1. An attack forces Jacob Ngo Magot, 5, to leave his village near Bor, Sudan, in 1987. He and hundreds of boys wander through the desert. He eats leaves and wild fruit, but animals and disease kill many friends. 2. Jacob arrives at a refugee camp in Ethiopia after weeks in the wild. He lives there four years. Hundreds of children like him starve to death or die of disease. A new government makes the children leave in 1991. 3. Soldiers chase Jacob and other Lost Boys from the refugee camp. They shoot and kill many and pursue others to the Gilo River. Hundreds of boys, desperate, jump in. Crocodiles eat several. Others drown. Jacob floats across on a car tire. He is 9. 4. Jacob and other boys trek through the desert to Pochala, Sudan, but unknown people attack one night. They kill several children. Jacob is exhausted but walks into the desert again. 5. Animals and disease kill more children as they march through the wild for months. Jacob arrives in August 1992 at a refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya. He studies English and math, attends church and eats grain once a day for the next nine years. In July, at age 19, an airplane takes Jacob from the camp on the first leg of a 72-hour journey to Atlanta.

Last year, he heard that the United States would give a permanent home to him and 3,800 refugees like him. Authorities resettled them only after concluding that their parents were probably dead and that protracted war made southern Sudan too dangerous for their return.

Aid workers called them the Lost Boys of Sudan after the "Peter Pan" characters who band together to avoid the adult world.

Jacob would go to a place called Atlanta.

He had never held a job or paid a bill, but Jacob was desperate to support himself in Atlanta, to prove he could survive once again. But what if no one would hire him? What if Americans mocked him for knowing so little?

He thought about it on his first night in this country, July 17, in a darkened hotel room in New York.

"There is a reason for me to be in the United States," he thought, "but I do not know it, so I must ask God."

Jacob, a Christian, sat up in bed and prayed. He reached for a small blue diary.

"What have you plan for me?" he wrote. "What are going to be my achievements here in US?"

An airplane flew him the next day to Hartsfield International Airport. A caseworker named Matthew Kon, also a Sudanese refugee, ferried Jacob and three roommates in a Chevy Blazer up I-85 and I-285. Kon's wards peered through windows to absorb sights they had never seen before, so many green trees and tall buildings and the river of cars flowing alongside them.

That first afternoon, after exploring the kitchen, Jacob retreated to a bedroom and envisioned his future by recalling the past, by remembering what aid workers had told him about America.

"We were told there is something here called entry-level jobs, like cleaning, carrying things in a factory," Jacob said. "You are the one to determine your need. If you fail, you will not blame anyone."

To Jacob's left sat Peter Ayuen Anyang, the tallest of his roommates, with high, pronounced cheekbones and the innocent smile of a child. Beside Peter was Daniel Khon Khoch, wearing the blue plastic rosary he has worn each day since an Italian priest named Father Joseph gave it to him in 1994 for singing in the refugee camp choir. Off to the side was Marko Aguer Ayii, who struggled with English but laughed as freely as the others.

Jacob sat on his bed, roommates quiet beside him.

"Most of us will be having no vehicles," he said. "It will be difficult if you get a job far from your living quarters."

The cars and trucks in Atlanta intimidated him.

"If you walk randomly, maybe a vehicle will knock you."

He also was intimidated at the prospect of dating American women.

"We were told that, here, if you want to make friends with a girl, she might have had a boyfriend and that boyfriend might go and kill you," he said. "If a girl asks to make a friendship and you say no, will she kill you?"

Jacob and his roommates passed those first days in donated clothes furnished by the International Rescue Committee, the resettlement agency that sponsored them. They wore T-shirts that said "Married With Children" and "Imagination Station." Belts looped twice around their waists.

Food was the most immediate problem.

"We are hungry but do not know what to make of the food in our kitchen," Jacob said.

How to open cans with names like "Chef Boyardee Cannelloni" and "Healthy Choice Chicken and Rice Soup"? What to do with the bag of sugar? What about the mysterious container of orange powder that Peter held aloft?

"It is written here 'Tang,' " Peter said, "but we do not know if it is healthy."

They ate once a day, at night, as they had done for eight years in the refugee camp, gravitating toward foods that were not so exotic. They relied mainly on white rice and wheat bread, but it was not just food that confounded them.

'We have to make eye contact'

Jacob had spent his whole life on flat plains with few trees, a tabletop landscape where you see the sun the minute it breaks the horizon. But there were so many trees in Georgia. Jacob could see light for hours before he ever saw the sun.

SUDAN'S CIVIL WAR
	A brutal civil war in Sudan pits the Arabic and Islamic northern government against the Christian and animist south. It has killed more than 2 million people since 1983, including hundreds of thousands of civilians. That's more than the combined death toll in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Indonesia, Kosovo, Sierra Leona and Somalia. The war has produced an unusual group of refugees called the Lost Boys of Sudan. Most were forced from home after northern soldiers attacked their southern villages in 1986 or '87. Many survived because they were tending cattle in fields away from home, a tradition in their Dinka culture. Most girls, older males and adults were killed. The children formed a river of orphans wandering together for years. Many were killed by wild animals, bandits, disease or starvation. Survivors wound up in a refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya. The U.S. government agreed to resettle about 3,800 Lost Boys after authorities concluded that their parents were almost certainly dead and that persistent violence in southern Sudan made their homes too dangerous for their return. About 170 Lost Boys live in metro Atlanta. Like all refugees, they have legal permission to live and work in the United States and are eligible for citizenship after five years.

On his seventh day in America, Jacob and his roommates walked behind Kon to the Kensington MARTA station for a lesson on bus and train routes, important because Jacob would take public transportation to whatever job awaited. He sat next to Peter as they whizzed through a dark tunnel on the first train ride of their lives.

"It is very, very, very, very long and very fast," Peter said, beaming.

On the ride home, Jacob gazed through the window until he saw the Kensington sign.

"We are supposed to alight here," he told the others.

A week later, Jacob rode MARTA to the IRC for a class on job skills. He walked into a room where a yellow note on one wall says "Wall" and another on a window says "Window." Robin Harp, an employment specialist, talked about money.

"In the United States, there is an attitude that if you're healthy and you're capable and you can work, then the government should not give you money and you should work," Harp said.

She tried to brace them.

"Your first job will be difficult and you probably will not like it, but remember, it's just a starting point," Harp said. "You may have to ride the bus up to an hour and a half to the job and an hour and a half back."

Back at the apartment, Jacob shared what he learned with his roommates, who now included a fifth Lost Boy named John Mach Rual. Peter had divined some of the same tips by reading "Body Language in the Workplace," a paperback on their living room coffee table.

"According to what I have read here, we can shake hands with the interviewer," Peter explained. "We have to make eye contact."

Jacob longed for an interview.

He waited.

The wonders of modern America

On Aug. 3, Jacob's 17th day in the United States, a whirlwind of a woman named Dee Clement knocked on the door. She is a volunteer who races in and out of the lives of many of the 170 Lost Boys in metro Atlanta, delivering shoes and towels and free life lessons. She strode into Jacob's apartment with a typewriter, a Panasonic Jet Flow vacuum cleaner and her dalmation, Polka Dot.

Jacob and his roommates settled into chairs in the living room.

"This machine is a very, very special machine," Clement began. "It's called a vacuum cleaner."

She picked hair from Polka Dot -- he was shedding -- and sprinkled it on the carpet. Then she flicked a switch and the very special machine started making noise. Jacob's eyes followed the vacuum cleaner back and forth, back and forth.

The dog hair was disappearing!

Clement taught them to peck keys on a typewriter.

"We all of us speak English Arabic Kishwahli and mother tongueeee," Daniel typed. "America is the land of freedom. America is multicultural land." And then, as Jacob talked about bullets and fire that chased him from home: "Arabic soldiers came and shot our people."

Soon Jacob fell into a routine. He went to church on Sundays and attended GED preparation class from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays.

"The problem that will lead me not to get a better job is because I have no skill, and it is through college that I will get that skill," he said.

He practiced tuning radios and setting clocks.

"I have learned to use telephonic communications," he announced.

About this time, the IRC matched Jacob and his roommates with a permanent volunteer, Cheryl Grover , a real estate consultant for Verizon Wireless. Jacob rode to her house one Saturday in August, awed on the way by the web of interlacing concrete bridges people call Spaghetti Junction. He wrote "Spageti Juncho" in his diary.

"This one is very, very technical," he noted. "Some cars are moving up and others are moving down."

He was in Grover's living room 20 minutes later. One of his roommates balled up in fright when Grover's dogs, Max and Baby, bounded into the room. She led the dogs away and returned to tell her visitors to have no fear because the dogs were in a bedroom.

"The dogs have their own bedroom?" Jacob asked.

"No, no," Grover said. "They're in my bedroom."

In the kitchen, she showed them the whirring box of metal and glass that cooks food with invisible microwaves. She taught them to cook hot dogs, refried beans and oatmeal. Then Grover led them down carpeted stairs to show them computers.

"Dear Cheryl," John wrote on the computer. "I am John from the land of Cush [Sudan] eager to learn a lot of things. I have left my mum and dad in Africa due to the emerge war in my territory. This war caused great separation of relatives in Sudan and many destruction."

On a payroll at last

As August merged into September, Jacob began to worry about money. The IRC had given him $400 in spending money in his first two months, but he sent every dime to the refugee camp in Kenya. He wanted to help a brother and two sisters who stumbled into the refugee camp in 1998. Soon, though, he realized he needed money in Georgia. He ran out of donated MARTA tokens and spent money from his third check to buy some.

Jacob did not yet know it, but he would be eligible to apply for emergency IRC aid if he lacked a job after four months. Caseworkers had not told him to encourage self-sufficiency, but Jacob needed no prodding. Failing to find work in four months would be a crushing blow to his pride.

"Here in America, it is through jobs that you can make your life to be very successful, but if you have no jobs, you cannot make it," he said. "I cannot tell you that I will really make it, but I am trying if possible."

Jacob finally had an interview Sept. 7, at the Discovery Channel Store in Lenox Mall. He and John went with their IRC job developer, Benjamin Cushman, whom Jacob reverentially calls "Mr. Benjamin." Job developer Valerie Hardin brought two other Lost Boys.

Jacob wore tasseled black loafers, khaki pants, a dull blue shirt, neatly pressed, and a Navy tie with red polka dots.

"You look very nice," Hardin told him. "I don't think I've had another client wear a tie for a job interview."

Inside the mall, Jacob craned his neck to survey the second level. "It will be confusing if one is to get a job here," he said. "If I come alone, how will I find the way I am to go to my workplace?"

John marveled at the mannequins, human forms the color of peaches and milk chocolate, lavished in furs and jewelry.

"Somebody who is not a millionaire cannot come and buy something here," he said.

Jacob strode out of the interview with a poker face but beamed as he got near John.

"I told him I am hardworking, punctual, willing to work," he said.

He went home confident, but the phone did not ring.

"We are worried," Jacob said later. "It is getting now a long time without a job."

He could only watch Sept. 19 as two roommates, Daniel and Marko, started work at an Emory University cafeteria. He had applied at the Discovery Channel Store, Home Depot, Publix, Target and the Westin Peachtree Plaza. As he waited, Jacob watched television on a tiny set, read about the U.S. Civil War and thumbed through driver's license manuals.

He talked about buying a car one day and moving to Gwinnett County, where he had seen so much open space on rides to Grover's house in Duluth. It reminded him of the wide, flat savanna of southern Sudan.

Finally, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, the phone started ringing with job offers.

Peter found work stocking shelves at Target. John and William bag groceries at Kroger.

Jacob's job came days before his last $200 check.

He earns $7.25 an hour at the Discovery Channel Store and $8.50 an hour stocking shelves at Target on North Druid Hills Road.

Sometimes he works all night at Target, sleeps on the bus and stocks shelves in the morning and afternoon at the Discovery Channel Store. Recently he opened his first bank account and deposited $1,400. He is tired more often, pays more attention to time.

Jacob is relieved to be working, but he can't get too excited. The Discovery Channel Store job is only part time. It could end after the holidays. And a week after Jacob started at Target, the store announced it would close for remodeling in January. Jacob might have to find a new job all over again next month. But he notices that most Americans somehow seem to manage.

If they can make it, he says, maybe he can, too.