By Pamela Ethington

When Gabriel Bol Deng was a boy in Sudan, he thought the world was constructed like the hut he lived in, the sky a ceiling and the horizon walls. He thought that if he walked a full day in any direction he would reach the end of the world. Little could he have imagined that the world extended far beyond his vision and that his life would one day take him out into that world and away from his home.

This past June, 43 people from 27 countries became United States citizens in a naturalization ceremony at the Onondaga County Courthouse in Syracuse. Among them was Deng, one of the so-called “Lost Boys of Sudan,” now a senior math major at Le Moyne. The ceremony, attended by more than a dozen members of the Le Moyne community, marked another step on what has been a long journey for Deng from his native Sudan. It’s a journey that’s taken him from his burned-out village and family’s disappearance to the United States, where he’s shared his story with students, churches and national and international conferences.

Born in Gogrial around 1979 (he’s not sure of his exact birth date because records don’t exist), Deng spent his first years living the traditional life of a Dinka tribesman in a large, but close-knit, family.

His mother, Deng recalls, would often send him on errands because of his speed in carrying out her requests. Once, before sending him off, she “picked up some dirt, spit on it to make mud, and said to a neighbor, ‘You watch. My son Bol will be back before this dries.’ And so,” he adds, smiling, “it made me want to try harder, to please her.”

In the evenings, the family would sit around a fire, and it was then that his father would pass on things he felt were important for the children to know. “He told me not to give up and to always try my hardest,” Deng says. “And he told me that it was better to be poor than to have no friends.” His father also spoke of fighting in the country, but to a boy who had never seen or heard a gun, it all seemed very far away.

Until a day in 1987 that would irrevocably change the way he saw the world. Deng was tending to his father’s cattle in a field away from the village when he heard a gunshot and saw four Arab soldiers with guns and swords in the middle of the herd.

“I had never seen anyone with different colored skin before,” Deng recalls, “but as soon as I saw them, I knew these were the people my father had told me about.” He hid in the tall grass and watched as they chased the cattle north. When he could no longer see them, he got up and began to run the 15 miles back to the village. As he got closer, he says, he could see huge plumes of black smoke rising into the air and heard gunfire.

Two village men met him and told him to come with them, that there was nothing left in the village, but, Deng says, “I felt I had to find my father; I had to explain to him what had happened with the cattle.” While Deng was wrestling to get away, the man was shot dead in front of him, and when he looked up, the other had disappeared. Deng went on to search for his father, but upon reaching the village, he says, he found only burning huts and some corpses.

Deng says he then fled into the bush and, fearing lions, climbed up into the first tall tree he saw. He stayed there two days until a large group of people came and rested at the foot of the tree. When he heard them speaking his native language and telling of the same sorts of experiences he had just gone through, he knew it was safe to call out to them. They welcomed him, offering him food, water and sympathy. It was the first time, Deng says, that he had cried since the ordeal began.

For the next four months, Deng walked – barefoot – more than 1,000 miles. The group crossed the Nile, where, he recalls, some were eaten by crocodiles, and the desert, where others died of starvation and thirst.

The refugees organized themselves into makeshift families in order to keep track of the many children. By the time they reached the Dimma refugee camp in Ethiopia, Deng says, four of the five children in his “family” were dead. Deng survived but was hospitalized for several weeks with malaria, malnourishment and infected wounds from insect bites so severe that deep scars still mar both his legs.

Although camp life was a great deal better than what the refugees had previously endured, Deng says, it was still difficult, with one meal a day or sometimes every other day. Many refugees continued to die from malaria, anemia and diarrheal diseases.

It was in that camp, though, in 1989 that Deng first set education as a goal for himself. He remembers the exact moment. Some U.N. personnel had come to the camp, and the visit was a cause for celebration among the refugees, who danced and sang for them.

“I said to myself, ‘What is so special about them? They’re human beings, just like me,’ ” Deng recalls. “And I decided that the thing that made them special was that they were educated. I decided that education must be something good that I should strive for, and I thought if I were educated that someday people would dance for me.”

He had the opportunity to begin that education at age 13, when the refugee camp opened a school. “Bars of charcoal were all I had to use as writing implements,” Deng explains. “We did not have notebooks, so I peeled and divided boxes to use to keep notes in my first-grade class.” He encouraged his friends to study too, telling them that education was now their mother and father; education was what was going to take care of them now.

A year later, because of the changing political landscape in Ethiopia, the refugees were forced at gunpoint to vacate the camp and again found themselves foraging for food and facing wild animals and dangerous river crossings. According to Deng, “My first-grade notebook and Bible were the only reading material I had – they meant everything to me.”

They wandered on the border of Sudan but were attacked by ground troops and bombing raids and finally fled into Kenya to the Kakuma refugee camp, where Deng lived for another nine years. And studied. He grew okra to sell for pencils and for kerosene to use in a study lamp. He became president of the camp’s Young Christian Student Movement and the school debate club.

In the late 1990s, according to Deng, more than 17,000 students in the camp were invited by the United Nations to apply for refugee resettlement in the U.S. Deng was one of the 4,000 chosen and arrived in Syracuse on February 14, 2001, on what he termed “a day of emancipation for me.”

Since coming here, Deng has taken advantage of every opportunity presented to him. “I am grateful when people give me things,” Deng says, “but I don’t look on it as just a handout. I try to take everything that’s given to me and use it to move myself forward.”

After passing the GED, he earned an associate’s degree in mathematics and science at Onondaga Community College. He currently is completing a bachelor’s degree at Le Moyne in math education, with concentrations in philosophy and special education. It’s a natural fit for Deng, who was called “the teacher” in the camps by the other students.

He student taught this year at Onondaga Central and in Syracuse city schools, and in between math lessons, he told the students about his life and experiences.

“They would say to me that if I could get through the things I did, then they could get through their problems,” he recalls. One student who often had been absent from school, he says, came every day for the seven weeks he was there. Deng hopes to continue at Le Moyne following graduation to pursue a master’s degree in teaching.

In the meantime, he has been sharing his story not only at schools and churches but at conferences, including summits sponsored by NetAid and the Kiboko Projects. He was a representative and keynote speaker before a joint conference of the Office of the U.N. Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict and Free the Children in Toronto.

He tells his story, although he finds it painful to repeat, so that people will understand the situation in Sudan, that the current crisis in Darfur is a continuation of fighting between the north and south that began 20 years ago.

“Two and a half million people have died in the war that brought me here,” he says. “That’s not including the 300,000 who have died in Darfur. Had the international community been involved in the 1980s, there might have been no crisis in Darfur.” He tells his story, he says, “because people are still suffering. Children are still hungry and without parents.”

He also hopes his story will serve as an inspiration to others. “There comes a day in everyone’s life when they face depression or a problem,” Deng says. “I hope that they will remember me then and say to themselves, ‘If Gabriel survived, then I am going to make it too.’ ”

As for his future plans, Deng hopes to raise money to build a school in his village. People are starting to return, he says, but a school would mean more would come back. He sees education, which gave him a new life, as key. “Teaching,” he says, “is the best way to make a difference in children’s lives.”

He recently launched his school project with the help of the Center for Peace and Global Studies at Le Moyne. “Gabriel is a remarkable young man,” says Barron Boyd, director of the center. “He responded to the terrible adversity of his early life with a commitment to others, both here and in Sudan. Many talk about it, but Gabriel lives the Jesuit and Le Moyne ideal of service to others. The Le Moyne mission statement calls upon us to ‘promote a more just society,’ and in that spirit we are proud to help Gabriel realize his dream of building a primary school in his home village.”

While the naturalization ceremony in June may have been the end in a long road for some, for Deng it was but another stop, another gift he’s happy to accept but determined to use to move himself forward.

He says he hopes to save enough money to return to Sudan to look for his family, possibly after graduation in May. “I feel like an incomplete person,” he says. “I will not be complete until I find out what happened to them.”

Is he bitter about the road he’s had to travel? “This suffering made me who I am,” he says. “I would not be the same person if I had not gone through this. If I can find my parents, if I can find my family, then I would not mind having gone through this. ”