A 'Lost Boy' finds Vermont

This "Lost Boy" from Somalia is one of about 150 Sudanese refugees who have settled in Vermont. There are many things they have to learn to deal with, the first is the weather. The Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program has helped them learn and assimilate. DP

By KEVIN O’CONNOR, Staff Writer

Alex Pial doesn’t know much about Samuel de Champlain, who made history 400 years ago as the first explorer to sail the Vermont lake that now bears his name.

But Pial knows how it feels to discover a new world.

Growing up in the African country of Sudan, the 29-year-old was a child when civil war broke out a quarter-century ago. Separated from his family after militiamen stormed his village in 1987, he became one of at least 20,000 orphaned “Lost Boys” who walked hundreds of miles over dry, desolate plains in search of safety.

Surviving the threat of lions and land mines, Pial fended for himself for a dozen years in refugee camps in the neighboring nations of Ethiopia and Kenya. Then, on Valentine’s Day 2001, he was relocated to Vermont.

Explorers, early settlers and subsequent waves of immigrants have viewed America as a proverbial rainbow leading to a pot of gold. But upon his arrival, Pial saw only white. It wasn’t just all the people as light as he is dark, but something more foreign to him: winter.

“It snow all day,” recalls the young man who grew up speaking Arabic (Sudan’s primary language) and Dinka (his tribal tongue). “You can see out the window — the road’s all covered. I keep on asking my host family, ‘How do you get out?’”

They pointed to a plow truck, something as strange to him as the houseful of electrical appliances he never encountered in an African mud hut. Cold and confused, Pial and his fellow refugees considered leaving.

“We say, ‘Let’s see for a couple of days — it may change.’”

That year it snowed in February. And March. And April.

“Then in May, you could see the flowers.”
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