A New Life, A Family Reunited

by Peter Smith

Wearing a crisp shirt and tie and a radiant smile, Gabriel Kwai stood poised but eager just outside the security checkpoint at Louisville International Airport.

He was waiting for the wife he hadn’t seen in two years, the daughter he had never met — and the chance to start a family life for the first time since he was 9. That was when a devastating civil war came to his Sudanese village, scattering his family and sending him and other boys on a deadly odyssey spanning hundreds of miles, three countries and the remainder of their youth.

The rest of Peter Smith’s enlightening profile of Lost Boy and treasurer of the Sudanese Refugee Education Fund Gabriel Akech Kwai is available online and may be purchased at the Courier Journal archives.

(Originally appeared in the Courier Journal on August 6, 2010.)