Courtesy Monty Mosher, The Chronicle Herald
\r\nA chorus of dead children speaks to Riiny Ngot.
\r\nThe children are a lost generation in Sudan, victims of two decades of civil war that killed upwards of two million civilians and displaced twice that many. They were attacked by soldiers who mistook them for rebels, devoured by crocodiles in a last desperate swim for refuge, or snatched by wild animals in the jungle in the terrifying dark of night.
\r\nMore than 20,000 children, many orphaned after attacks on their villages, wandered for months, and likely for 1,500 kilometres. They were looking for their families, for safety or a drop of water. Aid groups came to call them the Lost Boys.
\r\nSome sat down in the Sahara Desert and waited to die.
\r\nThat’s what Riiny, just 11 at the time and caring for his eight-year-old sister Akuol, did a decade ago until he remembered his mother’s Christian teachings that God made all things possible.
\r\nThe dead children who walked with Ngot, now 22, want him to prosper. They want him to tell their story, and to remind the world of war’s horrors and that peace in southern Sudan is tenuous.
\r\nThey want this Lost Boy to find a home.
\r\nThe children would be pleased to see him today. The seven-foot-two Dinka tribesman, a relative of former NBA player Manute Bol, is now in Nova Scotia, in his first year with the St. Francis Xavier basketball team.
\r\nBad knees have limited his ability to play, but he’s grown more comfortable in his surroundings at the Antigonish university.
\r\n"I remember driving from the airport and one hour later wondering where I was going," he says. "I didn’t know if I was going to like it, but I love it here.
\r\n"I learned from my mother that home is where people love you. Home is in your heart. So I feel like this is home."
\r\nSt. F.X. coach Steve Konchalski says Ngot’s past has made him determined.
\r\nINNER DRIVE
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"He’s got an inner drive that most people wouldn’t have because most people wouldn’t have to deal with the things he’s had to deal with."
Ngot almost didn’t come to Nova Scotia. He was tempted to leave school in Calgary to go to Africa to find his parents, whom he hasn’t seen in 12 years, but he knew he would have to surrender much of the progress he’d made in Canada. He’d worked too hard on his English skills in his six years in Calgary to turn back.
\r\nNgot is the eldest son of father Mayout Ngot Riiny and mother Yar Reech Ngot. His family lived a relatively prosperous life in southern Sudan, where both of his parents had jobs in Wau, a city of 136,000.
\r\nHis father taught him the tribal custom to be brave and always care for his siblings.
\r\nHe took him on cross-country runs, teaching his warrior values after a young Riiny was too exhausted to think about anything else.
\r\n"I said, ‘Dad, why do we run, do you think I’m going to be a world champion? My dad laughed and said, ‘No, I’m teaching you to be a man.’ "
\r\nThere was a constant threat in the south. Militia units backed by the Islamist Sudanese government based in the north frequently attacked the non-Muslim areas. Civil war raged from 1983 to 2005.
\r\nDinka boys tend cattle as part of their culture. Riiny spent summer vacations working the fields in his grandparents’ village of Luonyaker, where his grandfather was a chief. But Riiny preferred his "silver spoon" life in the city.
\r\n"I used to cry when the summertime came," he says. "In the city you just watched TV, watched cartoons."
\r\nHe was tending to a calf in the summer of 1999 on the day the gunships came. He heard the shots and took cover.
\r\n"The plane was bombing everywhere, shooting everywhere," he recalls.
\r\nThe war his mother had spoken of had come.
\r\nWhen the shooting stopped, Riiny raced to his grandparents’ home, which was in flames. He heard his sister crying and ran in, stepping over the burning bodies of relatives and neighbours.
\r\nWhile retelling his story more than 10 years later, Ngot unwinds ice bags from his knees and points to his long legs and the burn scars from that day.
\r\nRESCUED HIS SISTER
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He found his sister, unconscious and suffering from burns to her legs, and took her outside. The roof caved in a moment later.
Images now form behind his jet black eyes and slide toward his tongue before he swallows them at the last possible moment. He taps his fingers on a table and averts his gaze.
\r\nNgot is gentle and forthright, but the pictures in his head are painful and strangers may only intrude so far. His eyes moisten, but he doesn’t cry.
\r\nSome memories will remain shuttered. His sister, now 18 and living in Calgary with a young daughter, has never spoken publicly of her experiences.
\r\n"It’s very hard," Ngot says, asking to skim over some details.
\r\nHe tended to his sister’s wounds over the next week. UNICEF workers arrived and drove them to a displacement camp. They drove for hours. He has no idea where they went. He believed that their parents must be dead.
\r\nThere was no peace in the camp. Riiny, though not yet a teenager, was already six-foot-three, taller than some of the rebel fighters who came to recruit him as a soldier. He was taken to the field one day and ordered to aim a rifle but wasn’t strong enough to raise it.
\r\n"I told them I was 11 years old," he says. "They said, ‘Hell no, how can you be 11 years old?’ "
\r\nSome recruits were his age.
\r\nTime was against him. The rebels would soon take him. He knew his sister would be raped or taken into slavery if left alone.
\r\nAfter two weeks in the camp, they gathered their few belongings and snuck away at midnight, setting out for home without knowing where it was.
\r\n"There was no map, no road."
\r\nRiiny had to carry his sister, as her burns had not fully healed.
\r\n"It was in the morning when we ran into a group of kids who were walking as well," he says. "We sat at the roadside and watched them pass."
\r\nIn the midst of this group of hundreds of children, Riiny was startled to discover his best friend from Wau.
\r\n"I asked, ‘Where are you going?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ So I looked at my sister and said, ‘Why don’t we just join them?’ "
\r\nRIVER OF CROCODILES
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It’s been estimated they walked for three months.
\r\nThey lived through several weeks in the jungle. Ngot has nightmares from this part of the journey and sleeps with a light on to this day.
\r\nClusters of children would gather at night. By morning, snakes, lions and tigers would have thinned their numbers.
\r\n"You don’t see anything," Ngot remembers. "You only hear the noise of someone being grabbed."
\r\nThey wandered through the desert, perhaps for two weeks, dodging snakes in the scorching heat of the day and walking in the chill of night.
\r\n"There were kids who sat down and never got up," he says.
\r\nHis mother’s faith saved them in the desert.
\r\nNgot admits he never listened much to his mother. He would often start eating before she finished grace.
\r\n"I told her I didn’t deserve her God," he says with a hearty laugh. "But sometimes she would sit me down and say, ‘You never know when war is going to reach you. How will you survive if that happened in your life?’
\r\n"She said there was always God, no matter what the situation. I said, ‘Mom, you talk too much.’ But in the desert, that’s when I remembered the things she said.
\r\n"I was exhausted carrying my sister and I threw her down and I just lay down. That was it. I wasn’t going to walk anymore. She looked at me and she said, ‘Where are the words our mom said?’ "
\r\nAnd Riiny, wearing no shoes, picked up his sister and ran to catch up to the group.
\r\nTheir numbers had been pared by a quarter or more by the time they reached the Gilo River, which separated them from the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. To go back meant returning through the desert and the jungle and being shot at from the air.
\r\nThe rain-swollen river was a kilometre wide and Riiny knew there would be crocodiles. He watched a few of the children enter the river. Some made it across, but he saw others ripped apart.
\r\nAfter 15 minutes, he tied his sister to his back with a shirt for the crossing. A good swimmer, he planned to dive beneath the crocodiles feeding at the surface and told his sister to poke him in the ribs when she needed a breath.
\r\nHe told his best friend to latch on to his leg and the three would take their chances. He could feel the crocodiles moving around him in the water.
\r\nRiiny and his sister made it across after 15 to 20 minutes, but his friend panicked and was snatched. He died horribly, as did many of the 400 to 600 children who succumbed in the river.
\r\n"It took him a long time to die," Ngot says.
\r\nHe is afraid of water now, even swimming pools.
\r\n"I can still close my eyes and hear the noises, the crying in the river," he says.
\r\nRiiny and his sister spent three years in the refugee camp until an aunt in Calgary happened upon their names on a website. She sponsored them to Canada but then died suddenly, only days before Riiny and Akuol were to travel there from Nairobi, Kenya, in September 2002.
\r\nAfter surviving unspeakable horrors, it was another crushing blow.
\r\nBut they still had plane tickets, and an uncle in Calgary whom they didn’t know agreed to take them in. Riiny was 15 and Akuol 12.
\r\n"After the death of my aunt, my sister and I didn’t want to come," Ngot says. "But what energized me was the voices of the dead people, the voices of my friends."
\r\nSeveral months after arriving in Calgary, he attended a weekly gathering of the expatriate Sudanese community. A man he didn’t know said he looked like a younger version of a good friend of his — Mayout Ngot Riiny. His father was alive! So was his mother, he quickly learned.
\r\n"I can’t describe how happy I was," Ngot says.
\r\nFINDING HIS PARENTS
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He immediately called on the man’s cellphone and spoke to his parents in Africa. They thought it was a hoax.
"My son died a few years ago," his mother said.
\r\n"She couldn’t believe she was talking to her own son," Ngot says. "I couldn’t believe I was talking to my mother."
\r\nHe convinced her that he was her son by telling her that he used to eat during mealtime prayers. He convinced his father by reminding him of how they used to run.
\r\nHe was six-foot-10 when he arrived in Canada. A basketball coach saw him at school and invited him out to a practice. Riiny was afraid of the ball but was on the roster days later.
\r\nHis coach threw him into the game and told him where to stand as the play unfolded.
\r\nRiiny spoke next to no English but rapidly learned about blocking shots and rebounding. He ended up with 19 rebounds in his first game.
\r\n"I got zero points. He didn’t teach me how to shoot."
\r\nHe tried to quit basketball the next day. At 160 pounds, he thought he was too slight for the hard knocks under the basket.
\r\nBut his coach pushed back in the way his father had.
\r\n"He asked me if I wanted to do this. I asked him what it would take. I didn’t want to be the worst player."
\r\nThe coach told Riiny to get stronger. He went to the weight room, added 70 pounds and became a college prospect.
\r\nSince those days, he has made a trek of a different sort. He attended a prep school in Massachusetts, then Orange County Community College in Middletown, N.Y., for one season.
\r\nHe moved on to the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut last year but only played in one game because of his knees. He left school to help his sister with her baby.
\r\nA few years ago, Ngot couldn’t tell his story. While playing basketball in New York, he was persuaded to go to a school to speak. He got halfway through and emotion overtook him. He pledged never to do it again.
\r\nA week later, an 11-year-old girl in that class sent him a letter. Her mother was dying, her father was in prison and Ngot had given her hope. He changed his mind that day about sharing his experiences.
\r\nAdopting his mother’s religious faith has also helped him to talk about his dark past.
\r\n"I prayed to God that if my horrible story could change someone’s life, then I asked for the strength to share it without tears," he said. "After that, I never cried."
\r\nKonchalski had seen Ngot play at a basketball camp in Toronto but lost track of him. He learned from a friend last summer that Ngot was looking for a place to play.
\r\nKonchalski told him he needed to settle down academically and athletically.
\r\n"He needs a home, he needs someplace where he can settle in and say, ‘I’m going to be here for the next three years.’ "
\r\nNgot is driven to succeed, to show his mother he has matured and to prove to his father he has become a man. He intends to finish his degree. His dream is for his parents to see him play basketball. He wants to go home and show them what he’s become.
\r\nThe spirit of the dead children will be urging him all the way, he says.
\r\n"I don’t want to be a Lost Boy for the rest of my life."