A 'Lost Boy of Sudan' Dreams of Medical School

April 30, 2010— -- John Kuai works hard to come up with the money for school tuition. He works the overnight shift at a local cigar factory in Jacksonville, Fla. After sleeping for a few hours, he heads to his biology, chemistry and physics classes at the University of North Florida, where he is a junior.

Kuai has a calm presence and a quiet voice with a heavy accent. He's bald with a thin mustache, and he leans forward when he talks. Photographs and certificates boasting of his educational achievements line the walls of the bedroom in his apartment. Kuai smiles in his Florida Community College graduation pictures as he receives his associate's degree.

And he isn't done yet. He is now studying to get into medical school so he can give back to the land he was forced to leave behind: southern Sudan.

In 1987, when he was just 8 years old, Sudanese militants from northern Sudan attacked his village, destroying his family. His father, a farmer, was killed in front of him. Other friends and relatives were also murdered. He fled, and Kuai said God gave him the hope to keep walking.

"I was so devastated," Kuai said. "It was the first experience of loss in my life."

Kuai is one of the 3,800 so-called Lost Boys of Sudan who came to America as survivors of Africa's longest civil war, which began in 1955 and ended with an uneasy peace pact between north and south in 2005. Economic, political and religious divisions still plague the country. A recent election was riddled with fraud, increasing tension within the country's borders, reported The New York Times.

The civil war killed more than 2 million people and displaced another 4 million, according to the U.S. State Department.

The Lost Boys of Sudan, a name given by aid workers after the characters in "Peter Pan," lost their families and escaped their attacked villages. Some were only 5 years old. Kuai and the other Lost Boys who banded together were from different villages and did not even speak the same language. They traveled for months together, staving off starvation, wild animals and disease as they tried to find safety.

If boys fell ill, they relied on others to take care of them.

"If you didn't have a close friend to carry you, they just left you by the side of the road," Kuai said. "They ended up dying. That was really a big tragedy."

He and the boys he traveled with were among 30,000 children escaping their villages in southern Sudan. Kuai arrived in Ethiopia and stayed there with the boys he traveled with for four years, where many died from cholera, malaria and diarrhea -- all curable diseases.

Each night in the refugee camp, young volunteers would lay the bodies of children who died on the side of the road. Kuai was one of these volunteers.

"When we went to Ethiopia, we didn't have any elders, so it was our responsibility to bury our own friends and brothers that had lost their lives," he said.

Then civil war broke out in Ethiopia, and Kuai was forced out of the country. It was 1991, and in order to escape Ethiopian rebels and get back to Sudan, he had to swim the Gilo River.

It had been four years since he fled his home, and crossing the river would turn out to be one of the more harrowing experiences of his life.

As the boys swam, Kuai said gunfire rained down upon them. Hippos and crocodiles swarmed the water as boys fell into the strong current, trying to escape the bullets.

"When I looked back, I saw so many children that were crying and waving for help," Kuai said, "so I had the courage to come back and do anything necessary."

Kuai said he grabbed a tree log and told others to hold on in the water. He saved five boys. Thousands of others drowned as the river ran red.

"Even up to now, I sometimes ask myself, 'Why did I live?'" Kuai said. "And the answer that usually comes to my mind is that maybe I lived to tell this story to the world."

After surviving the Gilo River, he eventually found his way to Kenya's Kakuma Refugee Camp.

"I hoped that there would be a better day," Kuai said, "and that was God that gave me the inner hope that I found."

In 2001, about 3,800 Lost Boys, including Kuai, were granted refugee status in the U.S. and about 135 settled down in Jacksonville.