Jacob Atem: One of Sudan’s ‘lost boys’ is now working toward Ph.D. at University of Florida
5 min ready Morgan Watkins
Source: Gainesville Florida – Correspondent
Published: Saturday, March 3, 2012 at 7:57 p.m.
It was a beautiful day with no rain when Jacob Atem became a lost boy.
Atem was watching the cows graze along the banks of the Nile River when he heard the popping. He and his cousin, 14-year-old Michael Atem, saw smoke rising from their southern Sudanese village of Maar. The sound of gunshots continued.
They fled to the forest in fear, becoming two of the more than 20,000 lost boys of Sudan orphaned in the nation’s second civil war.
Twenty years later, Atem hasn’t forgotten the village he left.
He is 26 now, pursuing a Ph.D. in health services research and management and policy at the University of Florida.
He co-founded the Southern Sudan Health Care Organization, which built the first health clinic in Maar.
But with about five weeks to raise at least $12,000, Atem and his nonprofit are struggling to ship medical supplies to the clinic.
* * *
Knowing that the enemy troops that attacked their village would capture or kill them on sight, Atem and Michael did the only thing they could: they walked.
For months, Atem walked barefoot with a growing group of boys toward what they hoped would be a safe haven — Ethiopia.
When Atem tired, Michael carried him.
They drank urine when they had no water and ate mud when they had no food.
Malnutrition and fatigue set in.
“You go to sleep with your friends, and then you wake up in the middle of the night and four of them are not waking up,” Atem said.
Thousands of lost boys died trying to reach refuge, but Atem was one of 3,800 who were brought to the U.S. in 2001, according to the website for the Alliance for the Lost Boys of Sudan, a nonprofit organization.
He found a safer future in America, but wanted to help the people he had left behind.
“Who am I to just be blessed and not be killed when thousands of lost boys have died?” he said.
In 2008, he founded the Southern Sudan Health Care Organization with Lual Awan, another lost boy from Maar. Their goal was to establish the first health clinic there, which they achieved in January 2012. Villagers participated in developing the clinic, which was funded by about $800,000 in donations.
“We knew that health care was desperately needed in the village because there was nothing at all,” Awan, 30, said.
* * *
Atem awoke to boys screaming.
“Lion!”
Panicked, Atem scrambled to his feet.
As he bolted for the bushes, he ran into a branch that cut through his leg. He saw bone.
Despite his injury, the march to Ethiopia went on.
Death circled like a vulture.
“People would sit down like they were going to get back up, but they didn’t,” he said. “They just died right there.”
When they reached Ethiopia, their bodies had withered from starvation and malnutrition.
“We were nothing but skeletons,” Atem said. “Our muscles disappeared before our eyes, and we could only see skin and bones.”
Atem spent a couple of years in a refugee camp, where he was baptized as a Christian and exchanged his first name, Thon, for Jacob.
But when Ethiopia’s own civil war worsened in 1991, the government forced them back across the border.
The boys had to cross the Gilo River as they returned to Sudan. Some drowned, while others were eaten by crocodiles or shot by enemy troops, he said.
They began walking again, this time toward Kenya.
Atem spent several years in a refugee camp there before he was brought to the U.S. at 15 years old.
It had been almost a decade since he’d run from his burning village.
* * *
While the clinic Atem envisioned has been built, making it operational is a challenge hindered by a lack of funding.
The nonprofit has raised the money needed to ship medical supplies to Kenya, but it can’t afford the second leg of the trip.
For a discount price of $15,000, Atem’s organization had a 40-foot container packed with scalpels, syringes and other donated supplies worth about $500,000 shipped Wednesday by the Hospital Sisters Mission Outreach, another nonprofit, from Springfield, Ill., to Mombasa, Kenya.
The container should arrive on April 8, and Atem wants to send it immediately to Juba and then to Maar.
He will arrive in Juba on April 22 with a team of volunteers who will travel from South Sudan’s capital to Maar to provide medical treatment. But without supplies, aid will be impossible.
“If we don’t have enough money and the container is still in Mombasa due to the lack of funds, it would totally be a disaster,” he said.
The organization needs to raise between $12,000 and $13,000 before April 8 to ship the supplies in time. Atem had expected it to cost about $3,000, but the price is higher because a lack of roads makes shipment difficult.
People can visit the organization’s website, www.sshco.org, to donate.
The nonprofit has also entered the Dell Social Innovation Challenge with the hope of winning up to $50,000. People can vote for the organization at www.dellchallenge.org.
Dr. Tim Page, who met Atem in Michigan, will join him at the Maar clinic in April. He is impressed with Atem’s dedication.
“He’s definitely committed and driven to see this project through,” he said. “He works tirelessly on it.”
Atem plans to graduate in a few years. Afterward, he wants to expand the Maar clinic and create similar ones in other villages.
Although the nonprofit faces fundraising challenges, Atem trusts it will get the clinic running. He believes God helped him reach the U.S., which is why he now has an opportunity to help his community in Maar.
After spending years as a lost boy, this is the path he has chosen.
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