c. 2004 Religion News Service

CHICAGO _ When he was a boy herding cattle in Southern Sudan, Santino Majok Chuor would sometimes look up and see a jet leaving contrails across the sky. He and his friends would joke that “a girl of America” was flying the plane.

Chuor dreamed of one day going to America as a student and meeting an American girl.

In September 2001, Chuor made it to the US _ not as a student, but as a refugee.

“That would have been better _ if I had come here in freedom,” Chour said in a phone interview from his home in Houston. “Then I would want to get one of those American girls _ they would look so good to me. But I came to America as a refugee _ and it loses its appeal. There is nothing that looks good.

“I was not expecting to be orphaned in order to come here,” he said.

Chuor is one of the “Lost Boys,” some 20,000 Sudanese young men who were separated from their families in the late 1980s during their country’s civil war. In 2001, nearly 4,000 of the Lost Boys (the name comes from “Peter Pan”) came to the United States. Chuor is featured, along with Peter Nyarol Dut, in a new documentary film, “Lost Boys of Sudan,” that follows them from the sprawling Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya through their first year in the United States.

Though they believed that coming to America would be like a “journey to heaven,” the two struggled when they arrived. The films shows their attempts to adjust in a new culture _ finding jobs, deciphering the bills (phone, electric, rent) that came with their apartment, even figuring out how to use an electric stove.

Jon Shenk, who directed the film with Megan Mylan, said he was drawn to the Lost Boys because of their experience as newcomers to the United States, and the difficulty of their lives in Africa.

“Their story is so particularly bad,” he said. “Not only did they suffer civil war, not only did they lose their parents, not only were they religiously persecuted _ but they were eaten by lions, they were chased by gunfire _ there are so many things about them that are of epic proportions.”

Shenk and Mylan met Dut and Chuor in Kakuma, about a week before they left Sudan. After a few months in Houston, Dut left for Kansas, where he graduated from high school and became a member of the National Honor Society. Chuor remained in Houston, working at a factory.

The documentary will play in cities where the Lost Boys have settled _ San Francisco, Atlanta, San Jose, Calif., Boston, Lincoln, Neb., among others. In Chicago, a packed house of Lost Boys, and volunteers that work with them, attended a recent showing.

Many of the young Sudanese men laughed as they saw Chuor and Dut face the same bewildering challenges they did as new refugees.

“It was funny because it was like looking at yourself back in the first days in the U.S.,” said Gabriel Akoon, who came to Chicago in June 2001. “It’s like laughing at all of the things you did.”

Akoon, a junior at North Park University, credits volunteers from local churches and agencies with helping him and other Lost Boys find jobs and schools to attend.

“If you don’t have connections to show you how things are done, you are in a bad situation,” he said.

Many of the Lost Boys have been watching recent developments in Sudan, where a peace agreement between the Islamic government in Khartoum, and rebels in South Sudan (mostly Christian and animist) seems imminent.

“I will celebrate because we have been fighting for 21 years,” Akoon said, “but it won’t be total happiness” because of fighting in the Darfur region of western Sudan. There, thousands of African Muslims have been driven from their homes by militias aligned with the mostly Arab government.

“This ethic cleansing _ it looks much like the Rwanda genocide,” he said. “We sympathize with the people in the west _ it’s the same thing that happened to us.”

The documentary shows glimpses of the suffering that the Lost Boys endured. It begins with a voiceover from Chuor, describing the attack on his village. He and thousands like him escaped because they were out herding cattle, a traditional job for young boys. Many died on the long march to refugee camps in Ethiopia and later to Kenya. At one point, they were driven into the Gilo River, where many were shot, drowned or eaten by crocodiles.

That story seeps into one of the most innocent moments of “The Lost Boys.” Chuor attends a Lost Boys retreat at a summer camp toward the end of his first year in the United States. While swimming in the pool, some of the young men talk calmly about the Gilo River.

“I crossed the big river _ you know Gilo _ I crossed that, man,” one of them said. “Many thousands of people died, I remember,” he added a moment later, before joining the rest of his friends in a race across the pool.

“Lost Boys of Sudan” has already won a number of prizes, including best documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Heartland Film Festival. It will be shown this fall on the PBS series P.O.V.

Chuor, who plans to attend community college in Houston in the near future, has already seen the film “seven times.”

“That was the first movie I saw in the United States,” he said. “It was really very great _ it will tell everyone what is going on with us in Sudan. It will be a movie that our children will see and remember everything that happened.”

DEA/JL END SMIETANA