Chris Koor Garang dreamed for years of knowing his parents’ fate, of learning whether they were alive or dead.
His family had been split apart by the war in Sudan one violent night in 1989.
About a week into his first trip home in nearly two decades, he got a letter from his parents. They were alive and in a nearby village in southern Sudan. They wanted to see him right away.
But he couldn’t just leave. There were people who needed his medical care. A little girl had been bitten by a snake and had an infection all the way to her foot bone. A woman had been carried in on a stretcher — a two-day trip to the clinic — after a botched C-section performed by villagers.
He stayed three more days, finishing up what he had traveled about 9,000 miles to do, before climbing on board a pickup truck toward the town of Kwajok, where his parents were waiting.
When they finally saw each other, they clung tightly and didn’t want to let go. His father held his head and spat on it , giving him his blessing.
The family was reunited. But it was more complicated than that.
“When I saw them, I was happy. I was glad they were alive but I didn’t have that connection that somebody who stayed with their parents for so long could have,” says Garang, now 30.
“I grew up alone in the camp. I have my own life, my own family. My friends were my brothers,” he says. “It was just like, all right it’s great you guys are alive, now let’s see how life goes."
***
Garang, whose name Koor means lion in Dinka, comes from a cattle-herding tribe in what is now South Sudan, a landlocked country that gained its independence in 2011. It is smaller than Texas and has about 12 million people.
At the height of the conflict between the North and the South, militiamen on horseback and camels rode through his village in the middle of the night, burning everything along their path, raping women and kidnapping children to sell as slaves.
Garang and his brother ran in different directions, both naked and barefoot. There was no turning back.
At age 7, Garang became one of about 20,000 children, mostly young boys, who trekked in groups through swamps, deserts and across the Nile – a 1,000-mile, months-long journey to neighboring Ethiopia.
His brother, he later found, was killed that night.
The boys in Garang's group crossed the Nile using papyrus leaves. They ate dead gazelles and other animals left by the lions. They drank their own urine to survive.
Thousands lost their lives to hunger, dehydration and exhaustion. Some were killed by wild animals, others drowned while crossing the river. Many were caught in the crossfire.
“There were times I wanted to stop,” Garang says. “But seeing some of my friends who starved and seeing they couldn’t walk because their feet were swollen; seeing them just being grabbed by the lions or their eyes taken out by the vultures — I didn’t want that happening to me, so I just kept going.”
By the time they arrived in Ethiopia they were walking skeletons. But their peace there didn’t last long. War broke out in Ethiopia and once again they were chased out at gunpoint.
This time they ran back into Sudan on their way to Kenya, where the United Nations set up a camp for about 10,000 of them in 1992.
In Kakuma Camp, a sprawling settlement in northern Kenya where the average daytime temperature is about 100 degrees, groups of boys lived together in mud huts for nearly a decade. They became each other’s parents, brothers and friends.
When one woke up screaming in the middle of the night because of bad dreams, another one stayed up and walked with him until it passed.
It was boys taking care of boys.
They were still in survival mode, though, making due with twice-a-month food rations of oil and maize and trying to avoid being recruited to fight in the war.
There was no time to wonder if their families were dead or alive.
***
In the late 1990s, as the war in Sudan raged on, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees determined there was no solution for the Lost Boys but to be resettled to a third country.
The likelihood of them having relatives in Sudan became less likely as time went on. There were also concerns of them being recruited into the war because many of them had military training, says Larry Yungk, a senior resettlement officer for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Washington.
About 3,600 refugees were selected to come to the United States. On April 3, 2001, Garang became one of 74 Lost Boys who would call Tucson home.
Here he met Carol Tierney, a volunteer who worked with many Lost Boys, but clicked with then-17-year-old Garang the most.
“All of the boys were very needy,” Tierney says, “but what they mainly needed was my checkbook. Chris was the only one who didn’t.”
Slowly he started to trust and become part of her family of six children and 19 grandchildren. He went on their family vacations and celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas with them.
She became Mom Carol and her husband Bill became Papa.
They still text every week and say “I miss you” or “I love you” if they haven’t seen each other in a while.
“He’s the seventh kid,” her kids joke, “but does he always have to be the favorite one?”
When Bill’s Alzheimer’s progressed, Tierney says, Garang was the only person in the family Bill recognized. He would point and call him “my boy.”
As Bill lay dying, Garang spent more than 24 hours straight at his bedside. After he died and the rest of the family had left, Garang stayed behind to bathe him.
“This is what I want to do for Papa,” Tierney remembers him saying.
“We chose each other,” she says of Garang.
***
Garang had found love, but he still needed to know what happened to his family.
“Even if it’s over the phone, just knowing their mother or father is alive has been one of the most important parts of their lives,” says Sasha Chanoff, co-founder of the non-profit RefugePoint, which works with the most vulnerable refugees.
Finding out they have living relatives helps refugees feel they didn’t lose everything to the war, Chanoff says.
During his first trip in 2007, Garang learned that not only were his father and mother alive, but that he had dozens of siblings from his father’s other wives.
Before he returned to Tucson, he traveled with his parents to his birthplace, where his placenta is buried. He spent a couple of days with his family and left them money to build a house and start a business. Instead, they loaned it to neighbors.
Over the years he has had to learn to navigate his two worlds, to lead instead of being led.
On one trip, his parents had paid 50 cows for him to marry a village girl. When he told them he wanted to find a woman to love and marry here in America, they couldn't understand.
“They don’t date like we do here,” he says.
One of the first times he visited, he stayed up until 2 a.m. listening to people who needed something from him. He wanted to get out. He was frustrated that the money he earned as a certified nursing assistant was not enough to help everyone.
The excitement of returning to his homeland was eclipsed by the sight of people starving and the suffering of those he left behind.
There were never enough mosquito nets. There were never enough needles and rolls of thread. There was never enough medicine.
All eyes were on him. He had made it out. He was expected to help save his family. His village. And his country.
***
Garang couldn’t shake the feeling he had failed another brother he hadn't yet met.
In 2005, he got news from a friend that he had a brother who had been kidnapped and taken to Khartoum as a child slave. He paid several hundred dollars to get then 10-year-old Chol Garang Chol back and found a family to take care of him in Nairobi, only to learn a couple of years later that the boy was being mistreated.
Garang enrolled Chol in a boarding school in Nairobi. Another brother soon followed, then three more. This year he is putting all five of them through school under the condition they earn only As and Bs. If they don’t, he says half-jokingly, they can go live in Kakuma.
“I am hard on them because I want them to have a different way of thinking,” he says.
Chol, a tall and lanky 19-year-old who wants to become a doctor, rented a three-bedroom home in a gated community in Nairobi, where he makes sure his siblings have everything they need. Garang also hired a Kenyan woman to care for them.
The house has a bright green, empty room, ready for when Garang visits. Earlier this year the walls were bare. The brothers were waiting for Garang to send money so they could buy decorations.
Garang pushes his brothers to continue their education, and he pushes himself to continue his. He went to the University of Arizona to study public health and eventually wants to go back to get a master's degree. He juggles three jobs at nursing homes, working 12- and 16-hour days to support his family in South Sudan, his siblings in Nairobi and his son in Tucson.
***
No one tracks where the Lost Boys are now.
Some returned to Sudan. Some got married in Kakuma and started families.
A peace agreement was signed in 2005, and more Lost Boys than with any other refugee group have started non-profits to help rebuild their villages.
Giving back completes the circle that saved him, Garang says.
“In the refugee camp, I didn’t know where my food came from,” he says. “Whoever donated the money to the UN, that’s what made me survive. So why can’t I also contribute and help others?”
The conflict between the North and the South — one of African’s worst civil wars— claimed the lives of more than two million people and displaced four million others.
Of those left behind, more than half live below the poverty line. The entire country only has about 250 paved roads. Only about 1 in 5 people over the age of 15 can read and write.
Garang wants to change that. In 2008, he founded a nonprofit called Ubuntu — an African proverb that represents “the universal bond of sharing and respects that connects all of humanity." Through Ubuntu he tries to go to Kenya every year to restock the clinic and train villagers about hygiene to help stop the spread of disease.
He learned to appreciate medicine and science as a kid in the refugee camp, watching how Red Cross workers mixed salt, sugar and water to rehydrate them. He did the same for fellow refugees.
This year he decided not to go back — in part because he was upset at his mother and brothers, but also due to safety concerns. Thousands have died and more than 1 million people have been displaced in a conflict that broke out in December. About a third of the country’s population will be on the edge of starvation by year's end, UN officials have said.
Two of Garang’s half-brothers have been killed. He sent $2,500 to cover funeral expenses.
***
Kyan, a skinny 5-year-old as shy as his father, is Garang’s life.
“As long as I have the energy,” Garang says, “I’ll do anything for him to have a better life than I had.”
Every week when he is off, he picks the boy up from his ex-girlfriend's house. As soon as Ky, as Garang calls him, climbs on board the black Tacoma with an Arizona Wildcats sticker on the back window, he is the boss.
A trip to Toys-R-Us is almost a given. Ky goes straight to the book aisle.
This is the second year Ky is playing soccer, just as his dad did when he was a kid. When they go to the park, they kick the ball back and forth and invite other children to play. Garang improvises by moving garbage cans to mark the goal posts and Ky expects his father to block every goal. “Goalie, Daddy, goalie,” Ky yells.
“In the camp we also used to play soccer like this,” Garang says as he dribbles the white and green ball. But they used old socks and medical gloves tied up with rubber bands.
“It didn’t bounce as much, but it worked,” he says with a smile.
In his Tucson apartment, a painting of a cheetah in the bush, a picture of thatched roof huts and a frame with the word Ethiopia on it decorate his walls. They are reminders of where he came from — and what he lost.
Almost every day he gets a call from Kenya or South Sudan. His mother is ill. A family home has run out of gas. The friend who was supposed to pay his brothers’ school fees didn’t do it.
"I have parents that are alive and need me. I have siblings that need me. And I have a community that needs me," he says. "So it’s been busy.”
