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A "Lost Boy" who found himself with ENG professor's help

By Brian Fitzgerald

In 1987, seven-year-old Peter Wal was resting under a tree while tending calves on the outskirts of his village in Sudan. It had been an ordinary afternoon in November until he noticed in the distance a thick cloud of smoke covering the sky above the village.

	J. Gregory McDaniel, ENG assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, helps Peter Wal with his physics homework. Photo by Vernon Doucette

"When I went back there, almost everybody was gone," he says. "I was so scared, I was shivering. There were dead bodies everywhere. I wanted to go home to see if my family was all right, but there were many people in the village that I didn't know. These people had attacked us before, and they were coming at me. So I didn't wait around. I ran."

Wal sprinted through the tall grass, and then crouched in a hole to hide from the Sudanese soldiers who had decimated his village. After they left, he headed east and met nearly 200 other unaccompanied boys, also from the Dinka tribe, sitting in the forest, exhausted after a long walk. But their troubles were just beginning. Walking further east to avoid the fighting -- a journey that would take them all the way to Ethiopia -- there would be more exhaustion, hunger, thirst, and death.

Wal's story is one not only of survival against all odds, however, but also of accomplishment, as he managed over the next several years to get an education in crowded refugee camps that barely provided a roof over his head. It is also the tale of a friendship with a Boston University professor who was so touched by Wal's plight that he has made it his personal mission to help nurture the 22-year-old's mind.

J. Gregory McDaniel, an ENG assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, remembers the first time he met Wal, shortly after he arrived in the United States last March. "A friend brought him over to my house, and we talked for two or three hours," he says. "I was struck at how warm and open he was, even after all he went through." McDaniel was also astounded at how talented Wal was in mathematics, despite his hardscrabble schooling -- for years his classroom consisted of chalk, a chalkboard, and a few textbooks under shelter of some trees. Now Wal's math mentor, McDaniel is trying to get him a college scholarship.

Orphaned in the storm
Wal is one of thousands of children known as the "Lost Boys of Sudan" -- so named by relief workers after the lost boys in Peter Pan, who clung together to escape a hostile adult world. Forced from their homes in a nation ravaged by a long and bloody war, 17,000 Sudanese children trekked hundreds of miles through African wilderness to Panydo, Ethiopia, only to be compelled to go on the run again four years later when fighting between Ethiopian troops and Eritrean separatists erupted in that country.

Why were Wal and other innocent children constantly pursued by threatening militias? Southern Sudan erupted in civil war in 1983, when the predominantly Muslim government in the north mounted a jihad, or holy war, against black Christians and animists in the south. In 1987, the war came to the Bor and Bahr el Ghazal provinces, and to Wal's village. His father was killed. For a decade, he had no idea of the fate of the rest of his family. "He was effectively orphaned," says McDaniel.

Wal has experienced unspeakable horrors, but the lanky, soft-spoken young man talks about those events matter-of-factly. When he relates his village's invasion by the Khartoum government in 1987, he readily describes the details of his escape. He also recalls -- through the eyes of a seven-year-old -- what happened to those who didn't escape: people in his village being "slaughtered like chickens, some thrown alive into fire." At the time, he says, he wished he was old enough to carry a gun so he could shoot the attackers. But he wasn't. In the dirt he saw the footprints of the fleeing children, so he followed the tracks.

In fact, Wal and his fellow refugees can be considered the lucky ones in this nightmare -- they're still alive. Because it is the job of boys in the Dinka tribe to tend the young cattle outside of the towns, many of them were able to get away from the soldiers, who burned the town centers and slaughtered many of the inhabitants.

In 1991, Ethiopia was at war with Eritrea, and the refugees were driven back to Sudan after three and a half years in Panydo. "They gave us 24 hours to leave," Wal says. Retracing his journey on a map in McDaniel's office, he describes to the assistant professor how they traveled 300 miles south toward Kenya, crossing the Gilo River while Ethiopian soldiers shot at them. Fortunately, he knew how to swim. Some boys didn't, and they drowned. "Many were shot dead while swimming," says Wal. Others were eaten by crocodiles.

They made it to Pokala, Sudan, where they stayed for nine months before they were again attacked by the Khartoum government troops. About a quarter of the Lost Boys died during their journey from Pokala to the Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya. Some were killed and eaten by lions and leopards. "When I was a boy back home tending calves, we had no fear of lions," Wal says. "We thought that they attacked just cattle, not people." But malnourished humans, whose diet consisted of leaves and bitter fruit, were easy prey.

Lost and found
Somehow, among 70,000 refugees in Kakuma, Wal obtained an education -- outdoors until United Nations relief workers brought in building materials in 1993 to construct a school. He recalls that the Red Cross attempted to establish mail communication between some of the Lost Boys and their families. "I wrote many letters to my mother, in Dinka and English," he says. There was no response. Finally, in 1997, he received a letter from his mother. Miraculously, she, his two sisters, and his older brother were still alive.

When the U.S. State Department decided to resettle 3,800 Sudanese boys across America, many of them didn't know where this promised land was located. "I knew that America was on a different continent," says Wal. "And we studied America in world history." But most them had never seen a television or sat in a motorized vehicle, never mind an airplane. "Many boys on the plane cried, but I didn't," he says. "I wasn't afraid because when I saw the pilot, he didn't show fear."

Sudan, in Northern Africa, borders Kenya and Ethiopa -- another war-torn country. The origins of the civil war in Sudan date back to 1955.

Volunteer David Chanoff, a friend of McDaniel's, helps place the Lost Boys under the age of 18 with local foster families. They are enrolled in high schools, and tuition is waived at Massachusetts state universities if they are admitted. But their older comrades get $428 a month in federal cash assistance for up to eight months, and are then expected to get jobs. "Ironically, when the boys who were 18 and older left the refugee camps and came to the United States, their education pretty much ended," says McDaniel. Most find employment in fields such as food service, the hospitality industry, and assembly or clerical work. Some hold more than one job, working, as Wal did, as many as 70 hours a week. "I slept whenever I could," recalls Wal. "Sometimes I fell asleep on my train and missed my stop." Wal was probably born in 1980. (Like others in his predicament, he has no idea when his real birthday is, and they share a single, government-issued birthday of January 1.)

The culture shock is overwhelming for many of the resettled refugees. Wal remembers being hassled along with his Sudanese roommates by neighborhood toughs in Chelsea. "They gave us a hard time -- threw eggs at us, and said that we'd better watch out," he says. "We wondered, watch out for what? I started asking myself, why should I come over here and have the same problems as I had back in Africa? Trouble seemed to be following me."

McDaniel says that Ellen Sperling, a local volunteer from the International Rescue Commission, took Wal out of Chelsea and let him stay in her living room in Jamaica Plain, and then found a family for him to live with in Dorchester. She was also instrumental in getting him a scholarship to the prestigious Beaver Country Day School in Newton, where he is the top student in his math class, thanks in part to McDaniel's tutoring. The prep school is a palace compared to the Kakuma camp, where Wal shared a physics text book with 14 other students.

"I'm probably pretty low on the list of people who helped Peter," McDaniel says. But Wal begs to differ: "No, no, no! You've done a lot." So have his classmates at Beaver Country Day School, who have started a Peter Wal Fan Club.

Wal laughs now at some of the language barriers he had to overcome when he first enrolled at Beaver. "Someone would say, 'What's up?' and I'd look at the ceiling," he says. "I remember when one of my teachers was helping me with my schoolwork. He opened his book and said, 'Let's go.' I picked up my book and walked to the door. He asked what I was doing, and I told him I thought I was supposed to go somewhere with him."

Can he go home again?
Will Wal ever return to Sudan? He doubts it -- not in the foreseeable future. "In Sudan, if they find out that you are educated, your life is at risk," he says. "They kill intellectuals." Indeed, according to the human rights group Africa Watch, hundreds of Sudanese professors, students, engineers, trade unionists, and lawyers have been jailed and tortured since the civil war began. But he hasn't ruled out a visit if the war ends. "If peace comes back to the country, then I will see my family," says Wal.

Adjusting to life in the United States has been anything but smooth for Wal. Like many of the Lost Boys, he can feel disoriented -- at first, he drove himself crazy trying to figure out where the sun rose and set. And he definitely is not used to the January cold of Boston. In McDaniel's office, he takes off his winter jacket so a photographer can take a picture, then he immediately puts it back on. "And these gloves," he laughs, putting on a mitten. "You can't do anything with these on your hands. It's hard to hold things."

Wal says that in the Kakuma camp he didn't have to think twice about whether to come to America when he saw his name on a list of refugees to be resettled in Massachusetts. "Many of the students left the camp to go into businesses because there wasn't enough food there," he says. Each day they were served just one meal of cooked maize and wheat flour. "But I knew that if I worked in one of these little businesses, I still wouldn't be able to buy materials for a house." In addition, because so much of his childhood in Sudan was spent constantly on the move, he feared that with the unstable political situation in the country, he could again lose everything.

"I knew that if I was forced to move, I would have to leave all my stuff behind," he says. "That is why I stayed in school to learn. If I had to run away again, I would still have the knowledge in my head. I would never lose that. Nobody could ever take that away from me."

11 January 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations