printable versionFrom refugee camp to Creative Writing Program, a 'Lost Boy' earns his diploma
BY BARBARA PALMER
Samuel Garang Akau, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English, first read a novel, Animal Farm, while in a refugee camp in Kenya.
It's hard to read when you are hungry, recalls Samuel Garang Akau, remembering the years he spent in school in a refugee camp in Kenya. Akau, a native of south Sudan who graduated on Sunday with a bachelor's degree in English, ran away from his home village at the age of 8, fleeing the violence of Africa's longest-running civil war.
Like thousands of other children, Akau then wandered from village to village, leaving each when it became dangerous. At the Kenyan refugee camp where Akau arrived in 1995, tens of thousands of refugees usually had one meal every day, but sometimes there was nothing to eat for two or three days, Akau said. When they were too hungry to read or study, Akau and his friends would tell one another stories, he said.
In the five years that he has spent in the United States, Akau, 24, has often been referred to as one of the "Lost Boys of Sudan." But the soft-spoken graduate seemed anything but that as he prepared for Commencement last week.
The student who first read a novel—Animal Farm—as a teenager in the camp, where as many as 30 students shared one book, began writing fiction here in the Creative Writing Program. He was awarded second place in the Creative Writing Program's 2006 Bocock/Guerard Fiction Prize for a short story, "A Seed Fallen Upon a Rock." It tells of two brothers, one who joins the militia in the Sudan and another who stays home and imagines his brother's experiences.
A founding member of the Stanford chapter of Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND), which works to end the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, Akau plans to return to southern Sudan to find a job in a nongovernmental organization dedicated to improving education or economic development. The biggest challenge there is the lack of infrastructure, he said. "There are no hospitals, no schools and no water," he said.
For now, he is looking for a job here, where he plans to stay until he acquires U.S. citizenship. He needs a paycheck not just to buy food and pay rent, but for the school fees he pays for a brother and five cousins in Africa. Akau's parents are dead and one brother was killed in the war. With the deaths of so many men in southern Sudan, "I have lots of people to take care of. There are wives and children with nobody to take care of them," Akau said. He could get a higher paying job in the United States and send money home, "but it will be good for [his relatives] emotionally if I am there." Akau eventually plans to return to the United States to go to graduate school when his brother finishes school, but for now "there are more pressing things."
And Akau plans to continue writing, "at least four or five novels. And a memoir," he said. It will be "not my story alone, but the story of a lot of people," Akau said.
Despite the hardship of the camp, Akau also remembers it as "a very hopeful place," rich in friendship and storytelling. (The dialogue in Akau's prize-winning story was "a real strength," said Jones Lecturer Tom Kealey, who was Akau's teacher in a writing workshop.) Even the years spent moving from village to village were made easier by the Sudanese emphasis on storytelling and extending hospitality to strangers, Akau said.
"The way I grew up was a difficult situation, but people were making sacrifices for others," he said. He is indebted to many people here who contributed to the cost of his tuition and encouraged him, he said. Akau transferred to Stanford from De Anza College, where he earned a 3.9 average.
As an undergraduate, Akau learned to love, in particular, the writing of Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Ishmael Reed and Edward Albee, he said. And his favorite, Thomas Jefferson.
He likes to think of how the future of a nation was based on the ideas of men like Jefferson and James Madison, Akau said. American history gives him hope, he added. "Every country at some point has gone through trouble," he said. Resolving problems "is a matter of whether people are committed and willing to do something about it."
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