his family were from Yei district. It seems a good point to tell you a bit of Peter’s story; a remarkable man who I have been lucky enough to live alongside for the last month.

I may have mentioned that I have been living with three chaps who have been attending a residential course at the main AMREF training centre. They all work for or with NGOs concerned with African health or development. Abdi, I have mentioned already, is from Somaliland, Kebba, who I will come to later, is from The Gambia and then there is Peter from South Sudan. I had the privilege of sitting with these guys for dinner most evenings and I learnt so much about African politics, life, the universe and everything.

One of the things I notice among a lot of Africans I meet is the ability to tell a story. Holding a small audience is a respected skill it seems and one I feel our multimedia-based society may be losing. I think it should be goal in life to be able to sit around a table, hold a group’s focus and massively exaggerate stories like our grandfathers. Peter would sit at the table, two fingers raised waggling back and forth as he made his point or his punchline. Often he would get the giggles as he was on the verge of finishing his story. Which inevitably set us off laughing as well. I think we actually heard only about 50% of the end of his stories. He would suddenly come out with some wonderful comments, two of my favourites being: -

“Explain this to me about you mzungus (white guys). You all only have two children. What exactly is your problem?”

“This guy came back to the village and had been studying in Denmark. He had a PhD! We were very impressed until he told us it was in bee-keeping! We couldn’t stop laughing. Any fool with a box can keep bees.”

Peter is an electrical engineer by trade but has been doing the course with AMREF on monitoring and evaluation of health programs. One day he insisted on escorting me to the local barbers for a haircut. On the way he told me the story of his life in exile around the Sudanese civil war. It’s a story of one man’s struggle to get educated in the face of tremendous odds. As a boy he understood education and training was the only way out of the impoverished situation of his immediate family. I was not aware until then that I was in the presence of one of South Sudan’s ‘Lost Boys’.

He was born in Morobo, in-between Yei and the Ugandan border. He was one of ten children, six brothers and four sisters born to a ‘peasant farmer’ as he put it. Unfortunately two of his sisters and his father died when he was young, either in traffic trauma or due to ‘a sickness’. He was certainly one of the smartest of the siblings and so was sent to school in Kanyara. Like many in Africa this involved long walks in barefoot everyday. In his early-teens the rebel forces took the town and he was unable to get to school. No one was getting in or out. So he and his friend Isac (he hasn’t seen Isac in many years. Last he heard he was in Libya and fears he is probably dead) decided to make their way to Juba the capital and try to finish their schooling there. Peter had sold his only cow to make this journey and pay his way seeking an education.

The situation in Juba was not much better. A generation of young adults were being deprived of a good start by instability and insecurity. Isac had family in the town of Atbara up in the north of between Kartoum and the Egyptian border. The situation was said to be better there. So they managed to pay their way onto a cargo flight to Khartoum. They travelled to Atbara on top of a train but Peter was unable to establish himself there for reasons I can’t remember so he left his friend and he made his way back to Khartoum to try his luck there. By this point the war with the south was intensifying and they introduced conscription in Khartoum. Young men and even children were being rounded up all over town to fight the rebels. Sympathising with the rebels cause and having no intention of fighting his own countrymen Peter fled Khartoum.

This was the period many in South Sudan went into ‘exile’ as he called it. During this civil war it is estimated 2.5 million were killed and further millions displaced. His family had fled south from the conflict into neighbouring Uganda. The clan he is from ‘the Kakwa’ are also very common in north Uganda so they found themselves among friends. Peter knew his family would head south with their Kakwa brethren so knew where to aim for. Peter fled across Sudan from Khartoum into the Congo. He traveled with other South Sudanese boys and mostly at night. Colloquially these displaced fleeing young boys and men were known as the ‘Lost Boys of Sudan’ by international aid workers. It most often refered to the young boys who escaped the slaughter in the villages because they were out with the cattle. Or frequently they had also been taken by forces on either side as child soldiers (the militias telling the parents they were getting safe escort to school) and some managed to escape. Thousands scattered into refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia in particular. As we sat there waiting for my turn to get my hair cut, he told me me 'It was a scary time.'

He managed to make his way along the border to Uganda and with the assistance of UNICEF managed to
find his displaced family. They remain in northern Uganda to this day and Peter managed to get his education. He qualified in electrical engineering is now married with six children. His eldest daughter is doing extremely well at school and wishes one day to become a doctor so he says.

It’s a rather humbling story and yet another reminder of how much I should be thankful for in my own upbringing and education. I wonder what I was doing as a teenager while Peter and the other Lost Boys were jumping borders in the dark and dodging the torches of Sudanese soldiers? To look at him now you would never know he has been through so much to get where he is.