Garang Mayuol was in the cow pasture with his father when the shooting started.
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After his father’s death, Mayuol lived with a foster family at the UN camp. Then, in 1991, when Eritrea won its independence from Ethiopia, the Eritreans cleared the camp, forcing the refugees back across the border into Sudan. The Sudanese military in turn bombed them for a week, driving them south toward Kenya. “People were drowning in the Gilo, being killed by crocodiles and hyenas,” Mayuol says. In 1992, at age ten, he made it to the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, where he would spend the next nine years—one of the approximately 27,000 orphaned or displaced male children known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. He was housed in a compound with seven other boys, including Deng and Garang, who would become his surrogate family.
Conditions were bleak at Kakuma. “They would give us a small amount of maize to last 15 days, and the last seven days we would be without food,” Mayuol says. “Sometimes we would run out of water.” Stricken with malaria in 1998, he ended up in the same hospital as a cousin of his who’d been wounded fighting for the primary southern insurgent force, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Mayuol’s cousin told him his mother was still alive and living in Lang.
In Lang, Mayuol was greeted like a hero, with dancing and ululations. Two men held a small bull on its back for him to step over, then sacrificed the bull. Villagers draped a cape around him and led him on a procession through the adoring crowd of 800. “Everybody wanted to touch me and make sure I was real,” he says. He got to see his mother and younger sister, but it was a bittersweet reunion. “I saw the suffering of my people,” he says. “It was overwhelming. I saw a lot of needs in their eyes. I thought, ‘How should I help them?’”
Now 27, single, and going for a BA in business at Benedictine University in Lisle, Mayuol plans stay in the U.S., using his knowledge to promote international investment in his homeland. “I hope I can find some foreign companies who can invest,” he says. “There are a lot of resources.”
