Abraham Garang's earliest memory is of the day he was forced to leave his home in southern Sudan and begin a tortuous journey to Ethiopia.
He was just a young boy; Abe doesn't know if he was 2 or 5 or somewhere in between. He says he remembers having a glass of milk that morning and looking back at the cattle his family raised before he and his cousin started their run toward an uncertain future.
Abe is one of the Sudan's "Lost Boys," one of 27,000-some youngsters forced to flee their homes in the 1980s when civil war tore their country apart. In 2001, about 3,800 Lost Boys arrived in the United States through a government refugee program put together by the United Nations, which relocated Lost Boys around the world.
Lisa Whitaker, director of Lynchburg College's Bonner Leaders Program, heard about the resettled Lost Boys at a Bonner Leaders Conference in May 2007. David Thon, a Sudanese refugee who had attended Mars Hill College thanks to its Bonner program, urged representatives of other Bonner colleges to sponsor a Lost Boy.
Lisa took his plea to heart and encouraged LC's cabinet to set up a scholarship for a Sudanese refugee. College officials embraced the idea. "I think LC was morally drawn to it," Lisa said. "I'm so proud that we did it."
As a result of that effort, Abe is now a Lynchburg College junior, majoring in accounting and coaching soccer at a local YMCA. He is also a Bonner Leader. His life is vastly changed, but his memories remain, and Abe does not shy from them. "I feel proud that I'm still alive," Abe said. "I survived a lot of things . . . a lot!"
Among those things were a snake bite that left him paralyzed for a time, starvation, and brushes with those who wanted to kill him.
After stays in two refugee camps with a return to Sudan in between, Abe finally left Nairobi, Kenya on June 17, 2001 and headed for his U.S. destination: Charlotte, N.C., where he began his third year of high school.
In 2003, Abe graduated and started attending community college. It was also that year that Abe was able to reestablish contact with his family in the Sudan. Unlike some of the Lost Boys, Abe was not an orphan. Though his mother had died when he was just a youngster, his father survived the war. Despite a disability, Abe's father was able to care for four families throughout the civil war.
Twenty years after he last saw his father, Abe talked to him by telephone. His father had traveled to Nairobi to place the call. Abe said he instantly recognized his father's voice. The conversation brought back earlier memories of Abe's childhood. As a young child, Abe had always wanted to go through the initiation rites of his tribe, which included permanently marking the forehead and pulling lower teeth. His father, however, had always stopped him and told him that such marks could identify him to his enemies one day. "How did he know that?" Abe wonders aloud.
Though his father died in 2003, Abe embraced his advice to take advantage of every educational opportunity. While Abe hopes one day to be able to help his fellow Sudanese, his primary goal is far more basic. He wants something he lost as a child. "I want to find myself a family," he said.
For Abe's full story, see the fall edition of the Lynchburg College Magazine.