A World Away

"I look in the mirror and I see my beautiful soul and I forgive, I forgive myself for this horrible life. And I realize that maybe that is my purpose. Maybe it is the reason I survived: so I could tell this story. I am still Riiny. I will always be Riiny, and nothing can ever take that away." Riiny Ngot

This is his retrospective feeling about himself, but it is of fairly recent origin. Since he was able to find and with that finding, repair a part of himself that had disappeared into a suffering black hole that might also have swept him into its deep, dark interior.

He was a child survivor of the most grippingly atrocious fate that could ever befall children. Torn from their families, in desperation for their lives, hunted by militias that were primed to slaughter and didn't care whose lives they were extinguishing, men, women or children, he fled along with countless other children. And he witnessed children attempting to cross between the border of Sudan and Ethiopia - across the Gila River - as many became the natural prey of crocodiles, turning the waters red and roiling.

A brutal civil war in Sudan victimized a young boy of eleven by the name of Riiny Ngot. He had, up until then, lived a privileged life, grandson of a chief. The town he was raised in was a large one, and because of his family's wealth he had social advantages and material possessions other children hadn't. He was, he believes in hindsight, not a 'nice' child; spoiled, arrogant, lazy. And then life became hell. And his live changed forever.

The horrors that were forced upon him, a child fleeing rampaging militias bent on murder, changed him forever, and haunts him yet, and always will. That eleven-year-old boy, fearful and alone, took it upon himself to swim across the Gilo River to seek sanctuary in a United Nations refugee camp located in Kenya; he was forced to cross from Sudan into Ethiopia and from there, Kenya. And he succeeded; he swam across the river that was red with the blood of other children, their fear-stricken, agonizing death cries ringing in his ears; determined to save himself, and his younger sister whom he had strapped to his back.

He is now a long way from Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya. Africa is now a far-off place that he has since returned to briefly, once he re-connected with the mother he was certain was lost to him forever, and with her travelled back to Sudan, to his family's ancestral village, as Dinka tribespeople, to meet up again with his father, another survivor of the deadly rampaging militias. Finding and embracing his mother and his father managed to restore to Riiny Ngot that vital portion of himself that he was convinced was missing. He is now, once again, a whole person.

But a vastly different one, he believes, than he might have been. "I would have been a different kind of person. I don't know what that person would have been, but I don't think I would have been a nice person." Where once it was assured that he would grow into adulthood, comfortable with his position in his society as a privileged elite who had little thought for those of lower caste and privileges, he is now growing comfortably into another kind of adulthood. Whose aspiration is to become a social worker, to do good things for other people.

"Now that I have my family the piece I lost is back together again. And I am going to hold my head up high, work hard, enjoy what I do - and never look back. This is Riiny now, all grown up."

For the time being, Africa's loss is Canada's gain. Riiny Ngot is a second-year sociology student at St.Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Long behind him is the grotesque horror of what he witnessed as a child fleeing death. The four years he spent in a refugee camp before an uncle sponsored and brought him and his sister to Canada represent the bleakly unspeakable past.

Like his father with whom he was re-united in the small home village of Hua, he is extremely tall, at 7'- 2". He is a half-foot taller than his father. And his father's recreational passion is running, while the son's newly-discovered passion is basketball. At St.Francis Xavier University, Riiny Ngot, sociology student, is a star basketball performer. He aspires to play professional basketball before embarking on a life-career geared toward helping people.

Now Riiny Ngot, while preferring not to speak about his past experiences and the horror they brought to his life, does still often agree, when asked, to visit area schools to speak before the student body about those very experiences. He also remembers the good things about his life in Sudan before the outbreak of civil war.

And he now sees value in his life where once he saw only dismal memories and himself as a Lost Boy; part of a tribe of orphaned Sudanese children whom civil conflict and tribal hatreds had cast adrift on a lonely sea of life.

Nance Ackerman for National Post

Read more: http://news.nationalpost.com/tag/riiny-ngot/#ixzz14XejStFi