John Dau is an activist and one of the “Lost Boys of Sudan”.
More specifically, Dau is one of 27,000 boys driven from their villages when the northern Arab government attacked the ethnic minority population of Southern Sudan in 1987. For the next five years, Dau led groups of displaced boys across Sudan for hundreds of miles, struggling with starvation, disease, and violence. In 1992, he was placed in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya where, at 17, he finally received a basic education.
In 2001, Dau was selected to immigrate to the United States and settled in Syracuse, New York. He has since founded the John Dau Foundation and co-authored God Grew Tired of Us: A Memoir, in 2007. He is President of the South Sudan Institute.