Gabriel Bol Deng --A Lost Boy Finds His Voice (fragment)

By Colman McCarthy

SYRACUSE NY—Out of Africa he came. In February 200l, Gabriel Bol Deng was one of some 3,800 southern Sudenese refugees accepted into the United States by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Never before had so close-knit a group of immigrants come to America from as persecuted, traumatized and persecuted a background or with so little language, social or economic skills to survive.

Gabriel Bol Deng, born in 1977 in the southern Sudan village of Gogual, was one of those who would come to be known as “the Lost Boys.”

For a time, their stories fascinated much of America as the boys settled in dozens of big cities and small towns. They were the perfect raw material for network television specials and newspaper feature stories. They were innocents abroad, Dinka tribesmen who had never opened a can of food, flushed a toilet, locked or unlocked a door, strapped on a seatbelt, turned on a television, rode an elevator, written a check or much else that is routine in the modern West.