Photos by Garrett Cook

Phoenix isn’t famous for its diversity. But peer into its margins, and you’ll find a city flush with people from around the world. In the final installment of a three-part series, we delve into the Valley’s Sudanese, Bhutanese and Burmese refugee communities.


PART ONE - HIDDEN CULTURES: EURASIA

PART TWO - HIDDEN CULTURES: MIDDLE EAST





South Sudanese {Lost Boys}
Population: Approximately 8.2 million
Estimated population of Sudanese refugees in Phoenix: 1,700

July 9, 2011 was “miracle day” for Kuol Awan. As one of the Lost Boys of Sudan displaced by civil war, Awan had never known peace in his birth country. He’d left his village in Maar at the age of 8 – one of tens of thousands of barefoot war orphans traversing a landscape of burned African bush and collapsed thatched huts, hiding in trees at night to guard against gunfire and animal attacks. It was 1987, and Awan’s parents, like those of most Lost Boys, had been taken from their village and killed. His sorrow over the fact that he could not follow the tribal tradition of burying his father was superseded by a drive to survive.

Awan walked for five years and nearly a thousand miles before reaching a refugee camp in Kenya, often carrying younger boys on his shoulders. Many of his fellow travelers perished. “Some people died, some went in a different direction,” he says. Early in his journey, several people ran into a river to escape gunfire and drowned.

By the time he came to the United States as a refugee in 2001, Awan was 22 and far past the point where he might have dared to dream there would someday be harmony in southern Sudan. So when a vote for South Sudan to separate from the north took place in January, 2011 – and passed by 99.47 percent, with July 9 chosen as Independence Day – Awan was both overjoyed and overwhelmed.

Kuol Awan

“That was amazing, for us to be part of that,” says Awan, who voted in Phoenix along with other Sudanese refugees. “We became part of the struggle in the beginning, and now I feel like I can contribute more by putting my voice out there.”

Awan is one of more than 20,000 young boys (average age: 9) who spent years walking across the African countryside in clusters throughout the course of the war, searching for a safe place. An estimated 2.5 million Lost Boys didn’t make it. Most of the young girls were killed or forced into marriages. Less than 3,000 documented Lost Girls made it to camps in Kenya; only 89 came to the U.S.

Nearly 500 Lost Boys resettled in Arizona as refugees from 2001 through 2005, making Phoenix the city with the most Lost Boys in the country.  The AZ Lost Boys Center opened in central Phoenix in 2003 and was renamed the Lost Boys Center for Leadership Development this year. Awan serves as executive director.

Some Sudanese refugees opened local businesses, like SoSudan, an African clothing store on west Van Buren Street, and Goat Meat Store at 27th and Montebello avenues. But many, especially among the Lost Boys, have gone into humanitarian aid – helping other refugees adjust to life in the U.S. through work as translators, ESL teachers, counselors and community outreach figures. “With our new direction, we want to focus more on people like us who got a chance to come to this country,” Awan says. “Even if it was bad [in South Sudan], it turned out that we are now the only educated people from that country.”

South Sudan is one of the least developed countries in Africa. A teenage girl is more likely to die during childbirth than to attend school, and 84 percent of the population is illiterate. Its fledgling economy could be bolstered by oil production, but the new president of South Sudan, Salva Kiir Mayardit, shut down the pipelines in January, in the midst of a dispute with north Sudan over transit fees (South Sudan needs the northern pipelines and port to export oil). It’s the latest dispute between the two halves of Sudan in a conflict that stretches back to 1956, when British colonists pulled out and demarcated a border, leaving the primarily Arabic-speaking, Muslim north at odds with the mostly tribal, animist south. Two huge civil wars – from 1955 to 1972 (the Sudanese government battling the Anyanya rebel army) and from 1983 to 2004 (the Sudanese government versus the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement) – resulted in the deaths of an estimated 3 million people, many of them various tribal peoples of South Sudan.


The largest ethnic tribes in South Sudan are the Dinka and the Nuer. Awan is from the Dinka tribe and herded cows as a young boy. When he arrived in the United States, he’d never seen American appliances before, and was particularly confused by the microwave and vacuum cleaner in his first apartment. He was convinced anything he put in the microwave would burn because there was nowhere to pour water in, and he thought the vaccum cleaner might navigate itself  around the room.

Though the culture shock was sometimes comical, it could be challenging, too. Awan, who has a master’s degree in psychology from ASU, says he initially came to the center specifically to help treat trauma. He says many Lost Boys had difficulty adjusting to life in the U.S. once they got residences and jobs – and time to think about everything they’d gone through. They come from a culture where problems are addressed as groups, Awan explains, and an environment where banding together was necessary for survival. “With all these horrible things that happened when we were in Africa, we kind of find a positive way of dealing with it, and that was having ourselves a team – staying together and being able to face it,” Awan says. “Because we used to sit together and have a chat and all that – those things went out when we came here. And then people started reliving the trauma.”

Awan’s solution: Bring more group activities to the Lost Boys Center – soccer teams, running groups, art projects – to foster a social network and provide healing familiar to their culture. “If you sent a Sudanese to a therapist in an American way, to be one-on-one, that’s not how we used to do it,” Awan says. “Even in this country, [no Sudanese] would go to one person. You do it in a different way, by talking as a group or addressing it as a team.”

Since 2003, with the aid of various programs at the center, 103 Lost Boys have completed a community or four-year college program, and 112 refugees have become U.S. citizens.

Achan Dumo wants to be among them soon. Almost half a century ago, she was a soldier in the Anyanya rebel army in the First Sudanese Civil War. Now, she is at the Lost Boys Center five days a week, studying for her U.S. citizenship test.

South Sudanese refugees protest continuing conflict in Sudan at the Town & Country plaza in Phoenix.

The mother of six lost one of her sons during the second war; he was killed at age 19. Her remaining sons are Lost Boys who managed to escape to the U.S. and bring her to Phoenix (Dumo fled to Egypt during the second war). Even in her 70s, she can lift and lug a PC tower down a long hallway like it’s nothing. Asked what she’d like to do in this country after obtaining citizenship, Dumo says, “Anything that a citizen can do, whether it’s a war or someone attacking us, me and my children can defend the country.”

Dumo’s “children” aren’t just the ones she gave birth to – because the majority of Lost Boys came to the U.S. as orphans, she serves as a surrogate mother figure to all at the Lost Boys Center. “I have even more sons,” Dumo says with a smile. “They are my boys.”

Kuol Awan returned to South Sudan in 2008 and 2009, and finally held a memorial service for his father. But he didn’t return to his village until 2011, followed by cameras for the BBC documentary This World: Return of the Lost Boys of Sudan, which aired last December. “When I was leaving here, I thought, ‘Just show up and you’ll be happy to meet people,’ but as you’ll see in the film, it was very powerful to see the land and how it has been deformed by the war,” Awan says. “It was amazing to be back, but at the same time, it was more emotional than I thought. And the thing that was killing me was, I want to do something but I don’t know how. I didn’t have the power to do what I needed to do.”

At the Lost Boys Center for Leadership Development, Awan has found power in empowering others. “We are excited to look at things like leadership, so they can go back and lead in whatever capacity. You don’t have to be the leader of a country, but you can be the leader of a classroom in a village. You can be the leader of a small group of people that are doing something like marketing,” he says. “For the last 10 years [the Lost Boys] have been here is all about getting an education. Now, most of us got it. So now it’s putting it into action and making it work. Education is part of what we make ourselves [obtain] so we can become independent and go back and hopefully make that a wonderful country."


For more of PHOENIX magazine’s 'Hidden Cultures: Refugees', check back soon, find us at newsstands Valleywide or call 480-664-3960.  Subscribe today so you don’t miss another issue!