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‘Lost Girl Found’ follows a Sudanese Lost Girl who seeks to escape her refugee camp and continue her education

Laura DeLuca, assistant professor adjunct in anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder, published a young adult novel that tells the often-overlooked story of one of the Lost Girls of Sudan and shines a light on the inadvertently competitive nature of asylum-seeking; it won a 2014 Colorado Book Award and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of its top 2014 book picks.

Set in a village as civil war spreads across southern Sudan, Lost Girl Found follows Poni’s journey from her village to the Kakuma Refugee Camp, then to Nairobi, Kenya, where she has the rare chance to interview for asylum in the United States.

DeLuca, who earned her Ph.D. at CU-Boulder (Anth’02), drew upon her experience as a Peace Corps volunteer and anthropological fieldworker in Kenya and Tanzania to write the book. Though she has not worked in Sudan, there are significant geopolitical links between Sudan, Kenya and Tanzania. All are former British colonies, and Swahili, the official language in Tanzania, is a secondary language in Kenya and South Sudan.

Upon returning to the United States in 2001 after her fieldwork in Tanzania, DeLuca experienced a kind of reverse culture shock.

So when she heard that the Lost Boys of Sudan, who made their way from Sudan to Nairobi, Kenya, and eventually to Colorado, would be at the Boulder Public Library in 2001, she went to meet them and to hear their stories.

“I needed to connect. I was going through culture shock myself,” DeLuca says.

She heard about the young men’s experiences at the Kakuma Refugee Camp and she kept wondering, “What would it be like for these young Sudanese to make this transition?”

DeLuca soon got to know a few members of this group, including Kur Anyieth Kur and  who were the first Lost Boys of Sudan to attend CU-Boulder.

In her Regional Cultures of Africa class, DeLuca began teaching her CU-Boulder students about the Lost Boys of Sudan.

“Students would ask, ‘What about the women? What happened to the girls?’” DeLuca says. “It made me say, ‘Good question.’ Well, what did happen?”

She started to dig deeper.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, only 89 women were originally resettled in the United States in 2001, compared to 3,600 men.

Media attention initially focused on the Lost Boys of Sudan, “who were impressive to visitors, well-spoken, wearing button-down shirts,” DeLuca says. Placed together in refugee camps, they were very visible and made a good story.

Women and girls fleeing from Sudan to Kenya were more often placed with foster families in the camps, who had more of a vested interest in keeping them quiet about their stories, so they could get bride prices, DeLuca says.

Women who applied for asylum had to leave the refugee camps in Kakuma and travel to Nairobi, where most aid organizations are located. Similarly, in Lost Girl Found, Poni flees not only the war in Sudan, but also Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, traveling to Nairobi, the capital.

It’s not just luck that distinguishes those refugees who get selected for resettlement, DeLuca says. “To successfully attain asylum, refugees must be able to advocate for themselves.”

They must interview several times with different gatekeepers or intermediaries, including U.N. officials. They must convince their interviewer that they have been persecuted.

"Refugees don’t just happen. It takes not just strength to cross a border, but also desire. Internationally displaced people must have a sense of urgency to go through with this whole process.”

The success of a refugee depends on “the ability to tell a coherent story and tell it consistently, which requires really good English and storytelling ability,” DeLuca says. “They have to be really consistent. They must tell and retell.”

DeLuca compares the selection process to a job interview in which refugees have to make a case for themselves over and over, and contradictions between each retelling are pointed out.

In the end, the gatekeepers can only grant asylum to a limited number of refugees. Whether they know it or not, refugees are competing with each other to get through that gate.

“Those who have better English skills and story-telling skills are often the ones with higher levels of education,” DeLuca says.

In many refugee situations, and certainly in the case of the Sudanese refugees, young men have received cultural preference and higher education levels than women and girls.

“Because boys got disproportionally educated, the girls were at a disadvantage,” DeLuca says.

Yet some Sudanese women and girls managed to cross the necessary borders and make the effort to find asylum. These women are the reason DeLuca wrote her book.

“Refugees don’t just happen. It takes not just strength to cross a border, but also desire,” DeLuca says. “Internationally displaced people must have a sense of urgency to go through with this whole process.”

Poni is a composite character of real Lost Girls, women refugees on the East Coast, with whom DeLuca met.

“In fiction, you can draw on some of the more inspiring stories, the resilience and the hardship,” DeLuca says.

Fiction also addresses the problem of interviewing someone about a history from 12 or more years ago. This is why DeLuca chose fiction over ethnography as the medium for this story.

“Anthropology can produce boring books. We wanted to write a more engaging book that would reach a broader audience,” DeLuca says. “We wanted to be accurate, but to find a way to say everything while keeping the story line in mind.”

She relied on her coauthor, fiction writer Leah Bassoff, to keep her ethnographic tendencies in check. Ethnography is the systematic study of people and cultures, designed to explore cultural phenomena as researchers observe societies from the point of view of the subject of the study.

The result is Lost Girl Found, which is something of a hybrid book. It still has an ethnographic glossary, and a timeline of Sudan’s civil war, so “the geopolitical and cultural context is accurate,” DeLuca says.

Now, she is devoting herself to shaking up paradigms about war-torn Africa.

“Coming off of writing the book, I’m really interested in positive things happening,” DeLuca says. “Can we talk about the successes and positives of the more than 50 countries in Africa?”

Her next project is to write vignettes about men and women in African countries doing exciting things locally, like social innovation projects and makers’ fairs, which celebrate arts, crafts, engineering and science projects and a do-it-yourself mentality.

Lara Herrington Watson is a CU alumna (’07) and freelance writer who splits her time between Denver and Phoenix.