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Gai Nyok, one of 25,000 Sudanese orphaned by civil war—better known as the “lost boys”—has been sworn in as foreign-service officer for the U.S. State Department.
Gai, now 29, fled his village of Abang in what is now South Sudan at the age of 5 and trekked more than 1,500 kilometers (almost 1,000 miles) to a refugee camp in Ethiopia. In 2001, he was granted asylum to the United States, where he was later taken in by an American family, completed high school, and won a scholarship to earn his bachelor’s degree at Virginia Commonwealth University. He went on to be a Thomas R. Pickering fellow, a government program that prepares young graduates for a career in the foreign service.
In late October, Gai was sworn in at as a U.S. diplomat and will be traveling to Venezuela, his first assignment, next summer.
A former Sudanese "lost boy" is now a US diplomat https://t.co/AJsTBE2AtZ via @qzafrica pic.twitter.com/8d2g8qzSvj
— Quartz Africa (@qzafrica) November 9, 2015
About 4,000 lost boys were resettled in the United States. As they have entered adulthood, their success stories have been publicized as testaments to the U.S. amnesty program for children orphaned by the second Sudanese civil war that killed an estimated 2 million people between the 1983 and 2005. Another former refugee, Majur Juac, has gone from working as a security guard to becoming a chess champion and teacher in New York City.
