isaac

A riveting sophomore tells his story.

By Brian Doyle

I. I was watching the cows that day, says Isaac. Also goats and sheep. I was eight years old. It was a sunny day.

Some older boys came running and said that men were shooting all the boys and men in the village, so we started running toward the forest. Then it got all crazy with dust and fire and guns.

When I got to the forest I tried to hide but the forest was full of people. I could not find my family. I waited in the forest all day for the shooting to stop but it didn’t stop. When night came we heard the men on horses in the forest looking for us, so we went deeper into the forest.

It seemed like the whole world was hiding in that forest.

The night grew cold but we could not light a fire and when a dog barked it was hushed immediately so the men would not find us.

In the morning we walked to the next village but the men raided that village too, and the people there ran into the forest, so the forest grew more crowded. We all kept walking, just to go.

This went on for three days.

In the villages every boy and man was killed, and every girl taken alive. Old men and women were left alone.

In the forest if you were lucky someone gave you something to eat, and if you were unlucky you ate from the trees.

After five days the elders in my village sent word that all young boys and young men from our village who were in the forest must keep walking east toward the border. They knew that if we came back to the village we would be killed next time the soldiers came. So I did not see my family again for a long time.

There were hundreds of us boys in the forest, ages six to nineteen. We walked all night and slept all day. Sometimes we killed a bird and ate it.

I walked with my cousin and three boys from our village. We five walked together. You held the shirt of the boy in front of you and a boy held your shirt behind you. I lost my shoes and made socks from my sleeves. It rained a lot but the rain was warm. There were always hyenas. They were looking for weak people to eat. You would hear them laughing. You would hear lions also. They weren’t so bad. You would find them sleeping in the road. If you slept in their territory that was bad for you. Sometimes when you were looking for a bush to sleep under you would find a lion or a leopard under that bush.

It was a silent journey. Not many boys felt like talking. We knew we had lost our parents. It smelled like trees and flowers. I cannot remember every day. We walked for three weeks through the forest. We walked three hundred miles. I lost my cousin. Finally we came to the border, and that was the end of one journey and the beginning of another.

II. To enter Ethiopia from Sudan you had to swim a river. It was dawn. The water was so clear I could see fish. Some boys walked in carefully but I jumped in. That water was so warm! We wanted to stay in the river, because it had been so long since we could swim and play and splash, because in the forest we could only run to the river to get water and then run back into the forest, but there was a hurry now to get across the border, so we hurried.

I was there along the border for five years, sometimes in one country and sometimes in another. There was always war and people after us, so after five years we began to walk again. There were thousands of us, all walking south. Boys were walking everywhere. We walked in groups of five, fifteens, fifties, and five hundreds. There were twelve groups of five hundreds where I was.

We crossed deserts and mountains and forests. We crossed places where there was no plant living there. There was attack after attack after attack. Different groups of men attacked us. In every attack you lost someone you knew. One time we were attacked near a river and we all ran away and I ran into the bush and watched as thousands of boys ran into the river and only a few came out.

We found a place to camp out for a while and we did. But there was starvation there. There was no food. Bones were sticking out of us. It was not good. We would eat anything that would not kill you. One time we ate an antelope. We ate leaves.

So we began to walk again. We walked across a desert toward Kenya but when we got near to the border we were attacked again and that was a very bad time. They killed many of us that time. A bullet went through my cousin’s back and came out his front. You can still see the scars.

I was very tired then. I thought that was the end of my life. But some people working for the Red Cross sent trucks out into the desert from Kenya to pick us up. The trucks picked up the weakest ones first. After a week a truck picked me up and brought me to Kenya, and that was the end of that journey and the beginning of another one.

III. The Kenyans built a very large camp for all the people who had no place to go. In the camp were Sudanese, Ethiopians, Somalis, Rwandese, Zaireans, many others.

I lived there for nine years. It was just dust and bushes. It was either wet or dry. When it rained it was mud and when it was dry it was dust. Trucks always had their headlights on.

It was a little bit normal. I played soccer every day after school. Some of the teams were the Black Eagles and the Red Stars and the Holy Babies. We had dances and fistfights and examinations and books. There was one meal a day. We never had quite enough food. We lived in large huts, fifteen boys to a hut. Our hut was one of twenty huts, so there were three hundred boys where I was. Those were how many of us were left from when there were five hundred of us. So two hundred boys were dead.

I was seventeen years old when I found out I did not have to live in the camp forever. The United States said I could apply for refugee status as one of the Lost Boys. A few other countries were taking some of us, and some boys went to Canada and Britain, and many of my friends went to Australia, but the United States said it would take thousands of us, so I applied to come here.

One day the letter came for me from the United States. It was a white envelope with a red postmark and an eagle stamped on it. I tore it open right there. It said yes, you can come here.

I still have that letter.

IV. Three months later I flew from Nairobi to New York City. There were forty boys on the plane with me. Three of the boys were from my village in Sudan.

It was a very clear day when we landed. We could not believe how crowded America was. People everywhere. Buildings everywhere. I recognized the Statue of Liberty. After we landed we spread out across the country: Texas, Massachusetts, Georgia, and New York. I went alone to Washington, D.C.

On September 11, I was working in a hotel. The Pentagon was across the street. My boss came and said you must come to the television now. On the television New York City was burning.

It was not a normal day anymore.

No one said anything to each other.

Then there was a shaking: it was the Pentagon. We went to the windows. Everybody outside was running away from the Pentagon or rushing towards it.

A man said this is unimaginable.

But it was not unimaginable to me. In the Sudan it was September 11 every day.

I lived alone in that city, and I was lonely, and I could not pay all my bills, so when another of the boys who had come to Oregon told me I should come here I did.

Here I have been working at the University doing the recycling of paper and metal and glass, and taking college courses downtown, and I began my classes at the University this summer.

I want to study political science and international relations here.

Then I want to go home.

I want to heal my home: that is what I want more than anything.

Chol Isaac Achuil, born in the Sudan in 1980, is a sophomore at the University this fall. He was one of the Sudan’s 26,000 “Lost Boys,” the children driven from their homes during the African wars of the 1980s. He is one of the 3,600 Lost Boys given political refugee status and admitted to the United States. To be of direct and material assistance to courageous men and women like Isaac, make a gift to the University's many scholarships by clicking here.

Brian Doyle is the editor of this magazine. His new book, Spirited Men, a collection of essays about great male writers and musicians, will be published by Cowley this fall.