Human Rights Office staffer has seen, lived the issues

law online and settling into his new office on the sixth floor of the Catholic Chancery offices in the Gillham Plaza Building. Last month Adier Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, joined the staff of the diocesan Human Rights Office.He was born near Bors in southern Sudan, and by age four was tending cows in the village, “a typical job” for boys. When the already 8-year-old Sudanese Civil War reached his village in 1989, four year old Adier was in a cattle camp with his 10 year old cousin Adier. The smaller boy’s mother had been killed by poison gas a year earlier and his cousin took care of him. His family fled in one direction and the two boys fled in another. Adier didn’t see his family again for 14 years.

The civil war in his homeland lasted for more than two decades. At least 500,000 people lost their lives during those years. Millions were displaced, having lost their homes and livelihoods. Villages were raided; government rations poisoned; slaves taken; people tortured and raped — entire families were wiped out. From the ruins of their homes a group of roughly 26,000 mostly male children ages 7-17 joined together in an attempt to survive. Aid workers called them the Lost Boys because of their resemblance to the band of orphaned boys in J.M Barrie’s tale, Peter Pan.
Adier and his cousin joined thousands of other refugees trekking hundreds of miles across deserts and rivers to Ethiopia. “We would be in a group of about 10,000 all walking in the same direction. We’d get separated and then meet again at stopping places. We made friends with those around us. Our leaders kept saying we’d go back home in a few days, and that gave us hope. But we kept going further away. The rebels in Ethiopia didn’t like us and pushed us back across the border in Sudan. So we followed the jungle into Kenya.”

They survived by eating leaves, roots, and discarded animal carcasses. About half the refugees didn’t make it. Those who did made their way to Kakuma Refugee Camp and the protection of the United Nations.

Adier and other survivors lived in the camp for several years. He worked with the Red Cross trying to trace his parents and brothers and sisters but with no success. Beginning in 1999, the U.N. and the U.S. State Dept. referred about 3,800 children and young adults to the United States for permanent resettlement. Those under 18 were placed with foster families. In 2000, Adier was resettled in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A Christian agency had matched him with a foster family and Adier moved in that November, shortly after he turned 15 and lived with them until he finished high school.

“It was a culture shock,” he recalled. “That winter was the first time I experienced cold weather and snow. But it was nice sleeping inside. The foods were different, of course. I tried a lot of foods. Pizza was one of my favorites!”

In Kenya, he had gone to school in the refugee camp, and learned to speak and write English — English as it is spoken and written in Great Britain. It took Adier until he finished high school to master the differences between British and American English.
After he graduated from high school, he enrolled at Aquinas College, a Dominican college in Grand Rapids. While in college, he applied to the Congressional Coalition on Adoptions Institute and was selected as a congressional intern, serving under Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan). He served in Washington, D.C., the summer before his senior year, May through August 2005, at Aquinas. He learned about policy formation, the nature of non-profits and their relationship to government. “Attending Senate hearings gave me the chance to see how it worked and opened my eyes to see things as they are.”

That same year, the Red Cross succeeded in tracing his parents and Adier traveled to Sudan to reunite and reconnect with them. His family — father, step-mother, six sisters and seven brothers — live in a refugee camp near the Ugandan border. An older sister lives in Australia.
After graduation from Aquinas, he attended John F. Kennedy University in Pleasant Hill, Calif., earning a Masters in Business Administration in 2008. Adier then found a job as a case manager for Refugee Services with Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas.

He likes Kansas City: it’s a great place with great people, and a few friends from Sudan who settled here, he said. “The people here are well-rounded and knowledgeable. And the economy is better than in other places I’ve seen. The environment is different, too. People know about issues in politics and religion and a lot of people want to help others. I see lots of smiles and hear a lot of ‘hellos.’”

Adier has stayed in contact with his family in Sudan, visiting them this past December. He sponsors nine children in Uganda, three of whom have graduated from high school. “There are still problems and injustices in Sudan,” he said, “a lot of issues in Darfur, but things are beginning to work out.”

Adier has been “busy since 2001,” the year after he came to the United States. His education — high school, college, an MBA and now law school — is very important to him. “I am one of the few from my village to go to school, to get an education,” he said. “I don’t want to fail my family or the others from my village, and they don’t want me to fail. In about 2 and a half or 3 years I will begin to study for the bar exam.”

He calls himself part of the “do-it-yourself demographic.” Adier speaks four languages, English, Dinka, Swahili and Arabic, much of it self-taught. He is enrolled in the Juris Doctorate online program at Concord Law School of California’s Kaplan University.

Adier enjoys watching baseball and soccer and visiting friends in his off-hours. “The World Cup was great,” he said. “I’m a big soccer fan, especially the team from Ghana. When I was in the refugee camp, I would buy gum packages with soccer cards in them. The cards had photos of players from Team Nigeria. I had hoped to see the U.S. team go farther than they did, but they played well.”

Adier plans to go into immigration law and continue to work in human rights. “Immigration, social justice, human trafficking, that’s what the Human Rights Office is all about. Legal issues, visas, deportations, it’s about people. You cannot eliminate people. It’s going to be interesting,” he said. “I see myself as a product of the system. I hope to do what I can to change things for people. To have an impact on anything you have to know something. You have to start somewhere, and this office is a good place to start.”