Author Description

"Sometimes, as we walked through the jungle, I looked up into the sky and asked God for His help. Once, I saw a thin, white line against the blue - an airplane flying somewhere I guessed with many people on board, all of them leaving one place to arrive safely in another place. I prayed the pilot would see us and send someone to our rescue, but there was no response to my prayer. Nobody came. I wondered who on earth could help us when it seemed God could not." In 1987, a young South Sudanese boy named Yai Atem is driven from his village by advancing government militia, hell bent on surmounting a rebellion by the Sudan People's Liberation Army against religious and political oppression from the north. Yai and thousands of other young boys and girls run for hours and then days with the army at their heels, plunging deeper and deeper into unfamiliar country, until they find themselves too far from home to safely return to their families. Thus begins Yai's incredible journey on foot across South Sudan and Ethiopia, a trek lasting several years, in which he and his friends face starvation, dehydration, disease, malnutrition and attacks by wild animals and prowling militia. Of twenty thousand Lost Boys and girls who flee their homes during the Second Sudanese Civil War, over half do not survive their desperate flight to freedom. Many years after he and other Lost Boys of Sudan are rescued and repatriated across the world by the UNHCR, Yai Atem tells this confronting and powerful story with equal parts honesty and humility, inspiring all who hear it with a deep sense of awe in the strength of the human spirit, and in the essential power of hope. All profits from the sale of Yai's book will fund a community development project in Southern Sudan. For more about Yai Atem, photos and to support Yai's community development project in Sudan, please visit www.yaiatem.com