Sudanese refugee chases her dream in civil war's wake
First the explosions and gunfire that shattered a 6-year-old's afternoon while her parents and baby brother were away, houses bursting into flames around them in a village in southern Sudan.
It was 1989. Back then, Martha Akech grabbed her little sister's hand and ran with the others into the brush — the start of a perilous, seemingly endless pilgrimage, of empty-bellied naps on patches of grass, and the hope their parents would be at journey's end.
You've probably heard of the so-called Lost Boys, a group profiled in "Lost Boys of Sudan," a film playing this week at Seattle's Varsity Theatre. Dinka refugees separated from their parents by Sudanese civil war, they trekked into Ethiopia until war there set them in flight again, back into Sudan and finally into the Kenyan refugee camp of Kakuma.
Thousands of boys got that far; about 4,000 were resettled in the United States. But along with them came about 100 girls and young women like Akech, 21, who with sister Tabitha, 17, is among a handful of Lost Girls making new lives in Washington state. To get here, they conquered not only the hardships of a war that killed 2 million and displaced twice that many, but cultural restraints that destined them to the duties of home.
Akech spent nine years in Kakuma, where she says schooling meant opportunities for boys, but not girls, who were mostly farmed out to families who saw them first as unpaid servants and, eventually, as females to be sold into marriage. She was inspired to find a way out.
She's been surrounded by people and accompanied by the sister for whom she's always felt responsible. But not until recently did she feel anything but alone.
AKECH KNOWS WHAT she wants. Today that means an hour's drive from her home in Duvall, where there is nothing resembling Living Color Beauty Supplies in South Seattle, a styling and hair-product pavilion for black women.
Akech is here with Tabitha and fellow Lost Girl Rebecca Paul, 21. "You should open a shop up there," they tell manager Anjell Russell.
A year ago, Akech's voice was thin and bland; now her cellphone greeting is perky and upbeat. Her nails flaunt elaborate designs; she wears sleek dresses, and she likes to hide around corners to scare friends Mike and Laurie Aholt, with whom she's been living since late spring. ("It's hard to believe she's only been here three years," Laurie Aholt says.)
Most Lost Girls who came to the United States were resettled in the Midwest and Plains states. Fewer than a dozen came to Washington state, compared with almost 60 boys, sponsored by Lutheran Community Services Northwest and Catholic Community Services.
Sprinkled from Everett to Tacoma, the girls tempered their stresses with monthly support sessions or sleepovers where they talked and braided each other's hair.
Akech and her sister joined a Duvall family where they were two of seven foster children of varying nationalities. Akech, though, was slow to trust after her "family" experience in Kakuma. How could she be sure this was any different?
But at this home, chores were divided equally, and when she couldn't face the public-school system her sister readily embraced, her foster mother spent hours home-schooling her.
Sometimes people pressed her to make other friends. You only want to be with Sudanese girls, they'd say. But who else could understand the road she'd traveled?
The young women feel responsible for those left behind — girls who weren't strong or lucky enough to avoid being sold into marriage or to negotiate their way out of Kakuma.
Akech once bottled her memories inside. One day near the Ethiopian border, she recalls, gunfire rained from the trees; Akech, then a lanky little girl, covered her ears while an old man nearby was shredded by bullets.
"I still see all the things I saw before," she says. "I try to forget. But I don't think I will ever forget."
For Tabitha, she thinks, it's been easier; she was just a toddler when it all started. "She had me, someone caring for her. But ... there was no one taking care of me."
IN TIME, THE LOST GIRLS splintered away geographically as their foster-home eligibility ended at age 21. Those who couldn't make it work, left — to Iowa, to Michigan, mostly following boyfriends.
Akech met John Deng in Kakuma. A Lost Boy, he's now a 25-year-old community-college student in New York. They see each other once or twice a year.
"A lot of girls have followed their man," says Seattle's Leigh Kimball, who met Akech while doing camerawork for the film "A Great Wonder," about three of Sudan's orphaned refugees. "That makes her different. She's really strong."
Like Akech, Deng had no idea what had happened to his family, but last year, he discovered his mother was alive and living in a refugee camp in Uganda. She now lives with him in Syracuse, where a sizable Dinka population gives her comfort.
"That kind of thing gives you hope," Akech says. She's barely aware of the strife currently plaguing the Darfur region of western Sudan, but if she could, she says, she'd go to Africa and comb the camps for her family.
She understands why so many girls have moved away to marry or to join their boyfriends. But it's not so simple for her. She has family. She has friends. She has a medical assistant's certificate and plans to pursue a nursing degree. "I don't want to start all over again," she says. "I like it here."
Akech has made two journeys — one to America, one toward a new identity. " 'In our culture, no man follows a woman,' [John] says. 'Now you're telling me you want me to move to your state?' I say 'No, I'm not telling you anything. But I have Tabitha.' "
At 21, Akech began sharing a Monroe apartment with best friend Elizabeth Agok, a Lost Girl featured in The Seattle Times early last year. Akech was a semester away from graduation from Lake Washington Technical Academy. She carried a five-course workload while working 38 hours weekly at a local nursing home despite an increasingly unreliable car.
When Agok told her she was moving to South Dakota to be with her fiancé, Akech couldn't afford the apartment alone. She explained her predicament to Laurie Aholt, a bank information technician who had mentored her in a program for students hoping to attend college.
The Aholts invited Akech to move into their home in Duvall, rent-free.
LAURIE AHOLT REMEMBERS the 1990 Plymouth that Akech used to drive from Duvall to work in Monroe and school in Kirkland. "She kept pouring money into it," she says. "Every time we fixed it, something worse would happen."
When it sputtered out for good, the Aholts let her borrow a car, but she felt awful because Mike had to get up early to take Laurie to work in their other car.
One day they asked Akech out for lunch. Let's take Mike's car, they said when they arrived, but the back seat was piled with junk. Oh, that's too messy — how about Akech's car? Not until they handed her the keys did she notice the shiny 1993 Dodge Neon parked nearby.
"She really loves to tease people," Laurie Aholt says. "We sort of turned the tables on her.
"We don't have kids, so to have that experience of giving your teenager their first car was really fun."
With the car came the tears: Akech suddenly felt something new. A feeling that parents can give you — the security that when you're in trouble, someone will look out for you, no strings attached.
All day she cried, wondering: Why? Why would they do that? "All my life, when I cry, it is for sad things," she says. But now she felt God was taking care of her. It was the first time, she says, she could ever remember crying tears of joy.
One of three speakers at her June commencement, Akech thanked teachers, including Glynna Lee, who'd given her a charm necklace reading "Someone Special." She told her story to a riveted audience and encouraged students to pursue their dreams.
Look what I've been through, she said. I just decided I would never give up.
Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com