Mike Delorenzo served as a pilot with Aim Air in Kenya. Some of his passengers’ stories touched a chord and brought out the journalist in him. One such story was of passenger Panther Bior, one of Sudan’s famous ‘Lost Boys’. 

Panther Bior tugged at my elbow. “How many more miles?” he asked. I looked at the GPS, turned back toward him and shouted above the roar of the Cessna Caravan engine, “Fifteen.” “Fifteen,” he repeated and paused thoughtfully, “that is good.” He looked down out of the passenger window, transfixed as he recognised the barren terrain of Southern Sudan below.

Driven from this place as a child some twenty years before, he never thought he would lay eyes on it again. But Panther’s story is interlaced in the bigger picture of a sovereign God. He is not unlike the biblical Joseph, lost and left for dead, yet one whom God did not forget.

Panther is one of Sudan’s ‘Lost Boys’ – children separated from their parents or orphaned in Sudan’s long-running civil war. These children fled their villages in small groups and eventually converged into an exodus of thousands. They walked for more than a decade, grew up in the bush as refugees, and were witness and victim to every kind of horror imaginable. Their story is both remarkable and terrifying. It has been publicized in books and articles through the years, and recently documented in a feature film by National Geographic entitled ‘God Grew Tired of Us’. The title seems fitting to describe these boys who became men without a home or family and without a country.

A few hundred survivors eventually ended up in a refugee camp in Kenya’s northern wasteland, and from there were sent all over the world. In some places churches stepped in to ‘adopt’ the boys, becoming a place of refuge.

Panther settled in New York and kept in close contact with some of his fellow ‘Lost Boys’. Together they fostered a vision to go back to Sudan – to bless their people as they had been blessed. In the wake of this boyish and contagious dream were a mixed assortment of people from the churches the boys attended, whose eyes had been opened to a world beyond the one they knew. If the boys were returning, they would go with them.

And so, as I steered the Caravan toward the co-ordinates handed to me on a scrap of paper, Panther wasn’t the only one peering out through the haze. Four middle-aged men, engineers and builders, also strained to see. The nearest usable airstrip to Panther’s home sits at an abandoned outpost on the waterless Jongeli canal – a massive, unfinished project to bypass a length of the Nile river lost in the Sudd, one of the world’s largest swamps. The town and the impressive fleet of rusting, heavy equipment scattered throughout it are a telling picture of Sudan’s stunted growth. During the war, both national development and individual lives stopped moving forward, and in fact, began to move backward. Ironically, these ‘Lost Boys’ were returning to a Sudan that, in some ways, predated their departure. We landed on a dusty strip set between a thatch village and a thousand grazing cattle. The men stepped from the plane and Panther, dressed in a new suit, melted into the waiting crowd.

The grace of God

Panther Bior fled his home village when he was seven-years-old, naked, and afraid. He returned twenty years later in a modern aeroplane, a man with a miraculous story. The tale is wrought with danger and amazing good fortune. But it is also a story of a God who did not abandon him in his darkest days. Of all the elements in Panther’s story, it is the grace of God he talks about most. For the myriad people caught up in his remarkable life, it will likely be an enduring theme.

He will undoubtedly tell his story many times over. His fellow travellers will build a new medical clinic and they will do what they can to encourage the church in that remote village. But as I watched Panther from the plane’s rear cargo door, I believed that his greatest testimony would come from simply being there again. What men and wars and the heartless land of Sudan meant for evil, God meant for good.

About the author

Mike DeLorenzo has been serving as a pilot with AIM AIR for the past 9 years and just recently began doing some freelance writing for AIM. Mike's ministry as a pilot is one of service to other missionaries, taking the same approach to his creative work, Mike helped launch the On field media department in order to serve the media needs of our missionaries. Mike and his wife, Renee, have 2 kids and reside in Nairobi. Visit Mikes website.

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