Lost Boy Of Sudan Hopes To Return Home With ODU Degree

By Jim Raper

William Mayom, a 23-year-old Sudanese who emigrated from Africa in 2001 and is now a pre-nursing student at Old Dominion, has boyhood memories of crowded refugee camps where the first chore each morning was hauling away the bodies of the ill and starving who did not wake up.

While in flight from a refugee camp in Ethiopia to another one in Kenya in 1991, he experienced hunger that makes him bend and shiver when he recalls it. He spent most of his adolescence believing that his mother and father and seven of his siblings were dead. He would learn when he was 19 that most of them were.

His horrific tale begins on a warm afternoon in 1987 when he was 6, playing together with other boys in his rural village in southern Sudan. Up until that day his life had been peaceful. But fighting between Muslims in the north of his country and Christians and other non-Muslims in the south swept into his village without warning. His father was caught outside the village tending farm animals. His mother was off collecting firewood.

“We heard the pop of the guns and we were excited and curious at first,” he says. “We listened and looked at the smoke. Then we heard cries and saw people running. They ran by us and told us to run, too. I called, 'Mama! Mama!' but people said to go. We ran and ran, into the bush.”

Fighters loyal to the north destroyed his village and killed his father, one brother and four sisters. Separated from his mother and two other brothers, the 6-year-old walked through remote terrain for weeks, sometimes holding the hand of a teenaged boy from his village of Dinka tribespeople. He saw some in his party die of hunger, illness and exhaustion. He saw a few attacked by wild animals. He saw others die at the hands of opposing fighters.

By the time his knot of refugees had traveled 200 miles to the Ethiopian border, the survivors were mostly boys and young men. Many Dinka adults had stayed in southern Sudan and gone into hiding.

Other groups of refugees arriving in the border camps were mostly young males, as well. Their numbers swelled to more than 20,000, and they came to be known as the Lost Boys of Sudan.

Mayom tells his story stoically in a thickly accented English. But tears well in his eyes after he has narrowed the tale to his family.

He made telephone contact with his mother before he left for the United States, but has not seen her since that tragic day in 1987. She told him about the deaths of his father and several siblings. She also had some good news: one brother was alive in East Africa. Mayom told his mother that another brother, now living in Michigan, was also alive.

Today, William Mayom is attempting to put his life back together. In addition to his pre-nursing course work, he has a job in food services at a local hospital. “This is a good job for me. I can watch the medical professionals at work,” he says.

Mayom lives with other Lost Boys in a house not far from campus. He, and the nearly 3,000 other Lost Boys who emigrated to America, received some initial support from the federal government. He has also gotten government education loans and limited assistance from the state of Virginia and Sanctuary of Hope, an outreach center in Portsmouth.

His goal is to get medical training so that he can return to southern Sudan to help relieve the suffering of his mother and other Dinka tribespeople.

According to the U.S. State Department, the combination of war, famine and disease in southern Sudan between 1983 and 2001 killed more than 2 million people and displaced another 4 million.

After an agreement signed in January 2005 ended the fighting, a Sudanese government organization began to return Dinka and other southerners from servitude and slavery in the north to their villages in the south.

Mayom believes the agreement came about because hard-line Islamic leaders in the north are trying to appease the U.S. government. “I am afraid this will not last,” he says. And despite the agreement, he is convinced that conditions in the south – desperate shortages of medical services, water and food – are worse than reported. This makes him ever more determined to get all the medical training he can.

Sandra Breeden, director of advising for ODU’s College of Health Sciences, has taken special interest in Mayom, but acknowledges the difficulties ahead for him. “We have 300 applicants for 100 spots in nursing. It is very competitive. Some of our students apply two or three years to get into our programs.”

This spring Mayom was on the waiting list for acceptance in the fall. He says if he doesn’t make the cut he will take more courses to better prepare for a second try.