Valentino Achak Deng
A "Lost Boy" of Sudan who turned his own survival story into schools back home
Valentino Achak Deng was a small child in the village of Marial Bai when it was attacked during Sudan's second civil war in the mid-1980s, and he became separated from his parents in the chaos. He joined the exodus of thousands of unaccompanied boys who walked for weeks across the country to refugee camps in Ethiopia and then Kenya, a journey that killed many of the boys who set out with him, from starvation, exhaustion, wild animals and crossfire. He spent roughly a decade in the Kakuma camp in Kenya before being resettled in the United States in 2001 as one of the "Lost Boys of Sudan."
In Atlanta he met the writer Dave Eggers, who spent years interviewing him and turned his story into the 2006 novel What Is the What, narrated in Deng's voice and published with his cooperation. Deng and Eggers agreed the book's proceeds would go toward rebuilding South Sudan rather than to Deng personally, and used them to establish the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation in 2006.
The foundation built the Marial Bai Secondary School in his home village, which grew to include a library, dormitories and a teacher-training programme, later ranked among the country's best schools, in a region where his own childhood had offered no schooling at all.