The Lost Daughter: A Memoir

by Mary Williams

  Then, like a kiss from a prince, my trance was broken by two very interesting e-mails. The first came when I began having trouble with my laptop and Andy allowed me to use his computer to check my e-mails. He failed to close his e-mail account before I got on, and an exchange between him and a female caught my attention. They talked of twisted bed sheets and sweet kisses. Reading the explicit back-and-forth of their romantic romp made me realize that it had been months since Andy and I had been intimate. An intimacy I had not missed.

  I was surprised that I was not angered by proof of Andy’s infidelity. While we were far from satisfied with each other, we got along reasonably well and rarely fought. I didn’t know how to break up with someone I was not fighting with and I wasn’t the type to create drama where there was none. So I saw these steamy e-mails as a lifeline out of my dead-end relationship. I confronted Andy with the e-mails and, rather than admit to infidelity, he tried to make me the bad guy. His response was indignation at my invasion of his privacy. It was a masterful performance. But I stuck to my guns and proposed that we break off our engagement. Next came the tears. From him. While I wanted to end the entire relationship then and there, he convinced me to give the relationship more time. I knew Andy didn’t have the money to move out so I suggested he move to another bedroom while he saved money to move out, and I returned his engagement ring.

  We continued to live together but I no longer felt obligated to subjugate myself to him. I began to read again. To dream again. I read a book by Bill Bryson called A Walk in the Woods, about hiking the Appalachian Trail. I began to fantasize about walking the trail myself. I bought camping equipment, stashing it away in my downstairs office, and went on long training hikes at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park on the weekends.

  Things got more interesting at work too. Over the past few months I’d become increasingly dissatisfied. It was a familiar cycle. I’d come onto a new job excited, only to work myself into the ground and take out my anger and frustration on my fellow co-workers. I went from being one of the most hardworking and optimistic folks in the office to a total grump full of nothing but criticism for everyone and everything. Things got so bad my boss told me she was considering letting me go. But before she could, I got an e-mail that changed everything.

  One day in the summer of 2001, a coworker sent me an article in The New York Times Magazine about a group of refugees dubbed the Lost Boys of Sudan. The Lost Boys were a group of nearly twenty thousand Sudanese children orphaned during the second Sudanese civil war, which began in 1983. By 2001, with no end to the war in sight, the U.S. government was in the process of resettling about thirty-eight hundred Lost Boys in over thirty-eight cities in the U.S. Atlanta alone was getting three hundred Lost Boys. Many would be resettled by my office.

  Like many people across the country, I was blown away by their story. While still children, these kids walked over a thousand miles through the wilds of Africa in search of safety. Many would die of starvation and be attacked by wild animals and soldiers along the way. They’d eventually turn up in a refugee camp in Kenya, where they’d spend the next decade waiting for an end to Africa’s longest running civil war.

  A few weeks after I’d read the article, a group of them were standing in my office. I did not expect that these young men would be so poised and hopeful. They had many questions about school. All had hopes of going to college and returning to Sudan to rebuild their country. Most of the refugees I’d worked with were individuals and families primarily looking to rebuild their lives. But these so-called Lost Boys were already talking about rebuilding their country.

  They were tall and rail-thin, with clothes hanging from them like scarecrows. Their skin made me think of a line from the James Weldon Johnson poem “The Creation”: “Blacker than a hundred midnights / Down in a cypress swamp.” When they came into my office in small groups, they were polite and often deferred to some predesignated leader among them who asked most of the questions, which always centered on school.

  I knew from having lived in Africa how the young people there dream of being educated like other kids dream of owning the latest sneakers or computer game. And unlike in the States, teachers are held in high regard. It took a while but my colleagues and I eventually convinced them that school could wait until we got them decent housing and jobs.

  Over the next few weeks, more and more Lost Boys came through my door and shared their stories with me. One young man named Abraham talked of seeing his village burned by the horseback-riding Muslim mujahideen soldiers from the north. John talked of how frightened he was to have to walk at night to avoid the soldiers. He walked during the day anyway because he was more afraid of the soldiers than of Africa’s big predators, which are most active at night. Emmanuel told me he lost friends when they were forced to cross a crocodile-infested river. Another spoke of being so thirsty he drank his own urine.

  They also had inspiring stories as well. Joseph told me about the songs they sang to one another to keep their spirits up on the march. How they made little animals out of mud to keep the smaller boys entertained. Stories about an aid worker in the refugee camp who would bribe the boys with cookies to get them to come to school when longing for their lost parents made them too weary to leave their shelter some days. They often used a proverb to explain to me how they felt about the war in their country: “When two elephants fight, only the grass suffers.” And when I asked one young man if they were called Lost Boys in the refugee camp, he told me, “No. We’re not lost, because God knows where we are. In the camps, the elders called us the seeds.”

  “Why were you called the seeds?”

  “Because like seeds we are expected to reach fertile soil. And now that we have, we must plant ourselves and grow strong. Then we must bear fruit. We must bear fruit for our country.”

  I was in awe of these young men. I wanted to do everything in my power to make sure they got more than the necessities. I wanted to help fulfill the hopes the elders back in the refugee camp had for them. So, soon after meeting the Lost Boys, I quit my job at the IRC and started the Lost Boys Foundation. With a grant from the Fonda Family Foundation I hired two women who had been mentoring Lost Boys and rented several small offices from my mom in the same building that housed her teen pregnancy prevention organization, GCAPP.

  I created the Lost Boys Foundation to raise awareness about the plight of refugee children, the war in Sudan and as a vehicle to help secure scholarships, volunteer support and other needed resources for the guys. My ultimate goal was to build up the organization, and when the guys had gone through college, pass it on to them as a platform for them to help bring about change in Sudan. The worst thing I could envision was for these young men to survive all the horrors of war only to fall through the cracks in America.

  Lucky for us there was a great deal of interest in their story. In fact, unbeknownst to them their greatest asset would be their stories. Their stories and their resilience. In a world where too many turn to drugs and alcohol and other self-destructive vices to lessen the pain of past traumas, here were the Lost Boys who somehow were able to look forward rather than backward. Local and national media were on the story, and I was optimistic that I would be able to quickly raise more funds for scholarships. Then everything changed on September 11, 2001.

  I was at work on Tuesday morning prepping a young man acting as a spokesperson for the Lost Boys for a meeting I had arranged at Morehouse College, when I heard about the first plane hitting one of the towers. Someone turned a television on and I saw the second plane hit. At the first plane I thought, What a devastating tragedy. When the second plane hit I knew we were at war. I was stunned. I didn’t know if we should go to our meeting. I asked Abraham what he thought. He looked at me puzzled and said, “Why would you let this stop our work? They have the towers, don’t let them have this.” That simple truth got me mobilized and off we went.

  When we entered the building at Morehouse, I remember the receptionist was crying but sh
e led us to the boardroom where our meeting would take place. To my surprise, everyone showed. Before we began, we said a prayer for the victims of the attack and in a solemn mood proceeded with our meeting. I gave my pitch requesting that the school match students to Lost Boys for mentoring and tutoring. They listened. The meeting ended early when people began to excuse themselves. They were interested in getting to their TVs as more information was coming in about the attacks. Unbelievably, the towers were collapsing.

  Shortly after 9/11, another Lost Boy would arrive. His name was Valentino Achak Deng. He was scheduled to come to the States on 9/11. His flight was canceled. He got another flight a few days later. He told me he was afraid he would not be welcomed into America after what happened. Then he felt saddened that war had followed him all the way from Africa.

  Valentino was particularly bright and, I soon learned, an excellent public speaker. I recruited him often to speak to church groups and schoolchildren about their story, and he never left a single person unmoved and unwilling to support us.

  But a group of refugees from Sudan were no longer on the minds of a nation mourning their dead and looking for ways to help support the victims and their families. I thought our cause was lost, but I underestimated the generosity of Americans. There were many people who still wanted to support us, even in the midst of a national tragedy.

  So while we continued to get support in the form of volunteers and donations, we still had to think of more creative ways to raise awareness and funds for the Lost Boys cause. So I reached out to the writer of a book I was reading about a young man who lost his parents to cancer and takes on the responsibility of raising his younger brother. The story struck me as a westernized version of the Lost Boys’ tale. The book was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the author Dave Eggers.

  I sent him a letter via his publisher asking him if he’d heard the story of the Lost Boys and if he’d be interested in writing a story about them. Dave responded and graciously agreed to come to Atlanta to meet with us. I invited him to attend a birthday party. A very large birthday party. Since many of the young men had no record of when they were born, they were all assigned the birth date of January 1 by U.S. Immigration.

  So I invited Dave to attend a birthday party for three hundred Lost Boys at Philips Arena. The food and gifts were donated. My gifts to the guys, with help from Ted, were tickets for all of them to attend a professional basketball game and a surprise visit from a special guest: Sudan-born basketball player Manute Bol.

  The boys crowded into the large room with thirty-foot ceilings and a wall of glass overlooking downtown Atlanta. They were dressed in their finest, hugging and slapping the backs of their brothers in greeting. The volunteers who had driven them were mostly upper-middle-class churchgoers, beaming at their adopted sons with maternal pride.

  I’d recruited a DJ to play the latest rap and pop hits. There was an awkward moment when the boys circled the dance floor but didn’t dance. There were no girls for them to dance with, I realized. Then all at once they paired up and hit the dance floor, grooving to Jay-Z’s “Parking Lot Pimpin’.”

  They were joyous, tossed about by flow and beats, arms high and one foot tap, tap, tapping, thin hips swaying side to side. The volunteers stood around the dance floor clapping and cheering them on. When I thought they couldn’t get any happier, Manute Bol entered the room. At 7-foot-6, he’s hard to miss. Manute played for two colleges and four NBA teams over his career, where his shot-blocking ability was considered among the best in the history of professional basketball. Fame and money, however, did not make him forget where he came from.

  Bol was a true activist who spent millions of his own money supporting organizations working for reconciliation and education in Sudan. Many of the boys knew him from the many visits he made to refugee camps. He gathered them all around him, and in the Dinka language gave, from what I could tell, a very heartfelt speech that I assumed was probably about staying focused on school and staying away from fast women and drugs.

  Dave hung back, skirting the perimeter of the party with a little pen and pad taking notes. He’s kind of a shy fellow with wild curly hair. I introduced him to Manute and Valentino. I hoped that he would use Valentino as the subject of a written piece. Dave and Val hit it off, and Dave did eventually write a book based on Valentino’s life. They worked closely together to create What Is the What.

  For a while I had something to be excited about. We were getting media attention from the Oprah Winfrey Show, World News Tonight, People magazine and other local and national media. We hosted a large gathering on Thanksgiving for the guys. I received a small donation from Angelina Jolie. Several of our guys were cast in films. I got a young man a speaking part in the Dustin Hoffman film I Heart Huckabees, and a volunteer managed to get several guys cast as extras in the Bruce Willis film Tears of the Sun. I was also working closely with Hollywood producer Robert Newmyer, who was interested in developing the story of the Lost Boys for the big screen. We had scholarships for several guys at a reputable junior college and volunteers lining up to help. Churches and school groups regularly requested talks. The only thing we didn’t have was the tons of cash I thought we’d have after more than a year of nonstop work. And other problems were coming I never even suspected.

  The Lost Boys community was not as united as I had once thought. From the very beginning, I had unknowingly been stepping on toes. Though the guys were all Sudanese, tribal divisions existed that I was not aware of. So when one guy got a movie part over another, the guys from a different tribe got their feathers ruffled. The same thing applied when someone got a scholarship, or sat next to me at a basketball game, or became the subject of a book.

  There was a rift growing between several groups of Lost Boys. And I was becoming a target of intense scrutiny, accused of favoring one tribe over another and failing to meet the needs of all three hundred guys. Volunteers were pulled into the growing feud, as well as a local reporter who wrote a negative piece about the foundation. My staff and I defended ourselves and held several group meetings in order to answer questions and resolve issues. But the situation had gotten too far out of hand. Feuds between volunteers and one of my staff became personal, and it heralded the beginning of the end. My dear friend Valentino finally told me he had been targeted for a while. He and many other young men remained my staunch supporters, but in the end I got tired of being criticized by people I’d been trying to help and shut down the foundation.

  But my work was not in vain. I had succeeded in helping a Sudanese become powerful enough to be an agent of change in his own country. The book Dave Eggers wrote about Valentino became a best-seller and Dave donated the proceeds to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, a nonprofit working to increase access to education in post-conflict South Sudan by building schools, libraries, teacher-training institutes and community centers. Like Manute Bol before him, Val travels the world speaking on behalf of Sudan.

  I was exhausted by my experience with the Lost Boys. I decided that my desire to save people was really my misdirected desire to save myself. I didn’t know what to do with this revelation. I did know that I needed to get out of social services. I briefly took a position as the director of community development for the Atlanta hockey team, the Thrashers. I had become a workaholic and miserable, which made me very unpleasant to live and work with. I was quick to anger and overly sensitive to criticism. I began to get into tiffs with people at work over the smallest things: my missing stapler; So-and-So looked at me sideways; So-and-So left me waiting for ten minutes. I stopped greeting or even making eye contact with people I deemed my enemies. Slowly I began to isolate myself from everyone, including my family. Even the Lost Boys who I’d remained friends with were getting on my nerves. I was thirty-four and I knew I had to make a change, and soon. I didn’t know what I needed to get me out of my rut, only that it had to be huge. I needed a new series of challenges to help me find the headstrong, happy person I had once been.

&
nbsp; CHAPTER 13

  CONVENTIONAL WISDOM would have it that it’s unwise for a woman in her late thirties to walk away from a well-paying job and the prospect of marriage in order to hike the Appalachian Trail. But I did that, all of that. I told Andy we were over and moved him out of the house after months of him living in the spare room. The breakup was remarkably easy. We had months to process the end and we both knew it wasn’t working. He left peaceably, and the sight of that humongous TV leaving my house brought an enormous sense of well-being. After Andy left, I quit my job, sold my house, packed a backpack and left.

  The Appalachian Trail, or AT, is to many American hikers what Everest is to climbers: it’s the thing they must do if they want to be taken seriously. I wanted to become what they call a “through hiker”—someone who does the whole trail in one season, all 2,175 miles of it, from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, Maine. Thousands attempt it every year but only one in four succeeds. The hike usually takes about six months.

  My family was cautiously supportive. I assured them that I knew what I was doing. I had, after all, traveled extensively and was no stranger to adventure. Apart from living in Morocco and Tanzania, I’d studied outdoor leadership and gone on several extended expeditions, including a month-long trek in the New Mexican backcountry and a cross-country bicycle ride. I assured them I could handle any of the possible ailments that might await me: septic blisters, giardiasis, injuries sustained in falls, the potentially disabling symptoms of Lyme disease and the pernicious effects of boredom and loneliness.

  The afternoon before I planned to begin my hike, I walked into the office of a man I’ll call Mr. North Georgia. Mr. North was a friend of Ted’s and, given he lived near the trailhead, was familiar with the many things that could go wrong for hikers. Mr. North Georgia was a good ol’ boy/country millionaire who made his money in real estate. He had the long, lanky body of Jimmy Stewart and a sticky Southern drawl that conjured mint juleps on the veranda of an antebellum mansion.