‘Lost Boy’ hopes to reunite with mom after 30 years

James Thiep Angui barely remembers his mother.

He can’t recall her face or her hair.

And while a few things she once told him occasionally come to mind, he has just one real memory of his mom.

That’s of the night decades ago when he went to sleep in a Sudan village, only to wake up the next morning and find she was no longer there.

Left with other relatives, the boy began a yearslong crusade to find safety amid a civil war that killed millions and tore apart his homeland.

His journey as one of the “ Lost Boys of Sudan” led him through Sudan to Ethiopia, where he trained with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, and to Kenya, where he spent years in a refugee camp before finally getting a long-desired education at a nearby boarding school.

He eventually made his way to Tucson, Ariz., where through the years he worked at a university and a department store and drove 18-wheelers and taxicabs, before moving to Hurst last year.

Now he’s on the verge of coming full circle and returning to Sudan for the first time since he left more than a decade ago.

He hopes to reunite with uncles and cousins who helped him during his time there.

He will meet the sister he didn’t know he had.

And he will finally — finally — see his mother.

When that happens, “I think I will cry,” Angui said.

Civil war

Angui — who believes he is about 38 — barely remembers that last night with his mother.

But he knows that he was young and that she took him to the home of one of her father’s wives.

And when he woke up one day, she was gone.

He stayed with his grandparents, his uncles, his father and different relatives through the years in Sudan, where a civil war raged from 1983 to 2005.

Millions abandoned their homes, hoping to stay safe and avoid the men with guns who traveled from village to village shooting at people and property alike.

Villages were destroyed, buildings were burned, and about 2.5 million people were killed during the war.

So many families were separated that more than 20,000 boys from the Nuer and Dinka tribes, many believed to be orphans, headed to refugee camps, where humanitarian workers referred to them as the “Lost Boys of Sudan.”

Angui was one of them.

‘Make it out alive tonight?’

Angui spent much of his childhood separated from his parents, finding and staying with other relatives.

He once ended up living with family friends for about a year until he realized he “could not put up with not having a family member around.”

He took off through the wilderness, trying “to go back from where I came from.”

Searching for the Ariath village, where he once lived with his mother, Angui made the journey on foot.

But the constant war made travel difficult.

“The northern troops came by train and would shoot into the villages,” he said.

So he stayed out of villages, following a path close — but not too close — to the railway line. When the trains came, he sought cover in the jungle.

He never found his mother and didn’t know whether she was alive or dead, but in time, he reunited with his father.

He recalls one night when armed men from the north came through their village.

They rode horses, camels and donkeys, seemingly shooting at anything that moved.

“I asked my father, ‘Are we going to make it out alive tonight?’ ” Angui recalled. “He said, ‘We could.’ ”

Amid the screaming and the shooting and the house being set on fire, Angui and his father fled in different directions. That would be the last time Angui saw his father.

He made his way to a village where one of his uncles lived. He stayed there with family, helping to cultivate a peanut farm, until the violence became too much. Then he joined hundreds of others on a treacherous 1,000-mile walk to Ethiopia over the next four months as they searched for guns to protect their homeland.

Along the way, many had to sell articles of clothing to gain food for the group. Some fell ill or died of starvation or malaria. Others were killed by lions and crocodiles.

But Angui made it.

Ethiopia

The survivors arrived in Ethiopia, joining about 10,000 already in the training camp for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

Perhaps 10 by now, Angui spent time in a refugee camp to regain his health before joining the training. As soldiers were chosen to receive weapons and head back to Sudan and fight, about 400 in the crowd — including Angui — were pulled out of line because they were too young.

He went to another refugee camp, attending school for about six months, before he was deemed old enough to fight. He was sent with others to guard a village on the border of Sudan, a “prison town” where people captured during the civil war were kept.

He and others walked between the camp and Ethiopia every few days to pick up supplies for the prisoners.

By 1992, Angui said, he had “had enough” and realized he “was not going home, apparently, which was the main aim.”

So he joined six others who were separated from their families and were bound for Kenya.

Fearful of being caught and killed, they made their way there — past wild animals and armed opposition — in about two months.

Continuing travels

Once in Kenya, Angui — who believes he had a first-grade education at age 16 — settled into the Kakuma refugee camp, where he spent one of the longer stretches of his life, about eight years.

With help from others, he went to a boarding school in Kenya and studied for about four years. He then participated in a program that helped the Lost Boys travel to the United States, although they had to pay back the cost of airfare.

Angui didn’t have a birth certificate or any other paperwork, so officials picked a birth date — Jan. 1, 1976 — and helped him get a Social Security card and other documents he would need in the U.S.

After arriving in Tucson, the Lost Boys banded together, learning to navigate an unfamiliar society.

“Many of the young men admit they had never operated stoves, microwaves, computers, answering machines or Touch-Tone telephones,” according to a 2001 Tucson Citizen article. “They had never owned a television. Some had never ridden elevators, escalators or [in] airplanes.

“And for the first time they were learning how to ride bicycles, shop for groceries and use dinner forks,” the article said.

Angui said he worked for Target and in the University of Arizona’s genetics department. He drove an 18-wheeler long enough to see 47 states, and he began driving a taxi.

During his years there, he fathered two children. But he also developed a gambling addiction so strong that he came to Texas, where casinos are illegal, last year.

Remembering home

Angui now lives in Hurst — driving a cab and attending stand-up-comedy and writing classes — but there is a moment from six years ago that he can’t forget.

That day, he received a message on his phone from his cousin. “Your mother has been found alive, and she wants to talk to you,” the voice mail said.

Angui was so startled that it took about two days to bring himself to call his mother, Abok Athian Kuot, who now lives in Aweil, a big community in South Sudan.

Now the two talk on the phone daily. He has sent his mother enough money to help her build a home and receive the medical treatment she needs.

On the phone, sometimes she sings to him.

Sometimes they just talk.

She explained to Angui why she left him that night so long ago: She left him there for her sister, who couldn’t have children.

“The family decided, being traditional believers, that I belonged to her sister,” he said. “She was threatened with ancestral intervention if she didn’t give me up for a sister who would never have a kid. … I really don’t blame her.”

He learned he has a sister who was born after his mother left him. And he has three brothers.

Looking ahead

Angui plans to visit his homeland next year. The civil war ended with a peace accord in 2005. And South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011.

“I haven’t been back,” he said. “I didn’t know what to go back to.”

He will likely spend a few months there catching up with his uncles who helped him when he was young and getting to know his mother, brothers and sister, as well as other relatives. His father died in 2000.

Someday, if all goes well, he might return for good.

If that pans out, he already has a plan.

“I want to go be a farmer,” he said, adding that he wants to “live by what I do with my own hands.”

Maybe he will grow peanuts again, or rice and corn.

“I am excited,” he said. “It will feel like I’m home.

“Eventually.”

This story was originally published November 26, 2014 at 8:24 PM with the headline "‘Lost Boy’ hopes to reunite with mom after 30 years."