Peter Nyoun marvels at comforts like a front door that he can lock at night and a gas stove on which to cook pasta. He dreams of being a waiter in a restaurant, yet he has never eaten at one.
Nyoun is trying to settle here in Pittsburgh, but it is not home.
Home is continents away in Bor Town, a village in the Upper Nile region of Sudan. He has not seen home since he was 9, when he ran from government soldiers who raided the church where he prayed with his family and shot him in the leg.
Nyoun, now 23, tells how he ran with a bullet in his left thigh, blindly leaving his family behind because there was only one other option:
'If you keep quiet and lay there ...' he trails off, making a slashing motion across his skinny neck.
The young man is thin and can only digest small portions of cheese-onion-and-tomato pizza he was eating one day last week. Too much food hurts his stomach after a decade of eating only one tiny meal a day and sometimes none at all.
'Now I want to eat everything, but I get full too fast,' he said.
Nyoun is constantly smiling and repeating phrases he hears. He recounts his life in Africa with dramatic hand gestures and what he calls 'European English,' which he learned in refugee camps and now speaks too quickly.
How Nyoun came to share an apartment in Whitehall - after living for nine years in a scorching hot refugee camp in Kenya, eating one meal a day of maize and occasionally lentils, sleeping on a straw mat in a tiny hut and living in fear of murderous rebels - is an improbable story of luck and endurance.
It is a story that could be told, more or less, 3,600 times.
That's how many of the 17,000 or so Sudanese boys, who lost their families and homes in southern Sudan because of civil war, are being resettled as young men in dozens of U.S. cities by the State Department.
They are all excited to begin work and don't bat an eye when told they will have to repay the $848 for a plane ride to America.
'Africa is not life,' Nyoun said while walking down Liberty Avenue, Downtown, to register with the state Department of Welfare. 'In Africa, there is no work, just violence. I want to work daily.'
These young men, now mostly between the ages of 18 and 25, were chased from their villages by bullets and bombs, shot for refusing to fight or because of their religious beliefs, running from the crossfire between the Arabic Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army.
The media dubbed the wanderers the 'Lost Boys' after the characters in the Peter Pan fairy tale, though there is nothing magical about their parentless and nomadic existence this last decade.
'That is what we are, lost. We are without mothers and fathers. We are without homes. We live by foot,' Nyoun said.
He is one of 16 'Lost Boys' now resettled in Pittsburgh by Catholic Charities of the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, a branch of the U.S. Catholic Conference that was contracted by the State Department to handle the resettlement.
The first, James Luk, has a warehouse job and lives in the same apartment complex as the others. Kuc Kuc, 24, the oldest in Pittsburgh and a sort of father figure to the others, works in a wood factory. Athian Athian - who records say is 21, although he claims to be younger - works an afternoon shift opening mail at Mellon Bank.
The ones who have been here the longest laugh off their early misunderstandings, like being confused by light switches, ceiling fans and stoves. But for the recent arrivals, each day brings a new discovery.
'This I still don't know,' said Nyoun's roommate, Gabriel Deng, 22, pointing at the ceiling fan in his new apartment.
Nyoun, Deng and three others arrived at Pittsburgh International Airport on May 8 and spend their days getting acclimated to their surroundings. They fill out paperwork for Catholic Charities, devour English as a Second Language classes and play basketball.
Soon they will begin preparing for high school equivalency courses and interviewing for jobs. Catholic Charities has provided them with furnished apartments and will support them financially for up to six months.
'You have to assume they know almost nothing,' said Tony Turo, director of refugee services for Catholic Charities.
Linh Quach-Langenbacher, the group's coordinator of refugee services, explained to the newest arrivals several days ago that the furnishings in the apartments they are sharing are theirs to keep.
'If you decide to move away from Pittsburgh, everything in there is yours,' she told them.
Nyoun didn't understand.
'We cannot leave here now,' he told her. 'It is too nice.'
For now, they must learn how to board a bus, shop for groceries and do their laundry, things they had not done before arriving in Pittsburgh.
'Electricity is a neat thing for them,' Quach-Langenbacher said. 'Finding out how to operate the stove was interesting to them. They're fascinated with learning public transportation. They're trying to go as often as they can so they can learn their routes.'
On the trip from the airport, Nyoun was baffled by streetlights.
'Who is changing those?' he asked his Catholic Charities caseworker, Anis Bajramovic.
Their innocence is understandable.
Deng fled his home near the Sudanese capital of Khartoum late one night in 1988 when soldiers shot up and burned his village. He joined up with other boys, most of them between the ages of 7 and 17, as they walked without direction.
There were more than 17,000 'Lost Boys,' walking and sometimes fleeing. They staggered along to U.N. refugee camps in Ethiopia, only to be forced out in the early 1990s. They returned to Sudan and were driven south into Kenya, where they arrived at Kakuma and lived until their resettlement began last November.
'They journeyed more than 1,000 kilometers in four months to reach Ethiopia. In 1991 and '92, they returned to Sudan and then went on to northern Kenya,' said State Department spokeswoman Sandy Dean. 'About 7,000 of them came to live in Kakuma. Along the trip many of them came to die of hunger, disease or being eaten by animals.'
Many were converted to Christianity at the refugee camps in Ethiopia. Nyoun read his Bible all the time, but said it was only luck that kept him alive on the journey.
They spent days on end without food, water or family. They trudged down dusty roads, avoiding villages where soldiers shot boys who did not want to fight.
'If you do not want that, they shoot at you,' Deng said.
Nyoun remembers running from soldiers for 15 days straight at one point. Helicopters bombed the trail of boys from overhead.
'Enemies are all around,' he said, spreading his arms wide. 'You do not worry about food or water, you worry about where you are going to hide at night. In bushes, yes. If you are lazy, you will be dead.'
The dangers they faced weren't only human in nature.
Exhausted boys were eaten by lions and pulled under water by crocodiles while crossing a river into Sudan. Some sat down along the way to die of starvation.
'Someone who cannot be lucky is dead,' Nyoun explained.
Once they reached Kakuma, they were given small mats to sleep on and packed into tiny huts.
'This is bigger than what we have in Kakuma,' Nyoun said, pointing to a Toyota Corolla while walking near his apartment.
The 'Lost Boys' came to rely on each other, as there were more than 70,000 refugees from several African countries living there. The boys were all members of the Dinka tribe, and they became each other's family.
'These are my brothers, we are all brothers,' Nyoun said.
That extended family substitutes for his real family, lost in 1987 when he fled Bor Town.
'My mother is dead in 1980. My father is alive, but I do not know where,' he said. The men plan to attempt to reach their families once they are settled here. 'We shall decide to contact them. We will be trying to see them.'
They were brought here because there was no hope of going home. The ongoing civil war is too brutal.
'They didn't know what else to do, so they ran,' said the Catholic Charities' Turo. 'If they returned there, they would probably not be permitted to marry women of their society. They would be outcasts.'
Here in Pittsburgh they will go to school and work. Nyoun would like to go on to a university and study engineering, though he plans to return home one day.
'I want to be an engineer,' he said, 'to go build my nation, Sudan.'
Marc Lukasiak can be reached at mlukasiak@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7939.
