Luck amid violence
NEEDHAM - Two years ago, Adut Ayuel was living in Kenya's sprawling, desolate Kakuma refugee camp with what was left of her family. Marauders had destroyed their house and killed her father, one of the hundreds of thousands lost to Sudan's decades-long civil war.
A brother and a sister had sneaked away years earlier, before Adut was born - two among the thousands of Lost Boys and Girls who walked for months in search of safety. Years later, they found homes a planet away, in Massachusetts.
Only her mother was left to protect Adut, 12 at the time, and her sisters, from the men who would sell them into marriage, and from the machine-gun toting bandits - "The drrrrr-drrrrr-drrrrr people," Adut calls them - who came into the camp at night to rob and kill.
"It was a tough life, but it was OK," she says.
"Not really OK."
One day, Adut's mother was bitten by a black mamba snake lurking in a UN-issued bundle of wood. She died within days.
The grieving sisters cut off their hair. Relatives came to mourn with them. And then they were left alone.
Adut's oldest sister, Yar, living in Arlington by now, knew the girls were in danger. She was desperate to get them out of Kakuma.
But the UN is strained beyond its capacity, struggling so hard to process refugees that thousands of resettlement slots go unfilled each year. The orphaned girls did not get out.
"The bad people came a few days later," Adut says. "They whupped me first." Then they attacked her older sister Ayak.
Yar turned to an organization called Mapendo International - founded in Cambridge to rescue African refugees who were falling through the cracks - to do what the UN could not: Director Sasha Chanoff convinced a former colleague to fly the girls to Nairobi.
A few months later, Adut and Ayak were resettled in Massachusetts.
Tall, with short braids and a ready hug, Adut, 13, has spent the last 16 months living with a foster family in Needham.
She has learned thousands of English words, overcome her horror at the sight of lobsters, and amassed such an impressive collection of dolls that she has retired the oldest of them, "because I'm grown up now," she says.
She has learned why it rains and how candles work and that there is another explanation for the sun and the moon rising besides God personally placing them in the sky each day.
She has taken up field hockey, and lacrosse, and swimming, and basketball and can run faster than a lot of boys. When she goes back to the Charles River School in a few days, she will be trying to complete fifth and sixth grades in the same year.
She worries that she will forget her Dinka language soon. She will need it after she grows up and goes back to Sudan to help others, and to confront the people who attacked her.
"They are still in my house," Adut says. "I'm going to be so mad when I go back to Africa and see these people."
So many miracles brought Adut to this new life: That her sister Yar lived to finish her long trek to safety when so many other children perished; that Adut survived the civil war, and the attack in Kakuma; that Chanoff was able to get her out of the camp.
Sitting with this smiling girl in her gracious new home, you are struck by how unlikely her extraordinary journey has been.
And by how many children just like her are left behind - tens of thousands of Aduts, in Sudan, and in refugee camps in Kenya and Chad, as the massacres in Darfur continue, and tensions rise again between the north and the south.
And you wonder whether there are miracles enough to save them, too.
Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. Her e-mail is Abraham@globe.com 