SAN ANTONIO • “I speak from my pain,” said the soft-spoken young man, “because once I tell my pain to other people, they understand the pain of the people that are in Sudan.”

    Alephonsion Deng, a refugee from the genocidal civil war in the Sudan, brought the message of his people’s pain to the people of San Antonio in a presentation at Holy Trinity Church on May 5, sponsored by Knights of Columbus Council 9967.

    Deng, his brother and a cousin, members of the Dinka tribe in southern Sudan, were among the thousands of Sudanese children forced to flee their burning villages in the wake of attacks by the northern Islamic government’s forces, beginning in 1987. Parents were killed or lost in the chaos and gunfire, while girls were primarily captured and sold into slavery. The boys ran for their lives.

    Deng was only 7-years-old on that day in 1989 when he ran from the enemy fire pouring from the sky, but many of the parentless boys on the journey with him were even younger. Banding together for survival, they set out on what would become a thousand mile walk across their war-ravaged country.

    For five years, Deng, his brother, Benson, and cousin, Benjamin, were part of this incredible odyssey — over 27,000 parentless boys, searching for refuge and struggling to survive starvation, wild animals, terrible diseases and the ever-present war.

    Deng and his two relatives were among the 12,000 of these boys finally finding refuge in a camp in Ethiopia for four years. When civil war erupted there, the boys were chased out at gunpoint. Over a thousand were estimated to have been shot or drowned in the river they were forced to cross and the survivors once again trekked, without food or water, back across their ravaged homeland.

    Eventually, they reached another refugee camp, Camp Kakuma in Kenya, where their story was chronicled in a Sixty Minutes documentary, “The Lost Boys of Sudan,” which was shown during Deng’s local presentation.

    “That’s my group,” he said at the tape’s conclusion, referring to the “Lost Boys” in words one might use to speak of their high school graduating class. In a sense it was. Their “class’s” lessons, however, were learning survival in a world turned horribly upside down by war. Formal education, of a sort, came later at Camp Kakuma, where the boys learned their ABCs by printing them in the sand.

    Deng was to live at the camp for nine more years, before becoming part of a massive international humanitarian effort that brought him, his brother and cousin to America in 2001. The boys’ horrific ordeal is described in their recent book, They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan.

    Mention was made of one of Deng’s pivotal experiences on his epic journey across Sudan, a chapter in the book titled, “The Good Samaritan.” Not having eaten during three days of relentless walking, the 7-year-old Deng had become separated from his friends and was too weak to even attempt climbing the nearby mango tree, whose fruit hung tantalizingly out of reach.

    “My mind could not think of anything except that I was going to die this time,” Deng related in the book. He spotted a woman cooking a small amount of grain and crept closer, too exhausted to do anything but beg with his eyes, which all too clearly told he was starving to death.

    She refused him and when he picked up the few grains that had fallen to the ground, slapped them from his hands, screaming at him, “Why aren’t you dead? Why are you alive?” The tired little boy lay down sobbing, until the woman’s husband took the bowl and gently offered to share the little he had.

    “I had become convinced that people were not good, people were bad,” said Deng. “Sometimes I try to remember the man who shared his small meal. That incident made me think differently about people.”

    Later he realized the woman herself was in great pain, as she had spoken of her children being killed in the war. “So I didn’t see her pain,” he said, “I didn’t see that it wasn’t just me who was hurt in the war — it was everybody.”

    During their years on the run or in refugee camps, Deng’s brother suffered from River Blindness, a terrible illness that befell many of the “Lost Boys.” River Blindness inflicts victims with rashes that literally drive them mad, the pain is so excruciating, and Deng told of his brother scraping himself with a knife in a hysterical effort to stop the agony. Deng himself was stricken with Yellow Fever.

    Earning money by selling okra he grew from seeds and the few possessions given him at the camp (his blanket and cooking utensils), Deng was able to raise enough money to finally get his brother to the Catholic missionary clinic in another town that had the drugs needed to cure him.

    It was at the Kakuma refugee camp that Deng was first exposed to Christianity, being sustained with food as well as faith by a Catholic missionary priest who provided bananas and other provisions to supplement the boys’ meager camp rations.

    Deng related that while the 20-year war is portrayed as a religious war between the northern and southern areas of Sudan, it is actually more of a misrepresentation by the government there that has created this, pitting the sides against each other and causing the northern Islamic forces to believe the south (predominantly black Christians or animists) is occupying land that is rightfully theirs. The discovery of oil has, of course, been a factor in this.

    “And what hurts the most,” Deng said, “is the fact that they have exposed young people to this conflict,” resulting in a cycle of hatred and vengeance. One of his friends at the refugee camp left to join the rebel army, seeking revenge for family members who were killed. Deng himself came to realize the best way to deal with his personal pain was to let go of it and work, through his spoken and written words, for peace.

    This has helped his inner wounds to heal and Deng related that for some time after arriving in America he was an angry young man, pushing people away, and waking up in the middle of the night screaming from terrible dreams. Being able to write down and talk about his experiences has helped bring closure.

    Bringing his story to the public, he believes, will also help those who remain in war-torn Sudan, where the conflict has spread in recent years to the Darfur region, now experiencing the same horrors that Deng and the “Lost Boys” lived through 20 years ago in the south.

    Today Deng, his brother and cousin, now in their mid-twenties, live in the San Diego area where he works as a clerk at Kaiser Permanente Hospital and attends San Diego City College. Someday he hopes to return to his homeland and build an orphanage for the children there who have no one to care for them — as he once was.

    Through a humanitarian organization, his older brother Benson has been able to return to Africa to visit their mother. Deng has only been able to speak to her by phone, but hopes one day he too will be able to see her again. His father was killed in the raid on his village.

    Deng is heartened by the student activism in the United States on behalf of Sudan. He believes if more Americans become aware of the atrocities occurring there and write their congressman and the president demanding pressure be put on the Sudanese government to end the killing, change can be brought about.

    While a peace accord was signed in Darfur the very day of Deng’s San Antonio presentation, it was pointed out it will take months to put this into effect and, in the meantime, many more will die.

    To this end, audience members at Deng’s presentation were given the opportunity to sign cards as part of the Save Darfur Campaign to be sent to President George Bush urging action.

    A petition sent from the citizens of San Antonio was also circulated, pleading with the U.S. government “to take immediate and serious steps to bring the slaughter in Darfur to a halt,” and sample letters to congressmen and the president were provided in the information packets given out.

    Persons wishing to learn more about what they can do to help the plight of the Sudan and sign the online “Million Voices for Darfur” petition, were asked to visit www.savedarfur.org.

    Deng sees the pressure brought by the United States on the government in Sudan as his country’s greatest hope for peace. But it will take the voices and letters of individual Americans making their feelings known to bring this about. “Americans have the power,” he said. “They can change anything.”