Sitting in a community center in Phoenix, where thousands of Sudanese refugees have resettled, Mr. Deng recently examined documents about his war-torn childhood that he had never seen. They were based on an interview that field workers with the Swedish branch of Save the Children International conducted with him in 1989 at a refugee camp in Ethiopia. He was just a scared boy of about 14 at the time.
The papers said he was born in a village called Thur Kuol in the Bahr al-Gazal region of southwestern Sudan. The documents listed Mr. Deng’s relatives and recounted how he tended cattle before civil war drove him from his family. He had explained to the interviewers that he fled with other Lost Boys to avoid being kidnapped by soldiers from northern Sudan.
