Every morning at 7 a.m., Garang Yai arrives at Richmond’s picturesque campus and begins his day overseeing the facilities team for several residence halls. When his shift ends at 3 p.m., he starts his second job, studying for an associate’s degree in accounting at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College.

The educational environment that surrounds Yai now is vastly different from the schooling he had as a child. Yai was born in southern Sudan in the early 1980s at the beginning of a bloody civil war. When he was just seven years old, he fled his home and family to escape attacks from government-sponsored militia. Yai joined thousands of exiled boys, now referred to as the “lost boys” of Sudan, and spent years traveling hundreds of miles by foot from one refugee camp to another.

Yai was among the first of the 26,000 boys to arrive at the Pinyidu refugee camp in Ethiopia. “At first there was nothing,” Yai said of the camp. “There was no food.  There was just grass and trees.” 

It was in the camp that Yai received his early education, gathered with other boys around a large tree in groups of a hundred, scratching out their lessons with sticks in the dirt. Sudden air strikes from the government or ambushes from members of surrounding tribes often caused everyone to run from the camp.

In 1998, representatives of the United Nations and American churches visited the refugee camp in Kenya where Yai had been living for the previous six years. During the next few years, many of the boys were sent to the United States, Canada and Australia. Yai was one of 4,000 sent to the United States.

Now, the most common question people ask Yai is, “How did you choose Richmond?”  “And my answer is always, ‘I don’t really know; they chose it for me,’” he says, with a kindhearted chuckle.

When Yai stepped off the plane at Richmond International Airport with his half-brother Magiir and their cousin Dut on a cold, clear, January day in 2001, he was met by Paul Sauer and Sauer’s 10-year-old son, Michael. The Sauer family had volunteered through St. Michael’s Catholic Church to mentor the three Sudanese refugees.

“Those first few days it was literally showing them how light switches work and what food goes in the refrigerator,” said Jenni Sauer, associate vice president and controller at the University.

Soon after the young men arrived, Sauer contacted Al Lane, manager of custodial and environmental services. Their discussion led to all three young men finding employment on campus. Yai started off as a custodial “floater,” working in different academic buildings and residence halls.

While on assignment in Freeman Hall, he befriended Chris Gordon, ’06. Soon Gordon and his friends were getting together with Yai on a regular basis, having lunch, playing Frisbee and even attending a monster truck rally, Gordon says.

In 2007, Yai spent Christmas with the Gordon family in Colorado. The Gordons’ friends surprised Yai with a monetary gift to help bring his wife and two young children to the United States. In February, after years of wading through a frustrating immigration process, Yai was finally able to bring his family to join him in Richmond.

The determination and patience Yai demonstrated through the immigration process is echoed in his tenacious pursuit of education. Chemistry professor John Gupton, who met Yai in 2004 when Yai moved from his floater position to a permanent assignment in Gottwald Center for the Sciences, is inspired by his determination.

“He’s very interested in learning and soaks things up like a sponge,” Gupton says. “He obviously has great motivation for doing his best, and I wish everybody would feel that way about their educational experience.”

Yai is grateful for the education he’s been able to receive in the United States. “This country has a lot of opportunity,” he said. “If I was in Sudan, I couldn’t go to school.”

In Yai’s home region in Sudan, the only option for students to receive an education past primary school is to travel to Kenya. Few can afford to do that, and, as Yai points out, sending students elsewhere is not good for the village. Yai has joined a network of fellow Sudanese refugees in forming the Ayat Development Foundation (www.ayatfoundation.com) to raise money for the construction of a high school in the region.

Yai proudly shows a photo on his laptop of the first primary school building in his village, built just three years ago. The one-room hut is worlds away from the environment of the Gottwald Center that Yai used to clean every day, but it is an immense improvement from the large tree and the sticks and dirt that served as his academic environment as a child.

Yai is confident that education will continue to open doors for him, something the boys believed from the beginning, Jenni Sauer says. “They used to say that education was their mother and their father,” she said. “They’d been on their own since they were so young. They knew that education was the way to get further in life.”

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