A home here

Where are we going? Riiny Ngot admits thinking to himself about 45 minutes into the two-hour drive from the Halifax airport to St. Francis Xavier University, his rural Nova Scotia home for the next three years. We’re in the middle of nowhere.

Dramatic change, however, has long been a fact of life for the towering 21-year-old basketball centre, who begins his career in the CIS, the Canadian university league, this fall. Riiny, who is seven foot two—a foot taller than the team average, and the tallest player in the league—is also part of a remarkable group of refugees. They are known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. Starting in the late 1980s, some 25,000 children who had been orphaned or separated from their parents crossed the country seeking refuge from Sudan’s raging civil war. That conflict—one of the last century’s most brutal—pitted the northern Muslim government against the mostly Christian south, and ultimately claimed two million lives.

Psychologists who documented the Lost Boys’ exposure to death and violence place them among the most badly war-traumatized children ever examined. For Riiny, who is gentle and soft-spoken, lily-white scars on his legs and arms are only the physical reminders of the war. He aches, all the time, for the family it took from him.

When Riiny was 11, fighting exploded in the southern city of Wau, where he grew up. He was nearby, at his grandparents’ farm tending to a newborn calf, and he ran home, passing scores of dead and wounded, to find his house in flames. Amid the crackle of gunfire, he could hear Akuol, his eight-year-old sister, screaming from inside. Tearing through the house, he found her hidden in a closet. They escaped just before their home collapsed.

There was no sign of their parents, so they left Wau, crossing the country’s war-ravaged southern flank and joining other children who were fleeing the fighting. They travelled under cover of darkness—and not just to escape the 40-degree heat. Almost anyone they encountered—government troops, rebel soldiers or rival tribes—was a likely threat: Akuol could have been enslaved or forced to become a rebel wife, while Riiny, who already stood six foot three, was ripe for recruitment by the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. (Thousands of children also died from starvation, dehydration, animal attacks and disease.)

For most of the month-long journey, Riiny carried Akuol, who was frightened and tired. When it came to crossing the rain-swollen Gilo River to safety in Ethiopia, he tied her to his back using a T-shirt, and dove deep to avoid the river’s strong top currents. As they surfaced, Riiny heard his best friend, who had been travelling with them, screaming in terror: he was being attacked by a crocodile. Hundreds died that day, lost to animal attack and drowning, says Riiny. Others remember the river streaked with red, the blood of lost friends.