Lost Boy speaks to Isenberg students

Ngor Kur Mayol, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, spoke at Isenberg Elementary School during two separate assembly sessions. Submitted photo.

On May 31, Ngor Kur Mayol, known as one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, spoke at Isenberg Elementary School during two separate assembly sessions.

From 1984 to 2005, the Second Sudanese Civil War raged. Nearly 30,000 boys in southern Sudan were orphaned and/or displaced when their villages were attacked. They fled to refugee camps, where they grew up and became known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. In 2001, about 3,800 Lost Boys were specially invited to come to the U.S. and begin new lives.

Ngor, who now lives in Atlanta, promised he would not forget his village. Because of his dream and the dream of James Lubo Mijak of Charlotte, funds are being raised for two permanent schools that will serve more than 600 children and include classrooms, latrines, teacher housing, a water source and kitchen.

Their dreams are being realized through a collaborative project called “Raising Sudan,” a partnership between locally based nonprofit Sudan Rowan and its Charlotte-based partner, Mothering Across Continents. Construction on the first school is under way with a completion date slated for July.

Ngor told the students about the experience of walking thousands of miles — at roughly 9 or 10 years of age — through Africa’s unforgiving terrain in search of a safe place, eating fruit from shrubs and trees, surviving a swim across a river filled with crocodiles, becoming a child soldier at 13 and finally coming to the USA after years of refugee camps and army life. Now approximately 30 years old, Ngor says his dream is to give the children in his village something he didn’t have, a real childhood with a real education.

Ngor was invited as a guest of the Isenberg Student Government Association. The SGA raised funds for this project as part of a spring awareness/fundraising drive.

For more information about the Raising Sudan project or to have a speaker for your organization, please browse on: www.motheringacrosscontinents.org/Raising_Sudan.html or call Karen Puckett at 704-279-7428.