In October 2002, I received a letter from a woman named Mary Williams, who introduced herself as the founder of an Atlanta-based organisation called the Lost Boys Foundation. In the letter, in surprisingly short order, she asked me to drop whatever I was doing and help a refugee from Sudan tell the story of his life. It was a pretty unusual letter. I had heard of the Lost Boys. There had been a slew of articles about them in the American media that year, and I read about the group with the same fascination as anyone else. I knew that 3,800 young Sudanese men - called Lost Boys because they had been unaccompanied minors for much of their 13 years in Ethiopian and Kenyan refugee camps - had recently been resettled in cities across the United States, in groups numbering from 20 to 400. I knew that the young men, as boys, had fled their villages in southern Sudan as the civil war raged in the mid-1980s, and that none had returned home since. They'd been placed in cities such as Jacksonville and Fargo and San Jose, areas chosen not for their similarity to Sudan, but for their affordability and positive attitude towards international immigrants. There were 180 Lost Boys in Atlanta, and the Lost Boys Foundation was active in helping them find jobs, mentors and educational opportunities...