Residence Life Staffer Shares His Experience as Sudan ‘Lost Boy’ in New Book

When he first tried to write his story of being a child soldier in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, Paul Deng Kur said re-living the memories was so agonizing that he would repeatedly delete the draft, as if he were erasing the pain.

“It was very difficult to do—I would delete all that I wrote. I did it over and over and over again,” said Kur, 32, who works as an evening desk aide in Des Places residence hall. “It’s my pain. It’s what I went through, but the only way to reduce my pain was to share my story.”

Kur eventually persevered and, after more than a year of writing, completed and self published Out of the Impossible: The Hope of The Lost Boy. The book tells how Kur, age 5, and his cousins returned from herding sheep and goats outside of his village of Werkok (in the South Sudan) to find all the buildings and homes burned to the ground and his family gone.

Already in the midst of the tumultuous Sudanese Civil War, Kur didn’t know whether his family was alive or dead. To survive, he banded together with other orphans into groups. By age 6, Kur and a cousin were recruited into the Sudan People’s Liberation Army and were sent to Ethiopia for military training.

“Because of the life we were living, many of us didn’t have a choice,” explained Kur. “We were always looking for our family members—being in the army was the only option to find them, and it was the only way we could feel protected. It was the only constant.”

Despite being brought to refugee camps in Uganda, Ethiopia or Kenya numerous times by UNICEF, Kur would escape, sometimes walking for days only to re-join the army to continue the search for his family. When he was 16, Kur found himself at a refugee camp in Northern Kenya for what would be the last time. “They knew I’d try to leave again, so they decided to bring me with a group of ‘lost boys’ to the United States,” Kur said.

Kur was brought to Philadelphia in 2001, where he said he was overwhelmed by the culture shock. “It was great—we didn’t know these types of things were real,” said Kur. “There was so much food. There were stores. You could go to school and nobody bombed you, no one was hurting anybody. It was a very big change.”

The move, Kur said, was both life-changing and live-saving. “My life didn’t have any meaning back home,” he said. “A lot of my friends back home committed suicide. You know you’re alive, but it is a painful life. I don’t know if I would have lived if they hadn’t brought me to the United States. It was very tough.”

Kur graduated from high school and attended college, all the while still hoping to find his family. In 2005, he received a fateful phone call. A friend in South Sudan with whom Kur had served in the army had met a young boy who turned out to be Kur’s brother—one he didn’t know existed. “I told him that I didn’t have a younger brother, but I knew that I had to talk to him,” he said.

After talking to him on the phone, Kur confirmed that he was his brother who had been born during his time in the army. And—after nearly 18 years—he finally learned that his parents and some of his siblings were alive. “Many others had been reunited with their families, and so I thought hopefully mine was safe somewhere. I always had hope—it was a big relief,” said Kur.

Because his family has no phone service in South Sudan, they must walk—literally for weeks—to Uganda to access telephone service. Kur finally spoke to his mother and a sister in 2008. “The family couldn’t believe I was alive—just as I couldn’t believe they were alive,” said Kur. “My funeral had already taken place.”

Kur will graduate in December from the University with a Master of Science in Leadership and said he wants to work to promote education for girls and women in his native country, where 92 percent of females cannot read or write. “I don’t want the same life for my children,” said Kur, who pays for his younger brother to attend school back home. “When the war ended in 2005 in Sudan, I decided to do something positive and to pursue my education to help at home. I want to change how education is provided to children back home.”

Out of the Impossible: The Hope of The Lost Boy is available on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.