Helping the Lost Boys of Sudan

For the last four years David Turkon, an assistant professor of anthropology, has been doing volunteer work among unaccompanied minor Sudanese refugees known as the Lost Boys. A keen interest in Africa as well as a commitment to helping to solve problems that Africans face, such as poverty and HIV/AIDS, motivated Turkon to involve himself with African refugees in the United States. Turkon goes to Lesotho, in southern Africa, only every two or three years, but he says, “By working with refugees, I can make a difference in people’s lives on a daily basis.”

Turkon first got involved with the Lost Boys of Sudan while working with approximately 300 refugees in Phoenix, Arizona. As an applied anthropologist, his main interest was to help these refugees successfully settle and thrive in their new homes while maintaining their cultural identity. A primary way that he did this was by assisting in the formation and operation of a community center. His involvements in this area led him to be elected to the board of directors of the AZ Lost Boys Center (AZLBC), and he continues to serve on that board from Ithaca. Turkon was also instrumental in resolving disputes in areas where cultural differences led to misunderstandings. The expert witness testimony Turkon provided during several deportation hearings proved the impetus to dropping the deportation hearings. Since arriving in Ithaca, Turkon has become involved with the Central New York Lost Boys Foundation and has helped the nearly 200 refugees in this area define their community needs and move toward establishing a community center in Syracuse.

In 2004 Turkon successfully negotiated with Save the Children Sweden (SCS) to obtain a searchable database of approximately 18,000 files for Sudanese unaccompanied minor refugees for archiving and dissemination. This database contains files generated at refugee camps in Ethiopia as the refugees arrived after fleeing attacks near their home villages. Each file contains a photograph of the refugee as well as the individual’s full name, village of origin, circumstances of departure, escape routes, family members left behind, and the names of travel companions, including the circumstances of deaths for those who perished along the way. Since many of the refugees were children at the time of their arrival in the refugee camps and were traumatized by the circumstances of war, they may have poor recollection of their personal histories. These files hold the potential for many of these refugees to begin to reconstruct their lives. Turkon is the lead person on a project to make these files available to their owners. This summer he was awarded a grant for creative, collaborative, and community service and/or service learning through Ithaca College to move toward achieving this goal. With the help of Ithaca College computer science major T. J. Van Slyke, the database has been put into a searchable format and integrated into the AZLBC website.

Turkon finds that his work with the refugees has affected his teaching greatly, particularly in that it serves as an example of how to apply anthropological theories and methods to address problems in the real world. He has taken students from his Africa Seminar course to meet with refugees in Syracuse. “It was a remarkable experience for my students to learn firsthand about what led them to be refugees, what their experiences were in refugee camps, and the sorts of problems that they face in the U.S.”