San Diego Magazine / October 2004 / Benson Deng

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Benson Deng

SITTING IN CLAIRE DE LUNE coffeehouse near his North Park apartment, 24- year-old Benson Deng holds his finger up to a coffee cup. “That is how much [vegetable] oil they give you for 15 days,” he says, “but we must sell it to grind our corn. Then we cook the corn flour in boiling water.”

And those were the good times —when he was safe at Kakuma, a sprawling, impoverished Kenyan refugee camp where he lived for nine years and learned English.

Deng is one of the Lost Boys of the Sudan. He was 7 when he fled his village in 1987—barefoot, in nothing but his underwear—as Islamic government soldiers burned and pillaged in a civil war against Christian tribes. Small boys were told to run to avoid conscription. Some 17,000—ages 5 to 9—crossed a thousand miles of hostile desert into Ethiopia. Deng survived the threemonth journey with his cousin, Benjamin Ajak, just 5.

But in 1991, war came to Ethiopia, too. Soldiers drove the Sudanese children across the Gilo River and back into the Sudan. Several thousand were shot, drowned or eaten by crocodiles.

At a refugee camp, Deng was miraculously reunited with his younger brother, Alepho, who became gravely ill with yellow fever. Friends escaped to Kenya, but Deng stayed behind to nurse his sibling. After rebel soldiers put Alepho on a truck to Kakuma for medical treatment, Deng made the dangerous journey by walking at night, hiding by day. He arrived to find Alepho recovering.

Three years ago, 3,600 Lost Boys from Kakuma were resettled in U.S. cities. A hundred live in San Diego. Deng works as a data manager at a company called Waste Management in El Cajon, a two-hour commute by bus and trolley.

He also takes courses at City College. “Education is going to be my father and mother,” he says. In his little free time, he plays dominoes and soccer with Alepho and Benjamin or watches movies.

The three have written a memoir, Tales of the Lost Boys, which will be published next spring. Deng says he hopes to help other Lost Boys. “From that first day,” he says, “we know that there are nice people here . . . The world is not the same everywhere. Here is a safe place. You can walk down the street and nobody bothers you.”