DEL.ICIO.USIn Atlanta, war-scarred ‘Lost Girl’ on a quest
A reign of terror shattered her world. Then American gave her a chance. Abuk Wach is desperate not to waste it.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Friday, September 19, 2008
Abuk Wach gazes up at the trigonometry formulas she has hung, in all their sine and cosine glory, from the ceiling above her bed.
“We had a test last Friday,” the Conyers senior says, eyeing the mathematical mobile in March. “I got a 75.”
Rich Addicks/raddicks@ajc.com
Abuk Wach (in yellow dress) is not a party girl. The 19-year-old, a refugee from Sudan’s bloody persecution of its racial and religious minorities, didn’t have a date for the Heritage High prom and recalls feeling down. But a favorite song got her to kick up her heels with friend Felicia Guest. The next day, she was back to finding a college that would admit her.
Rich Addicks/raddicks@ajc.com
Abuk Wach is all smiles after receiving her diploma from Heritage High School, something that just a few years ago seemed an impossibility. As Abuk and her classmates marched into the gymnasium that evening, the band played, ‘Climb Every Mountain.’ Wach plans on attending college, hoping one day to return to Sudan as a health professional.
If grades were based on studying, Abuk would be valedictorian at Heritage High. But the Sudanese refugee is still mastering English and is a terrible test taker. The stress has only added to her sleepless nights. And Abuk has many of those.
Burned into her mind are some of the world’s most traumatic images, including the 1991 massacre that uprooted her from Bor, a village in southern Sudan. She saw men gutted, women floating like rafts down the Nile and hyenas pulling the meat off both. Once, she discovered the bodies of three children.
“They were all in bed,” she says. “They were all cut up.”
Abuk (pronounced a-BEWK) survived a journey chronicled in books and movies as that of “The Lost Boys of Sudan.” Hers is the lesser-known female version — with an extraordinary American twist.
Abuk’s knees bear the scars of a youth on the run, from bombs and bullets, lions and crocodiles, and the tribal warriors who orphaned her in the Sudanese night. Yet the last time she was really sore came during a ski trip to Colorado.
She learned volleyball between blinding sandstorms on a dusty lot in Kenya. Then she lettered for the varsity in Conyers.
She’s the eldest daughter in a prominent Rockdale County family that is building an orphanage in Kenya. And she’s a refugee.
Abuk lives in two worlds.
One speaks Dinka, suffers a haunting history and values women for childbearing. The other roots for “Yellow Jackets” from box seats, vacations in Hawaii and offers Abuk educational opportunities she never thought possible.
Her worst fear is that she’ll wake up one day belonging to neither.
Abuk wants to earn a nursing degree in America, then return to Africa, a place that will desperately need her skills. That must be why God showed her humanity’s worst, she believes, then carried her safely across the Atlantic.
But two months before high school graduation, Abuk senses a kink in her grand plan. She’s yet to crack 1,000 on the SATs. The college rejection letters are piling up.
She grabs an accordion folder of vocabulary cards. There are so many words to learn, especially for someone whose formal education didn’t start until age 10. But she doesn’t have the energy to study them today. “My sleep,” she says, “wasn’t good.”
It doesn’t seem fair that Abuk should be held back now by the same attackers who sent her screaming into the bush. But that’s exactly what happens each time a nightmare robs her of sleep and makes it harder to study the next day.
When the dead come back, Abuk lurches toward the bedside table. Her heart still racing, she flicks on the lamp.
Then she stares up at the trig mobile, filling her mind with the future and trying, best she can, to forget the past.
Scars, silence, and ridicule
The teacher laid down a challenge: Show me your best scar. And the exercise, meant to stimulate discussion, brought the Family Living class to life with tales of bicycle crashes, roller-skating accidents and slides into home plate.
Abuk, however, wasn’t sure what to do. She had wounds alright. But she didn’t get them playing. The shy sophomore wanted to prove she was similar to her new classmates at Heritage High, not different.
Reluctantly, Abuk pulled up her right pantleg, exposing puffy wounds on her knee.
She got them at age 4, she explained, as Arabs from largely Muslim northern Sudan attacked villages in the Christian and animist south. Some boys survived because they were out tending cattle. Most Dinka girls were killed, enslaved or sold as brides. Abuk was different — too young to work or fetch a dowry, yet old enough to run.
One night, Abuk told the class, she and her starving band of refugees stopped to cook a cow. The civil war had reignited rifts between cow-herding tribes, and members of the rival Nuer leaped from bushes, their murderous howls mixing with the rat-tat-tat of machine guns. They trampled Abuk, but she peeled herself off the ground. In the darkness, she kept falling, skidding on her knees across the African bush.
As Abuk finished her story, an awkward silence descended over the classroom. No one, not even the teacher, knew what to say.
In Africa, Abuk had been an invisible “Lost Girl,” expected to carry water jugs on her head and fuelwood in her arms for the boys who dominated the refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya. She hadn’t fit in, either, in the year since she arrived in an America that had known 3,700 Lost Boys but only 89 Lost Girls. She had bounced from a Clarkston apartment to homes in Decatur, Lawrenceville and, now, here in Conyers, 20 miles east of Atlanta.
After class, as her story gained a second life in the hallways, Abuk’s heart sank. A group of freshmen made funny faces at her in the cafeteria. “Did you get shot or something?” one boy laughed.
In the cliquish world of high school, Abuk had stamped herself with an untouchable label: freaky refugee.
Finding a home
Abuk’s skin is impossibly black, her smile impossibly white. She stands straight as a spear, with posture perfected under the weight of 10-gallon jugs. Silence is her shield. She’s doll-quiet in designer clothes. Given time, however, the real Abuk emerges. She is adventurous. And witty. The spear has a sharp tip.
Abuk captivated Jeff Beech the day they first met in 2005. They were at Dream House, a Lilburn nonprofit that helps medically fragile children. Jeff chaired its board; Abuk was an aide. The two bonded over Kenya, where Abuk had lived as a refugee and Jeff’s family is helping build an orphanage.
Jeff, 44, isn’t rash. The Georgia Tech grad has made a career specializing in planning – first as a management consultant with Accenture, now as head of his family’s foundation, dedicated to helping Christian nonprofits. Yet Jeff’s impulse told him to invite Abuk into his family.
Jeff and Greta Beech already had four children between the ages of 9 and 15. How, they wondered, would their oldest daughter, Bethany, react if 16-year-old Abuk took her spot in the hierarchy? A fun-loving, award-winning athlete, Bethany has Down’s syndrome.
The Beeches invited Abuk up for a weekend at their mountain retreat in North Carolina. And, by the end, they were convinced: this youngest of six in Africa was born to be a big sister in America.
Abuk liked what she saw, too. The Beeches shared her deep Christian faith and a bond with Africa. The Beech Foundation was spearheading an effort to build a school in Nakuru, Kenya, and expand an orphanage to house 400 children.
So when the Beeches popped the question, Abuk’s answer had been immediate.
Two weeks later, she found herself inside their Conyers estate, whose wrap-around porch peers out over a vast meadow that once held cotton. There was a pool out back. And a white picket fence in front. A dog named Tara chased cats in between.
Jeff and Greta sat Abuk down at the kitchen table. One important detail remained.
“Abuk,” Jeff asked. “What do you want to call us?”
Abuk blurted out the two words she’d dreamed of using together but never could.
“Mom,” she said, “and Dad.”
True sisterhood
Abuk sits quietly in Sunday school, at Smyrna Presbyterian Church in Conyers. She shares an old wooden pew with her sister Bethany, who smacks her gums on a sweet bun and hikes up her floral dress to sit cross-legged.
Abuk barely says a word. She doesn’t need to.
“Abuk’s graduating May 23rd!” Bethany announces to each teen who enters. Bethany can’t help herself. Another boy comes in. “Abuk’s graduating! On the 23rd!”
Abuk breaks into laughter, as does Bethany. One amazing smile – a white crescent in the ebony – meets another: braces of joy.
Much to everyone’s amazement, the two have grown uncommonly close in the three years since Abuk joined the Beech family. It’s like they have a deal. Abuk, robbed of a normal childhood, counts on Bethany to bring out the little girl in her. And Bethany, denied a conventional adulthood, relies on Abuk to lure out the young lady budding inside.
When dining out, it is Abuk, now 20, who politely reminds Bethany to push her glasses up on her nose. At home, it is Bethany who jumps onto a wooden chest in her bedroom and yanks Abuk into her High School Musical. “You are the music in me, ” she sings. “It’s like I knew you before we met.”
In each other they have found something that, for very different reasons, has been elusive: a reliable friend.
So when the Sunday school teacher, Kenny Jones, asks for prayer requests, Bethany raises her hand.
“I want to pray for Abuk,” she says. “She’s graduating in May!”
Abuk doubles over in embarrassed laughter, and Jones writes her name on the chalkboard.
Then, without knowing it, Jones asks the question that haunts Abuk these days. “Have you picked a college?”
College, to Abuk, is about much more than education. In her mind, it has grown into a passport to acceptance. But the kitchen garbage has filled with the stationery of rejection, from the likes of Kennesaw State, the University of the South and Georgia College & State University.
So Abuk smiles politely at Jones and, in her best no-big-deal voice, tells him the truth: “I made my choice, but I didn’t get in.”
Jones bows his head. He asks God to help those searching for guidance as they enter a new phase of life. Abuk locks hands with Bethany.
And they pray.
Embracing the past
Abuk shudders at the request. The teacher, Carol Ingle, wants to read her college application essay out loud.
Abuk’s mind flashes back to her sophomore year, when she shared a piece of her history in another of Mrs. Ingle’s classes, only to feel more foreign as a result.
Since then, Mrs. Ingle has grown into Abuk’s favorite teacher, a protector who helps her navigate pop quizzes, college applications and other unfamiliar terrain. Abuk loves watching her bound between walls that hold inspirational quotes from the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Mrs. Ingle has cultivated in Abuk a belief that “what lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” So it pains Abuk to say this, especially in front of the other students in her Teacher Education class.
“No.”
Abuk stares around the classroom. And the other girls’ eyes say it all: She has let them down.
Abuk knows that look. She has used it herself, on kids who don’t try in school, who don’t know they’re talented, who throw away opportunities children around the world would die for. It’s the look you give someone who has something special but, for whatever reason, pushes it away.
Then, out of the blue, Abuk points across the room at Karen Tuck. Mrs. Ingle can read my essay aloud, Abuk says, but only if Karen sings.
Karen has shared her dream: to perform on American Idol. But the petite blonde has stage fright to go with her velvety voice. The girls have begged, but she has never performed for them.
Until now.
To everyone’s surprise, Karen stands up. Self-conscious, she turns her back to the girls. Then she takes a deep breath and belts out what everyone will remember as the most incredible rendition of “Lean on Me.” She sits down and faces Mrs. Ingle.
“Read it,” Karen says.
Mrs. Ingle starts with the night Abuk’s uncle grabbed her by the hand, in the southern Sudanese village of Bor, when Abuk was just 3. “Unfortunately, I heard a gun roar behind us and within a fraction of a second, a bullet landed in front of us,” Mrs. Ingle reads. “Since that night, I have not seen or heard from father and several other relatives. Since my mum had already passed away, before these attacks, now I felt lost.”
Abuk looks for reactions from the other girls as they learn more about her journey. ” When we did not flee, we lived under trees … As time passed, I began wanting to go to school, but there were no schools.”
By the time Mrs. Ingle finishes, the girls have pulled their chairs in tight around Abuk. Some have tears in their eyes.
After class, the girls invite Abuk to eat lunch with them in the cafeteria. One troubled student even approaches Mrs. Ingle to express admiration. If Abuk can stay upbeat, after all she’s been through, then so can I, she says.
Abuk is proud — and surprised. This time, her scars have given voice to one student and focus to another.
Now, Abuk thinks, if they can just get her into college.
Honoring her culture
The distant drumbeat tells Abuk she’s late for Sunday service. But at least she’s here. Her attendance has waned recently at the church in Stone Mountain. And some Dinka elders have taken notice.
Abuk attends her family’s church more regularly than she makes it to this one. She drives her own car, a GMC Tracker. She wears catalog clothes and Stonecrest Mall jewelry.
“They say I’m losing my culture,” Abuk says.
Yet, inside St. Michael & All Angels Episcopal Church, she feels immediate communion with the nearly all-male congregation. She takes her place on the right side of the church, a few rows back from the only other women. Nearly all of the 50 or so worshipers sit across the aisle, on the side reserved for men.
Abuk didn’t sing the contemporary Christian songs earlier in the morning at her family’s church. That music is still foreign to her. Here, she knows every word. She cups the Dinka hymnal with both hands, her thumbs holding back the pages.
God sent Jesus for a reason, the pastor says, and God has sent the Dinka on a mission, too. “In the next 10 years, you must do something to better yourself,” he preaches in Dinka. “Sometimes the only ones who have food are those who store seed for the next season.”
In a few weeks, Abuk will return to Africa for the first time, as part of the Beeches’ annual mission trip to Nakuru, Kenya. She will spend two weeks helping orphans in the country that sheltered her as an orphan. Then, with camera in hand, she will hunt the lions who once hunted her.
Abuk wants to travel to Sudan, too. But Jeff and Greta agree: It’s too dangerous.
“Maybe next time,” Abuk says with sadness.
She hasn’t been able to get word of her trip to her brother Isaac or her sister Teresa in Sudan. Nor has she reached Uncle Abraham, whose shoulder was her lifeboat on a soggy slog away from death. What will they say of the little sister who comes all the way to Africa but doesn’t see them? Has she forgotten her roots?
Abuk was born in a place where less than 1 percent of girls finish primary school. She had so hoped to return to Africa holding a college acceptance letter.
It was to be her seed.
Two worlds become one
The Heritage High band strikes up “Climb Every Mountain,” and Abuk marches into the gymnasium, gliding into a sea of blue caps and gowns. She sits at the foot of the stage and faces an American flag. Then she peeks back at her cheering section: Bethany claps. Mom rings a cow bell. Dad raises a zoom lens.
Standing tall next to them is Abuk’s brother, Joseph Wach.
It was Joseph who came to America first and logged overtime in an Arizona ice cream cone factory so Abuk could attend school near the refugee camp in Kenya. He flew in from Nebraska, where he now works at a pork processing plant, and bought a digital camera shortly after getting off the plane. “I will send all pictures to brother Isaac,” he says of their sibling still in Sudan.
Joseph also is representing two brothers who didn’t survive to see this day. One died fleeing the violence with Abuk. The other was the primary applicant for the visa that helped propel her across the Atlantic. In a cruel twist, he died from an intestinal disorder the very week he and Abuk qualified for refugee visas.
Six years later, as the National Anthem echoes through the “Home of the Patriots,” Abuk takes a big step, not just for her, but him. She walks across the stage and trades a handshake for a diploma.
Abuk salutes the cheering crowd, then heads for the cafeteria, where family and friends shower her with hugs and photos. She looks triumphant.
The moment is perfect if not for one detail. On a wall near the front office, blue mortarboard cutouts hold the names of college-bound graduates and the institutions they’ll attend.
Abuk’s name is nowhere to be found.
Later in the evening, back at home, Abuk sits on the living room’s stone hearth and unwraps gifts. She is surrounded by her blended family — brother Joseph, cousin Michael, the Beeches and her American grandparents.
Abuk is surprised to see the label on one present. It’s from Mom and Dad. She thought her upcoming trip to Kenya had been her only graduation gift from them.
“Oh my God,” she exclaims, peeling back the wrapping paper. “A laptop!”
Then Abuk does something that causes jaws to drop. It’s a gesture born of an exuberant American teenager still in touch with her African soul.
The room erupts into cheers. “Go Abuk,” Joseph yells.
Abuk struts across the living room, hands at her side. She’s balancing the laptop on her head.
Epilogue
Abuk’s summer trip to Africa was an emotional one. A visit to a refugee camp, though it was for internally displaced Kenyans, brought back painful memories left in the sub-Saharan soil. Not seeing her closest family members hurt, too.
But Abuk’s journey ended on a high note: She learned by cellphone that an acceptance letter had arrived at home from Georgia Gwinnett College.
Suddenly, leaving Africa again seemed easier.
Things only got better after Abuk returned to Atlanta. She was admitted to a second school, Gordon College, which has the kind of specialized nursing program Abuk has sought all along. Last month, Jeff and Greta moved her into a home that overlooks the Barnesville campus, 60 miles south of Atlanta. They explained how to fill an iron with water and why there’s a campus seminar called “How to Survive the Freshman 15.”
Before leaving, Jeff quietly christened the new whiteboard in Abuk’s room. “Welcome to Gordon, Abuk!” he wrote. When Abuk noticed the message, she stopped everything and, for the longest time, just smiled.
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