The Lost Daughter: A Memoir (17 page)

Like many people across the country, I was blown away by their story. While still children, these kids walked over a thousand miles through the wilds of Africa in search of safety. Many would die of starvation and be attacked by wild animals and soldiers along the way. They’d eventually turn up in a refugee camp in Kenya, where they’d spend the next decade waiting for an end to Africa’s longest running civil war.

A few weeks after I’d read the article, a group of them were standing in my office. I did not expect that these young men would be so poised and hopeful. They had many questions about school. All had hopes of going to college and returning to Sudan to rebuild their country. Most of the refugees I’d worked with were individuals and families primarily looking to rebuild their lives. But these so-called Lost Boys were already talking about rebuilding their country.

They were tall and rail-thin, with clothes hanging from them like scarecrows. Their skin made me think of a line from the James Weldon Johnson poem “The Creation”: “Blacker than a hundred midnights / Down in a cypress swamp.” When they came into my office in small groups, they were polite and often deferred to some predesignated leader among them who asked most of the questions, which always centered on school.

I knew from having lived in Africa how the young people there dream of being educated like other kids dream of owning the latest sneakers or computer game. And unlike in the States, teachers are held in high regard. It took a while but my colleagues and I eventually convinced them that school could wait until we got them decent housing and jobs.

Over the next few weeks, more and more Lost Boys came through my door and shared their stories with me. One young man named Abraham talked of seeing his village burned by the horseback-riding Muslim
mujahideen
soldiers from the north. John talked of how frightened he was to have to walk at night to avoid the soldiers. He walked during the day anyway because he was more afraid of the soldiers than of Africa’s big predators, which are most active at night. Emmanuel told me he lost friends when they were forced to cross a crocodile-infested river. Another spoke of being so thirsty he drank his own urine.

They also had inspiring stories as well. Joseph told me about the songs they sang to one another to keep their spirits up on the march. How they made little animals out of mud to keep the smaller boys entertained. Stories about an aid worker in the refugee camp who would bribe the boys with cookies to get them to come to school when longing for their lost parents made them too weary to leave their shelter some days. They often used a proverb to explain to me how they felt about the war in their country: “When two elephants fight, only the grass suffers.” And when I asked one young man if they were called Lost Boys in the refugee camp, he told me, “No. We’re not lost, because God knows where we are. In the camps, the elders called us the seeds.”

“Why were you called the seeds?”

“Because like seeds we are expected to reach fertile soil. And now that we have, we must plant ourselves and grow strong. Then we must bear fruit. We must bear fruit for our country.”

I was in awe of these young men. I wanted to do everything in my power to make sure they got more than the necessities. I wanted to help fulfill the hopes the elders back in the refugee camp had for them. So, soon after meeting the Lost Boys, I quit my job at the IRC and started the Lost Boys Foundation. With a grant from the Fonda Family Foundation I hired two women who had been mentoring Lost Boys and rented several small offices from my mom in the same building that housed her teen pregnancy prevention organization, GCAPP.

I created the Lost Boys Foundation to raise awareness about the plight of refugee children, the war in Sudan and as a vehicle to help secure scholarships, volunteer support and other needed resources for the guys. My ultimate goal was to build up the organization, and when the guys had gone through college, pass it on to them as a platform for them to help bring about change in Sudan. The worst thing I could envision was for these young men to survive all the horrors of war only to fall through the cracks in America.

Lucky for us there was a great deal of interest in their story. In fact, unbeknownst to them their greatest asset would be their stories. Their stories and their resilience. In a world where too many turn to drugs and alcohol and other self-destructive vices to lessen the pain of past traumas, here were the Lost Boys who somehow were able to look forward rather than backward. Local and national media were on the story, and I was optimistic that I would be able to quickly raise more funds for scholarships. Then everything changed on September 11, 2001.

I was at work on Tuesday morning prepping a young man acting as a spokesperson for the Lost Boys for a meeting I had arranged at Morehouse College, when I heard about the first plane hitting one of the towers. Someone turned a television on and I saw the second plane hit. At the first plane I thought,
What a devastating tragedy.
When the second plane hit I knew we were at war. I was stunned. I didn’t know if we should go to our meeting. I asked Abraham what he thought. He looked at me puzzled and said, “Why would you let this stop our work? They have the towers, don’t let them have this.” That simple truth got me mobilized and off we went.

When we entered the building at Morehouse, I remember the receptionist was crying but she led us to the boardroom where our meeting would take place. To my surprise, everyone showed. Before we began, we said a prayer for the victims of the attack and in a solemn mood proceeded with our meeting. I gave my pitch requesting that the school match students to Lost Boys for mentoring and tutoring. They listened. The meeting ended early when people began to excuse themselves. They were interested in getting to their TVs as more information was coming in about the attacks. Unbelievably, the towers were collapsing.

Shortly after 9/11, another Lost Boy would arrive. His name was Valentino Achak Deng. He was scheduled to come to the States on 9/11. His flight was canceled. He got another flight a few days later. He told me he was afraid he would not be welcomed into America after what happened. Then he felt saddened that war had followed him all the way from Africa.

Valentino was particularly bright and, I soon learned, an excellent public speaker. I recruited him often to speak to church groups and schoolchildren about their story, and he never left a single person unmoved and unwilling to support us.

But a group of refugees from Sudan were no longer on the minds of a nation mourning their dead and looking for ways to help support the victims and their families. I thought our cause was lost, but I underestimated the generosity of Americans. There were many people who still wanted to support us, even in the midst of a national tragedy.

So while we continued to get support in the form of volunteers and donations, we still had to think of more creative ways to raise awareness and funds for the Lost Boys cause. So I reached out to the writer of a book I was reading about a young man who lost his parents to cancer and takes on the responsibility of raising his younger brother. The story struck me as a westernized version of the Lost Boys’ tale. The book was
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
, the author Dave Eggers.

I sent him a letter via his publisher asking him if he’d heard the story of the Lost Boys and if he’d be interested in writing a story about them. Dave responded and graciously agreed to come to Atlanta to meet with us. I invited him to attend a birthday party. A very large birthday party. Since many of the young men had no record of when they were born, they were all assigned the birth date of January 1 by U.S. Immigration.

So I invited Dave to attend a birthday party for three hundred Lost Boys at Philips Arena. The food and gifts were donated. My gifts to the guys, with help from Ted, were tickets for all of them to attend a professional basketball game and a surprise visit from a special guest: Sudan-born basketball player Manute Bol.

The boys crowded into the large room with thirty-foot ceilings and a wall of glass overlooking downtown Atlanta. They were dressed in their finest, hugging and slapping the backs of their brothers in greeting. The volunteers who had driven them were mostly upper-middle-class churchgoers, beaming at their adopted sons with maternal pride.

I’d recruited a DJ to play the latest rap and pop hits. There was an awkward moment when the boys circled the dance floor but didn’t dance. There were no girls for them to dance with, I realized. Then all at once they paired up and hit the dance floor, grooving to Jay-Z’s “Parking Lot Pimpin’.”

They were joyous, tossed about by flow and beats, arms high and one foot tap, tap, tapping, thin hips swaying side to side. The volunteers stood around the dance floor clapping and cheering them on. When I thought they couldn’t get any happier, Manute Bol entered the room. At 7-foot-6, he’s hard to miss. Manute played for two colleges and four NBA teams over his career, where his shot-blocking ability was considered among the best in the history of professional basketball. Fame and money, however, did not make him forget where he came from.

Bol was a true activist who spent millions of his own money supporting organizations working for reconciliation and education in Sudan. Many of the boys knew him from the many visits he made to refugee camps. He gathered them all around him, and in the Dinka language gave, from what I could tell, a very heartfelt speech that I assumed was probably about staying focused on school and staying away from fast women and drugs.

Dave hung back, skirting the perimeter of the party with a little pen and pad taking notes. He’s kind of a shy fellow with wild curly hair. I introduced him to Manute and Valentino. I hoped that he would use Valentino as the subject of a written piece. Dave and Val hit it off, and Dave did eventually write a book based on Valentino’s life. They worked closely together to create
What Is the What
.

For a while I had something to be excited about. We were getting media attention from the
Oprah Winfrey Show
,
World News Tonight
,
People
magazine and other local and national media. We hosted a large gathering on Thanksgiving for the guys. I received a small donation from Angelina Jolie. Several of our guys were cast in films. I got a young man a speaking part in the Dustin Hoffman film
I Heart Huckabees
, and a volunteer managed to get several guys cast as extras in the Bruce Willis film
Tears of the Sun
. I was also working closely with Hollywood producer Robert Newmyer, who was interested in developing the story of the Lost Boys for the big screen. We had scholarships for several guys at a reputable junior college and volunteers lining up to help. Churches and school groups regularly requested talks. The only thing we didn’t have was the tons of cash I thought we’d have after more than a year of nonstop work. And other problems were coming I never even suspected.

The Lost Boys community was not as united as I had once thought. From the very beginning, I had unknowingly been stepping on toes. Though the guys were all Sudanese, tribal divisions existed that I was not aware of. So when one guy got a movie part over another, the guys from a different tribe got their feathers ruffled. The same thing applied when someone got a scholarship, or sat next to me at a basketball game, or became the subject of a book.

There was a rift growing between several groups of Lost Boys. And I was becoming a target of intense scrutiny, accused of favoring one tribe over another and failing to meet the needs of all three hundred guys. Volunteers were pulled into the growing feud, as well as a local reporter who wrote a negative piece about the foundation. My staff and I defended ourselves and held several group meetings in order to answer questions and resolve issues. But the situation had gotten too far out of hand. Feuds between volunteers and one of my staff became personal, and it heralded the beginning of the end. My dear friend Valentino finally told me he had been targeted for a while. He and many other young men remained my staunch supporters, but in the end I got tired of being criticized by people I’d been trying to help and shut down the foundation.

But my work was not in vain. I had succeeded in helping a Sudanese become powerful enough to be an agent of change in his own country. The book Dave Eggers wrote about Valentino became a best-seller and Dave donated the proceeds to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, a nonprofit working to increase access to education in post-conflict South Sudan by building schools, libraries, teacher-training institutes and community centers. Like Manute Bol before him, Val travels the world speaking on behalf of Sudan.

I was exhausted by my experience with the Lost Boys. I decided that my desire to save people was really my misdirected desire to save myself. I didn’t know what to do with this revelation. I did know that I needed to get out of social services. I briefly took a position as the director of community development for the Atlanta hockey team, the Thrashers. I had become a workaholic and miserable, which made me very unpleasant to live and work with. I was quick to anger and overly sensitive to criticism. I began to get into tiffs with people at work over the smallest things: my missing stapler; So-and-So looked at me sideways; So-and-So left me waiting for ten minutes. I stopped greeting or even making eye contact with people I deemed my enemies. Slowly I began to isolate myself from everyone, including my family. Even the Lost Boys who I’d remained friends with were getting on my nerves. I was thirty-four and I knew I had to make a change, and soon. I didn’t know what I needed to get me out of my rut, only that it had to be huge. I needed a new series of challenges to help me find the headstrong, happy person I had once been.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
would have it that it’s unwise for a woman in her late thirties to walk away from a well-paying job and the prospect of marriage in order to hike the Appalachian Trail. But I did that, all of that. I told Andy we were over and moved him out of the house after months of him living in the spare room. The breakup was remarkably easy. We had months to process the end and we both knew it wasn’t working. He left peaceably, and the sight of that humongous TV leaving my house brought an enormous sense of well-being. After Andy left, I quit my job, sold my house, packed a backpack and left.

The Appalachian Trail, or AT, is to many American hikers what Everest is to climbers: it’s the thing they must do if they want to be taken seriously. I wanted to become what they call a “through hiker”—someone who does the whole trail in one season, all 2,175 miles of it, from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, Maine. Thousands attempt it every year but only one in four succeeds. The hike usually takes about six months.

My family was cautiously supportive. I assured them that I knew what I was doing. I had, after all, traveled extensively and was no stranger to adventure. Apart from living in Morocco and Tanzania, I’d studied outdoor leadership and gone on several extended expeditions, including a month-long trek in the New Mexican backcountry and a cross-country bicycle ride. I assured them I could handle any of the possible ailments that might await me: septic blisters, giardiasis, injuries sustained in falls, the potentially disabling symptoms of Lyme disease and the pernicious effects of boredom and loneliness.

The afternoon before I planned to begin my hike, I walked into the office of a man I’ll call Mr. North Georgia. Mr. North was a friend of Ted’s and, given he lived near the trailhead, was familiar with the many things that could go wrong for hikers. Mr. North Georgia was a good ol’ boy/country millionaire who made his money in real estate. He had the long, lanky body of Jimmy Stewart and a sticky Southern drawl that conjured mint juleps on the veranda of an antebellum mansion.

When I told him my plan to hike alone through the woods for half a year, he took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and said, “Yer purty. You should carry a gun.” He reached into his pocket to retrieve his business card and pressed it firmly into my palm. “If ya get out dair and find ya need help, just call me. I’ll come gitchu. Ya hear?”

I was aware of female hikers being murdered on the trail, and friends and loved ones advised me against hiking alone. I wondered again if I was foolishly putting myself in harm’s way. After all, I was a black woman who had chosen to go on a solo hike that would take me through very small, predominately white Southern towns and long, isolated stretches of forest. Maybe there was a damned good reason you rarely saw African Americans hiking the trail. That evening, I sat alone in my room and began to seriously doubt my sanity. But the last thing I wanted to do was go back home with my tail between my legs before I even set foot on the trail. I had difficulty falling asleep that night, and when I did it was fitful.

Luckily, by the time my alarm clock went off, my courage had returned and I quickly got myself ready for one of the biggest adventures of my life. On the morning of April 7, 2007, I stood at the AT trailhead on Springer Mountain. I hoisted my sixty-pound pack (I wasn’t quite able to give up my books, two canisters of mace, a blank journal as thick as
Atlas Shrugged
, and other assorted unnecessaries) onto my back and walked down the trail like I owned it.

The day was clear and cold. I was decked out in three layers of clothing—everything I had. The forest loomed above me, utterly silent, the branches naked. I easily found the first of the thousands of white “blazes”—white rectangles painted onto a tree—that mark the trail, and set off.

I kept to myself the first few days, except for an overnight stay at the Walasi-Yi Center at Neels Gap, Georgia, located at mile 32. The Walasi-Yi Center is impossible to avoid; in fact, the trail goes through the building. The center is an outdoor store and hostel that employs experienced backpackers to advise hikers on how to reduce their pack weights. I spent most of my two-hour consultation defending what I brought. In the end I begrudgingly agreed to give up one pair of hiking sandals, one of three books, and a bottle of hair conditioner. I packed these items into a FedEx box and shipped them home.

Some lightweight backpackers manage to get their pack weights down to twelve pounds. Impressive, but there is a cost. It’s not unusual to wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of a lightweight backpacker slapping out jumping jacks for warmth, all because he didn’t want to carry a heavier sleeping bag. Fuck that. Long-distance hiking isn’t just a test of physical endurance. It’s a mental game as well. Books, an extra set of clothes and abundant toiletries make me happy. And if you’re not happy, you’re not likely to finish.

I spent the evening in the Walasi-Yi hiker hostel, sharing a dark, stinky bunk room with about ten guys. The following morning, my fifth day on the trail, I was out the door at six
A
.
M
. The temperature remained chilly, and the air was damp. I spent mornings in a shroud of mist thick enough to drench my clothes and pack. I kept warm by marching.

Fourteen miles later, preparing to eat dinner, I realized that I’d inadvertently packed my camp stove in the FedEx box I’d sent home. This sounds as though it would be hard to do, but it isn’t. Camp stoves are tiny enough to fit into the palm of your hand. Also, I’d stored it in one of the many little nylon sacks into which I’d organized all my various gear (it’s easy to mistake one sack for another). I settled for a peanut-butter bagel. Then, like all good backpackers, I hung my food bag safely out of reach in a nearby tree. I lay in my sleeping bag reading, as rain pattered on the tent. Outside, I heard branches rustling in the tree where I’d hung my food bag. I yelled through my tent to frighten the animal intruder away. It worked . . . for about ten minutes. I yelled again, but was too scared and tired and cold to leave the safety of my tent.

When dawn broke I crawled out of my tent and into the rain. I was anxious to inspect what was left of my food bag. The animal had kindly left me a bagel, a bag of couscous I’d have a hard time eating given my lack of a camp stove, and some partially gnawed dried apricots.

I had to make this food last two days, roughly twenty-four miles, until my next resupply. I ate half of my soggy bagel and drank a pint of spring water.

I headed out at 7:30. At noon I nibbled from the remaining half of my bagel. Hours passed without seeing another hiker. I had envisioned my hike as not only a physical challenge but also a spiritual quest. I wanted to experience a quiet mind, but by noon on the sixth day I found myself wondering how Paris Hilton’s latest romance was holding up. It was humbling to plumb the hidden recesses of my mind and find not a wellspring of wisdom, but a wasteland of pop culture and a Pandora’s box of annoying songs. I hadn’t realized I knew all the words to Madonna’s “Lucky Star.” (I love Madonna, but I’ve just never liked that song.)

It was nearly dark when I entered the clearing around Low Gap shelter, one of hundreds of shelters along the AT. The shelters are three-sided lean-tos on platforms. They generally sleep about six people. The Low Gap lean-to already held six hikers: all male, all white, all smelling like ass. To my relief, they squeezed together to make room for me. As I settled in, we introduced ourselves using our trail names.

The tradition of taking a trail name goes back to the early 1970s, and nearly all hikers use one. If you don’t name yourself, someone will name you. I met a guy named Cum Shot (after a crowd gathered to watch him lance an infected boil with explosive results) and a cute sixteen-year-old girl who was christened Trail Bait.

Wolverine, a friendly thirty-something guy with the belly of a woman six months pregnant, loaned me his camp stove so I could cook my couscous dinner. My new friends couldn’t understand how I’d lost something as vital as a camp stove. I tried to save face by telling them that it was totally out of character. After all, I told them, I’m a National Outdoor Leadership School graduate. They were unimpressed. I ate my couscous in silence.

After dinner I crawled into my sleeping bag fully dressed to ward off the cold. Three of my other shelter mates were prep-school graduates with the collective trail name of The Hobbits. I told them a friend from home had given me the trail name Rosie, in honor of Rosie Cotton, the only prominent female hobbit in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. They promised to check my progress in the shelter logs. Each shelter has a log: a spiral notebook in which hikers write poems, draw pictures or pass messages. We turned in early because Wolverine and his hiking partner, Hong Kong Phooey, were planning a forty-mile hike in the morning. I lay in the cramped, dark shelter listening to the rain dance on the tin roof. I enjoyed the body heat radiating from my fellow hikers. In the darkness I grinned. I finally felt like I belonged; also, for the first time I was absolutely sure I would complete this hike.

On April 14, as I crossed the North Carolina border, I noticed the first clear evidence that spring was on its way: budding flowers. Also changing was the terrain. Overnight, Georgia’s rolling hills had transformed into steep rises and knee-biting descents.

I almost cried (twice) while ascending the North Carolina Grind, a steep, four-mile stretch of trail. My double-digit-mile days were starting to take their toll on my body. I had hyperextended my knee, but that pain was nothing compared to the screaming in my feet caused by an excruciating case of plantar fasciitis, an inflammation of the tissue that connects the heel to the toes.

The pain was particularly intense in the mornings and at the end of the day. Endorphins pumped through my system when I hiked, but once I unshouldered my pack, my body shut off the drugs. It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt. Experienced hikers assured me the pain was temporary: it should only last for the first three to four months. In my case, I endured this excruciating condition most of my hike and for several months after my hike ended.

The weather had improved from cold drizzle to cold sunshine when I arrived, on April 19, at the Nantahala Outdoor Center (NOC). Located at mile 134.1, at the bottom of a slick rock gorge, this compound of buildings (including restaurants, an outfitter, a general store, hotels and hostels) is a much-anticipated stop for hikers.

I was a physical and emotional wreck when I checked in. I’d slept poorly the night before and was weary from the long, bone-jarring hike down from Cold Spring shelter. I assured the receptionist that I didn’t want kayak lessons. Word was that the climb down to the NOC was nothing compared to the steep climb out. I wanted to be well rested.

I peeled off my filthy gear. I washed all my clothes in the washing machine while I showered. A hot shower after ten days on the trail is, and I do not exaggerate, better than sex.

On my way back to the bunkhouse, a young woman intercepted me to ask if I was hiking the trail. She walked without a limp, no infected bug bites marred her legs, and she looked well fed. Telltale signs she wasn’t a through-hiker. I told her that I was. Through-hikers are rock stars on the trail. Locals buy us meals, offer us rides and even open their homes to us.

She was a social worker supervising a group of twenty foster children, all girls, staying at the NOC. She asked me to talk to them about through-hiking.

I met the girls in a common room with big bay windows that revealed a forested hillside. The girls were tall, short, chunky, thin, black, white, Asian and Hispanic. Each was fiercely beautiful in the way of young girls made to witness the harsher side of life at an early age.

I told them that I, too, was raised in a dysfunctional home. When I was their age, I was frightened of everything. I couldn’t sleep in a room alone if I didn’t wedge a chair under the doorknob. But I was lucky. I was adopted by people who loved me. I got better and now I was strong enough to go on a six-month hike all by myself.

I asked how many of them would like to hike the trail one day. They all raised their hands. “Well, since you are all gonna hike the trail, you have to pick a trail name for yourself. It’s best to pick something that will let people know what kind of person you are.” They took turns telling me their trail names: Panther, Waterfall, Moon Dancer, Queenie, Buttercup. Each name provided a clue to the secret selves these girls nurtured. Despite their tough-luck lives, they still had the dreams and ambitions of girls raised under more innocent circumstances. If they were fortunate, they’d be adopted by loving people who could help them realize these dreams.

Those first thousand miles I endured alone, I suffered from insomnia, excruciating hip pain, several twisted ankles and plantar fasciitis. I scared off a black bear in Shenandoah National Park. I taught myself to safely read and hike at the same time. (The trick is to read only on uphills.) I volunteered on trail maintenance crews and I pushed myself to hike thirty miles in one day.

I was more than halfway through the AT before I allowed myself to accept hiking partners. I wanted first to prove to myself that I could survive on my own. I met Walker and Mellow a few days after I left Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, the AT’s unofficial halfway point. We kept passing each other on the trail, mostly because Walker was faster but had to stop every twenty minutes to pee. I told him that he should get his prostate checked. He said, “Why don’t you check it for me?” They soon invited me to join them.

Walker was a gangly, balding white guy from Austin, Texas, whose wife had begrudgingly allowed him to attempt his second through-hike. Mellow was an uptight Korean guy from Chicago. They were both in their late thirties. They fought often and had a pretty intense love/hate hiking partnership. Walker hoped my estrogen might cool their hostilities.

We ended up hiking Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and part of Vermont together. I thought of them as my boys. They were fun to hike with, but I was hiking more on their terms than my own. Before I met them, I was a White Blazer, trail lingo for hikers who rigidly follow the trail and refrain from taking short cuts or skipping sections. While I hiked with the boys (inveterate Yellow Blazers, the opposite of a White Blazer), we skipped about a hundred miles of the trail.