Fighting broke out early in the morning in his village in southern Sudan. Without food, water or family, he ran for three weeks through barren desert to find safety in an Ethiopian refugee camp.
He was nine years old.
Now 30 and a senior in economics, Thon Majak Deng looks like any other San José State student, sporting a San José Sharks jacket and carrying a copy of The Quiet American. But the story of how he got here is both humbling and remarkable.
"I still remember that morning," he says. "My sister came running into my room and said, 'Thon, Thon wake up! We need to go!' Then I realized there was shooting and bombing going on, and people running everywhere in town."
His sister left him with a woman from town and promised to return with a car and her husband, headmaster of the town's school. But the fighting was getting closer and everyone was fleeing. The woman taking care of Deng began to run. He followed.
"After running for about 30 minutes, a Toyota came by and it stopped. My sister jumped out of the car to take her daughter, who was about my age and also running in the crowd, and left me there," recalls Deng, his voice drifting off. "I looked around and there was nobody, so I kept running."
One of thousands of "lost boys" displaced by civil war in Sudan, Deng fled to Ethiopia in 1987. He walked among lions and hyenas at night to avoid the brutality of the sun. He ate mud and drank water only when he was lucky enough to find them. He walked with strangers toward a country he'd never seen, not knowing where he would sleep or what the next day would bring.
"It was difficult to survive," he says of what would be the first of many uncertain journeys. "There was no food. There were many people like me, separated from family by the war, traveling east to where there was no sound of guns."
The sound of guns has filled Sudan's countryside for much of the last half century. Dominated by Islamic military regimes since gaining independence from Britain in 1956, Sudan's two civil wars were rooted in the Muslim north's social, political and economic oppression of the mostly non-Muslim south. More than two million have been reported dead and at least another four million have been displaced.
Deng was among many refugees displaced repeatedly. War between Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea forced thousands of children out of Ethiopia's United Nations- and American Red Cross-supported camps back to Sudan. "There were about 22,000 boys of 8, 9 and 10, and some girls without parents," recalls Deng. "When we returned to Sudan, only 17,000 arrived. Nobody knows what happened to the rest of them. Because there was intense fighting there, maybe some were shot in the crossfire."
Having lived in the Ethiopian camp for four years, Deng found himself back in Sudan, again supported by the United Nations, but in more precarious circumstances. "Sudan is Sudan," he says, which means the government had access to the refugees. Government forces mobilized and attacked the town where Deng and the others had been living for just eight months.
At 13, Deng had to run again.
"We spent three months walking in the desert toward Kenya," he says. "You can't walk in the winter because it rains too much. The only safe time is summer, which makes the desert hot and dry, but it's better because there are no difficulties with mosquitoes."
Deng reached the Kakuma Refugee Camp in northern Kenya where he would stay for nine years. Although he was able to attend school for the first time and complete high school, camp restrictions and inadequate food rations made every day a struggle for survival.
"Life in the Kenyan camp was not equal to how Kenyans lived," says Deng, who likened conditions to those in a concentration camp. "Many things were lacking; we were not allowed to leave the camp and the food rations were not enough. Sometimes I went to school with hunger because I hadn't eaten the night before."
Every 15 days, each person was given one kilogram of corn -- which contains roughly the number of calories an average American eats in two days. Sometimes people would finish their rations within five days and have to wait 10 days for the next ration to come. Teams of 15 would cook and share one kilogram of corn each day to avoid starvation.
"It was a hardship," says Deng. "At least it was safe in the camp because there were no attacks." Trading the uncertainty of living as a target in southern Sudan for near-starvation, Deng and thousands like him endured unimaginable trials, losing their childhoods in an adult war. Resettlement was a slow process, with the first group of boys leaving for the United States in 2001. For Deng, a grown man of 23, moving to America meant yet another unpredictable journey.
If coming to the United States was fraught with uncertainty, it was also charged with possibility. Getting to what is now his last semester at San José State has brought more than his share of challenges, but Deng doesn't dwell on the negative. "Sometimes God does what you don't know," says Deng of his experiences since arriving in San José. "If you look around, you see all different kinds of people and you find that there are other people like you. Why not you, if other people can make it? It's a good hope I see."
Deng's indomitable spirit has carried him through each day since fleeing the attack on his village in Sudan. Lydia Ortega, chair of SJSU's Department of Economics and Deng's academic advisor, wanted more for him than to live day by day. At their first meeting, she asked about his career goals and plans, but didn't make any headway.
"All of a sudden it occurred to me that the concept of planning for the future was foreign to him," says Ortega. "For much of his life, he just had to think every day about how not to be dead that day."
Yet Deng has built a future taking things one day at a time. When support from Catholic Charities expired just three months after arriving in the U.S., he found a job at Fry's Electronics and an apartment to share with two other Sudanese refugees. When the job and the apartment didn't work out, he accepted lodging from Fr. Noel Seneviratne, a retired priest.
"They are very determined," says Seneviratne of Deng and the two others who lived in an annex to his San José home. "They always wanted to somehow better themselves."
After hosting the young men for nearly three years, Seneviratne worked with the Santa Clara County Housing Authority to get Deng and his roommates the apartment where they currently live. Deng focused on getting an education, beginning first at DeAnza College and then transferring to San José State in 2005.
"I think Thon has a strong education," says Ortega. "But he also has wisdom from his experiences and an appreciation for life that will take him far."
Along with wisdom beyond his years, Deng has an unwavering sense of duty to those still in Sudan -- to family and friends he lost decades ago. In December 2007, Deng, a freshly minted U.S. citizen, traveled through Sudan's capitol in the heart of the Muslim- dominated north to go home. After arriving in Juba, a city in southern Sudan, a six-hour bus ride over dusty, unpaved roads returned Deng to his village in Bor County for the first time in 20 years.
"It was hard, it was sad, it was joyful," says Deng about reuniting with sisters Achieu and Ayen, and brother Deng Majak Deng. "I felt bad that my own brother and sisters didn't recognize me, being away all that time."
During the month-long stay, Deng took in the life he left behind, visiting family in simple homes made of mud and straw, watching boys fish in a shallow tributary of the Nile River, and walking among "cattle camps" and farms. Seeing the tremendous needs of his village -- no electricity, no sanitary drinking water, inadequate medical facilities, and few schools or supplies for hundreds of thousands of children -- was overwhelming for Deng.
How does one man help hundreds of thousands when he can't even afford an operation to remove bullets from his sister's back and knee, wounds left untreated since the war?
He doesn't do it alone. In 2005, Deng co-founded Coalition of the Willing (COW), a non-profit that raises funds and awareness about ongoing needs in southern Sudan. The 2005 peace agreement between northern and southern Sudan gave the south autonomy for six years, and stipulates that the south will vote for either unity or independence in 2011. With the world's eyes on the devastation in the Darfur region in the west, Deng worries about the future of southern Sudan during this unstable time.
"To think about the future with hope might bring the good sense that people shouldn't go back to war again," he says. "But many people want to be independent from the north, so there's hope on one side and doubt about what's going to happen."
Miles away from home, Deng's heart is in Sudan. He works as COW's treasurer. He sends money he earns working part-time at FedEx Kinko's to Sudan so his niece and cousins can go to school. And he will do much more.
"I have to pay back the people who paid for the life I have, my education," he says. "I will pay back my debt by doing good for the people who need it most. The more we stand up -- if we do good for other people, we will be successful."
-- Jody Ulate '05
Help Deng and Coalition of the Willing get assistance to southern Sudan.
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