A group of young African refugees, commonly known as the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan, have found a way to help one another and revive the solidarity they once shared in their homeland.
Scattered across 39 U.S. cities when they arrived almost four years ago, the 3,900 teenagers and young adults were forced to deal with culture shock and the stress of living apart.
So last year they established the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan, a not-for-profit organization that seeks to raise money for school tuition and healthcare programs and to reestablish unity among the young refugees.
Over the Memorial Day weekend at the Los Angeles campus of the University of Judaism, a 19-member board of directors convened for the first time to draft the group's bylaws and formalize its mission.
"This organization has been established to create a network, to bring us together and really help us to establish ourselves in this country," said Benjamin Okuka, 29, the group's public relations officer, who lives in Detroit.
It is a goal that few of the young southern Sudanese, now ages 19 to 29, thought they would ever realize.
They fled their native country after their villages were burned and looted by Arab militias from northern Sudan. Most of the young people -- mainly boys -- were unwilling to join rebel fighters in Sudan's enduring civil war that has pitted forces from the predominantly black African, animist and Christian south against government forces of the dominant Muslim and Arab north.
The young exiles, hundreds of them orphaned, trekked thousands of miles, enduring starvation and banditry, eventually ending up in desolate, fly-infested refugee camps in Kenya. Many of them died.
The U.S. offered almost 4,000 of the Sudanese youngsters a haven in 2001. San Diego, San Jose and Sacramento were among the cities where scores were resettled.
By the time they arrived, most were adults and thus eligible for public assistance for only a limited time. After that, they were on their own -- thrust into a society where modern conveniences such as telephones, washing machines and electric ranges were as foreign to the newcomers as their surroundings.
The breakup of their tight-knit group -- most were used to sharing a hut with five or six others in a compound of more than 300 people -- added to the challenges of assimilation.
