A 'Lost Boy' finds Vermont
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Alex Pial, 29, is one of about 150 Sudanese refugees to settle in the past decade in Vermont. Jeb Wallace-Brodeur/Times Argus |
Toolbox
By KEVIN O’CONNOR
Staff Writer - Published: January 11, 2009
Alex Pial doesn’t know much about Samuel de Champlain, who made history 400 years ago as the first explorer to sail the Vermont lake that now bears his name.
But Pial knows how it feels to discover a new world.
Growing up in the African country of Sudan, the 29-year-old was a child when civil war broke out a quarter-century ago. Separated from his family after militiamen stormed his village in 1987, he became one of at least 20,000 orphaned “Lost Boys” who walked hundreds of miles over dry, desolate plains in search of safety.
Surviving the threat of lions and land mines, Pial fended for himself for a dozen years in refugee camps in the neighboring nations of Ethiopia and Kenya. Then, on Valentine’s Day 2001, he was relocated to Vermont.
Explorers, early settlers and subsequent waves of immigrants have viewed America as a proverbial rainbow leading to a pot of gold. But upon his arrival, Pial saw only white. It wasn’t just all the people as light as he is dark, but something more foreign to him: winter.
“It snow all day,” recalls the young man who grew up speaking Arabic (Sudan’s primary language) and Dinka (his tribal tongue). “You can see out the window — the road’s all covered. I keep on asking my host family, ‘How do you get out?’”
They pointed to a plow truck, something as strange to him as the houseful of electrical appliances he never encountered in an African mud hut. Cold and confused, Pial and his fellow refugees considered leaving.
“We say, ‘Let’s see for a couple of days — it may change.’”
That year it snowed in February. And March. And April.
“Then in May, you could see the flowers.”
For most Vermonters, the word “immigrant” conjures up sepia-toned images of ships crowded with ivory-skinned ancestors chugging past the Statue of Liberty. But of the state’s current foreign-born residents — 22,666 in a population of almost 624,000, according to census estimates — the number from Europe (8,127) now is rivaled by the total from Asia (5,117), Africa (1,029) and Latin America (1,883).
The state’s newest arrivals show a different face and tell a different story.
Out of Africa
Pial, one of about 150 Sudanese refugees to settle in Vermont in the past decade, doesn’t have snapshots or scrapbooks to illustrate his tale. Fleeing his homeland with only the clothes he was wearing, he lacked a birth certificate, passport or other identification. As a result, aides for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees gave him entry papers and a birth date: Jan. 1, 1980.
But Pial has memories. Once he lived with his mother, father, six younger sisters and one younger brother in Yirol, a southern village populated by fellow Dinka tribesmen and their cattle. Up north, Sudan’s Islamic fundamentalist government sought to crack down on political and religious dissent. Pial was about 7 years old when the civil war tore through his hometown in 1987.
“I heard something,” he recalls. “Maybe machine guns.”
The boy ran outside. Militiamen on horseback were stirring up dust, destruction and death. He heard shots and screams. He saw thatched roofs ablaze. Then he felt himself swept up by a flood of fleeing neighbors.
“The crowd kept on building. You don’t know what to do. You just follow where people are going.”
Where was his family?
“I don’t know what happened.”
Nationwide, militiamen would kill an estimated 2 million men and women and enslave countless girls. But they passed over at least 20,000 young males that aid workers, remembering Peter Pan’s circle of orphans, tagged “Lost Boys.”
With little supervision or sense of direction, the youth banded together one by one, dozen by dozen, hundred by hundred. Often barefoot and nearly naked, they followed whoever else was fleeing. They ate dead animals, drank from puddles and otherwise went hungry and thirsty.
“We continue day after day, week after week.”
Three months and 300 miles later, Pial arrived in neighboring Ethiopia. The barren landscape soon teemed with thousands of fellow Sudanese. Aid workers spent years building refugee camps. But with the overthrow of Ethiopia’s government in 1991, Pial and his fellow preteens were forced back home. To get there, they had to swim the Gilo River, a fast-flowing, crocodile-infested tributary of the Nile.
“We lost a lot of people crossing that river.”
Those who didn’t drown in the bloody water died of sickness, starvation, bandit attacks, bombings or bites from snakes, scorpions and malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Pial, walking eight months and another 300 miles, somehow reached the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya in 1992.
The United Nations and other aid organizations set up the enclave to shelter and feed an estimated 85,000 people displaced by fighting or famine in seven surrounding African countries. Amid 100-degree plains and dried riverbeds, refugees found huts and rationed flour, lentils and water.
Pial, for his part, most valued the camp’s school.
“It is education that kept me so focused and gave me tremendous hope. I knew that education was the only way to a safer and better life.”
U.N. teachers had only enough desks for themselves. As many as 100 or more students per class sat on the ground. The older ones shared pencils and paper to study English, math and science. The younger ones did the same writing with sticks in the red dirt.
“It was very hard to focus,” Pial recalls.
But class size was the least of his worries. Refugees constantly waiting in line for something to eat or drink grew frustrated and fought with each other. In response, the United Nations introduced a peace education program in hopes of instilling respect, self-reliance, cooperation, problem solving and “the value of coexistence with limited resources.”
Pial can recite the whole list. He was such a good student, he was asked to teach the program.
“We learned that sharing is a healing process and can be conducted in an already violent and conflict-laden world.”
The year was 1999. A new millennium was about to dawn. For Pial, it promised new hope — and a new home.
'Will it get warm?'
In 2001, Pial was one of about 3,500 Sudanese refugees chosen by the United Nations to relocate to small towns and big cities throughout the United States. Supported by federal funds and local social service agencies, the effort would be the largest resettlement of refugee orphans in history.
Boarding a plane Feb. 12, Pial flew to Nairobi, then Amsterdam and then New York City before arriving in Burlington two days and nine time zones later.
The 21-year-old knew a few things about America — “freedom” is the first one he cites — but nothing of Vermont. Landing at midday, he peered out the plane window. His warm brown homeland was replaced by cold blacktop and white snow.
“I was shocked,” he recalls. “When is it going to be sun? Is it going to melt? Will it get warm?”
So began the flurry of questions. In the movies, refugees embrace a happy ending within two hours. But in real life, the Lost Boys’ past made them reticent about who and what to trust. Why does the supermarket glass slide open when you walk toward it? Where will the bus go if you get on?
“When people come here they are really stressed. There is a lot of debate in your own mind just to learn when you should be worried or not.”
Pial and his peers found help through the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program, a field office of the nonprofit U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and the only agency of its kind in the state. The Colchester-based program helped the Sudanese find apartments and jobs, enroll in school, decipher etiquette and electronics and, if they couldn’t find work, offered up to $458 a month in federal funds for up to eight months.
Pial now lives in a cozy apartment in a century-old brick building in the former Fort Ethan Allen in Colchester. He initially worked as an assistant at the resettlement program, helping fellow Sudanese and refugees from Bosnia and Afghanistan adjust to life in Vermont.
The office staff of 19 welcomes displaced populations from around the world. Through contracts with the U.S. State Department and private donations, it’s now aiding some 500 refugees, with about half recently relocated from Bhutan, Burma or Iraq.
“Our work is to give people the tools to build a new life,” says Judy Scott, the resettlement program’s director. “Alex demonstrates that someone can find refuge here, make the best of the opportunities and then give back to society.”
Achieving that can be a challenge. Immigrants as far back as the Pilgrims have dreamed of plenty, only to discover the difficulties of starting from scratch. How, Pial and his peers ask, do you study in school when you need money and must work? Then again, how do you get a good job without a diploma?
Pial talks of a Sudanese mother who fled her country’s civil war, only to face the culture shock of trying to juggle a family and low-wage job. Back home, it took a village to raise a child. But in America, something called “foster care” also has a say.
Pial doesn’t share any specifics in deference to all involved (client confidentiality prevents the state from commenting), but says he empathizes with the troubled woman’s plight.
“I know the law is law — you have to respect the rules and regulations — but what they went through is a trauma that does not go away. Now we are in good hands, but searching for help and self in a world of unending changes.”
'What can I give'
But as generations dating back to the first Abenakis keep discovering, the rocky soil of the Green Mountains, tackled with toil and tenacity, can sprout new life. Surviving their first winter, Pial and his peers convinced fellow Sudanese from as far as California to join them in Vermont.
“People here are very, very friendly. And you be able to go to schools.”
Pial has taken classes at Community College of Vermont.
“It is a very important goal for me to go to college. Everything relies on your knowledge. Wherever you go, you will be able to do something with it.”
But tuition — along with food, housing and transportation — costs money. Since the fall of 2002, Pial has studied on and off when he’s not working full-time as a caregiver for the local Visiting Nurse Association.
His concern for others extends off the job. He’s on the board of directors of Global Reach Partnerships (a nonprofit group mentoring Sudanese refugees in Vermont), the Association of Africans Living in Vermont and the Vermont Association of Professional Care Providers. In the past, he also volunteered with the New Sudan Education Initiative, a Chittenden County-based group working to build schools back in his homeland.
Ask why he tackles so much and his girlfriend, Victoria — a fellow Sudanese who immigrated in 2004 — says she, too, wants to know.
“I do it,” he replies, “because people need help.”
Pial is committed to public service. He was 26 when he became one of the first in his group to become a U.S. citizen. After his July 2006 naturalization ceremony, he immediately registered to vote.
Since then, he has spoken at a “Faces Behind Human Rights” symposium at Middlebury College; with former Gov. Madeleine Kunin at a Burlington rally for Darfur (another war-torn region of Sudan); and with Dave Eggers, author of the best-selling Lost Boy biography “What Is the What,” at Ohio’s Miami University. He also posed for photographer Ned Castle’s recent show on local refugees at Middlebury’s Vermont Folklife Center.
“The thing here is — why people are struggling with each other — it’s just a matter of understanding and fear,” he told Castle. “A human being is a human being. We are the same — what differs for us is only the culture.”
Visit Pial’s apartment and you’ll see maps of Africa hung above his American television and stereo system.
“You have to keep your originality,” he tells his fellow refugees. “If you have anything to share, you don’t need to keep it to yourself. When you get into the community you can say, ‘I’m a stranger; how can I make a friendship; how can I get the social life; how can I get integrated into the community?’ The best way is to speak up. Otherwise, nobody will know what I have; nobody will know how much I knew; nobody will know what I need — what kind of help I need, or what can I give.”
Finding a future
While Darfur endures war, southern Sudan now enjoys a fragile peace — spurring Pial to try to raise money for a return visit.
“I want to look for my family,” he says simply.
Pial still doesn’t know what happened to his parents or siblings but is determined to find out. That elicits respect from new friends like Rachel Hutchins, a resettlement program volunteer whose Charlotte family hosted him upon his arrival.
“It was quite a stormy day when he came, and they had to learn a lot,” Hutchins recalls. “These young men could have come here and just enjoyed, but they’re very considerate about giving back. All the Sudanese are very giving, loving people. It’s a good feeling to know they’re now safe.”
Pial’s happy ending, like that of many immigrant stories, masks the full horror and sadness that sparked the journey.
“I cried and cried and cried,” he says. “At the end, I don’t have any tears anymore. What can I do? I just put the dream that one day I will be able to see them. The road is not as smooth all the time, but you can go through the bombs. If you are flying in the air, there’s no road but still sometime when there’s a cloud or a mountain, the plane goes up and down. Same thing with a human being. You can shape yourself, or somebody can help you. Don’t look backward, you have to look forward. Live for the new life. That’s how you survive.”
Some choose to forget the past. Pial considers it a foundation.
“My dream for my future career is to work with people from diverse cultures to help them deal with their problems because of past experiences,” he writes on Global Reach Partnerships’ Web site. “I have had many such experiences and I feel I am well-equipped to help others.”
As Inauguration Day approaches, Pial also draws inspiration from Barack Obama — but not because he’s about to become the nation’s first black commander in chief.
“I cannot believe somebody that age can become president. He’s showing the next generation they will be able to lead. It reminds me I can be somebody. And I’m seeing someday my child, if he wants, can run for high position, for president.”
Pial’s no longer a “Lost Boy.” He’s a man who has found his future.
Contact Kevin O’Connor at kevin.oconnor@rutlandherald.com.