"This is not too hard," 18-year-old Primo says.

Primo recalls he once built a dwelling from grass and mud in Africa, where he and Gabriel lived -- and each night feared death -- one summer ago.

This is nothing.

Displaced and abruptly separated from their parents by brutal civil war in southern Sudan when they were just children, Primo and Gabriel -- and thousands of other Sudanese villagers -- suffered a treacherous journey of exile and, later, a fearful life of asylum before being relocated to the United States.

Primo and Gabriel now take summer-school classes in Yelm and work on their foster family's farm in peaceful fields.

They are, miraculously, survivors of a war as old as they are, a war that still rages.

They escaped crocodiles, lions, disease, starvation, dehydration, gunfire, bombing and surprise pro-government militia attacks.

They endured repeated relocation and religious persecution -- all before the age of 10.

This past winter, seven South Sound families from Chehalis to Lacey offered refuge to four girls and 13 boys, all teens from southern Sudan, all relocated to Kenya.

"It is good for us," Gabriel says of the weeding job as he loads jagged bundles into the back of an old, light-blue Ford pickup.

Culture shock

Since arriving in December, Primo and Gabriel have discovered aspects of American life we take for granted.

They've enjoyed three meals a day, electricity, indoor plumbing, school clothes, tennis shoes, pizza, cookies, driving lessons, bank accounts and a foosball table in the their plush, carpeted bedroom.

They've experienced a family Christmas, a night at Yelm High School's prom and a trip to a beach in California.

Primo and Gabriel, who live with Sean and Mary McCarthy of rural McKenna, attended Yelm High this past spring along with four Sudanese boys who live with Rod and Robyn MacKnight of rural Yelm.

Last week, Gabriel tried a Sugar Babies sucker for the first time.

He was taken aback by the hard, sticky caramel in the same way he was mystified by the electric stove in the family's kitchen, which he thought, surely, must be connected somehow to the wood stove in the living room.

"I draw pictures and I explain to them how electricity goes from here to there," Mary McCarthy says after bringing the boys home from the field work for another family in Yelm.

"They're more at ease now," McCarthy says. "There's many types of candy they have never had, so it's always a treat."

But the boys aren't gushing about American luxuries or raving about advanced technologies, which they're still working to comprehend.

"Here we like it because it's safe and there is no war," Primo says.

"We were not happy," Gabriel says of their refugee-camp home in Kakuma, Kenya.

Resettled through joint efforts of the U.S. Department of State, Catholic Community Services and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, more than 60 Sudanese refugees live in Western Washington.

By the end of September, the United States will place 3,800 Sudanese refugee youths in homes across the nation.

Most will ride in a car -- and on an airplane -- for the first time on their trip to America.

Exile

Primo and Gabriel don't know exactly how old they were when the civil war in Sudan escalated in 1987, though they guess they must have been about 5.

Both lived in southern Sudan, long subjugated by the ruling Arab government in the north. They were hundreds of miles apart and spoke different dialects in their pastoral villages.

The refugees still can't speak each other's dialect. They later became best friends by speaking to each other in the national language -- Arabic.

Both remember a quick and chaotic exodus when their villages were attacked and many people were killed, huts burned.

Many of the children, often boys, were outside the villages, away from their homes to help at cattle camps.

"I was playing," Gabriel says. "I just heard the noise of a gun. I saw people running. I ran after them."

Thousands upon thousands, fleeing the murder that surrounded them, headed east for Ethiopia to cross mosquito-infested swamps.

Many children fell pray to wild animals, hunger, thirst and malaria. Children saw hundreds of their comrades and elders die.

Eighteen-year-old Jacob Kuany, staying with the MacKnight family near Yelm, says he remembers the many difficulties well.

"There was no food, there was no water, there was a lot of wild animals," Jacob says. "If you're left behind they can kill you."

He once drank the fluid from the stomach of an antelope -- killed for meat -- to keep from dying of dehydration.

"When you squeeze the stomach," Jacob says, "it's like water."

The boys thank the power of God for their survival, which, for some of them, meant drinking their own urine.

The boys, with the occasional helping hand of an elder, walked hundreds of miles to reach Ethiopia, where they lived in camps of thousands with little organization, food or education until 1991, when new leadership in the Ethiopian government forcefully, violently closed the camps.

Then, again by the thousands, the refugees marched back to Sudan, where they were forced to either cross a flooded, crocodile-plagued Gilo River or face gunshots from the Ethiopia military chasing them out.

Hundreds were shot on the river banks, eaten by crocodiles or drowned in the river.

Michael Chuol, living with the MacKnights, saw his uncle die, wounded, in the Gilo river.

"He was taking care of me," Michael says sadly, seriously. "Still now, I dream. I dream about the war."

Those who survived the Gilo began a six-month hopscotch through Sudan from unwelcoming city to unwelcoming city, moving further south, to eventually reach Kakuma in 1992.

Kakuma

Washington's teen Sudanese residents all came from Kakuma, a refugee camp 80 miles from the Sudan border.

Most of the Sudanese recently relocated to the United States spent eight years -- most of their lives -- at the camp.

It's home to more than 75,000 refugees from 10 different countries and 20 ethnic, often conflicting, groups.

Though the camp offered Primo and Gabriel somewhat regular schooling, food, water and recreation, Kakuma brought equal violence, bandits and fear.

"Every day they shoot people at night," Primo says. "Sometimes you can sleep. But when you hear the sounds of guns going, you don't sleep the rest of the night."

Kakuma is so large and dangerous that security provided by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees staff has failed to deter violence.

Women searching for firewood on the outskirts of the camps are often raped.

Social services workers report frequent "nervous depression and dependency" from the refugees, describing them as "traumatized, aggressive, highly stressed," a 1999 UNHCR report says.

"I hate Kakuma," David Atem, also a resident at the MacKnights, says.

Primo says, however, athletics helped him survive in Kakuma -- volleyball, basketball, but, mainly, soccer.

Over the years in Kakuma, a soccer league formed. Large groups traded their small, daily rations of hard, dry corn kernels for currency to buy a soccer ball.

Then the hunger and fear would subside for a while.

"In Kakuma, when you play soccer, you forget everything," Primo says, adding that he also directed a church choir at the camp, which he misses despite masses at a Catholic church in Yelm.

Lost families

McCarthy says nightmares still haunt Primo and Gabriel, who, like the boys that live with the MacKnights, remain inexplicably cheerful on the outside, somehow sunny in their disposition, their contemplative happiness contagious.

Michael is excited and jovial after a dinner at the MacKnights.

"I'm very comfortable," Michael says after feasting on baked chicken breasts and garlic bread, juicy with butter.

Still, Michael misses his biological parents. He can still see his father's face.

"I know they are good parents," Michael says. "I love them very much."

None of the Sudanese boys who go to school in Yelm know if their parents are alive.

That's why they are here. Agencies such as the American Red Cross worked to trace their parents, but with no luck. With no one to take care of them, they were eligible for foster care in the United States.

Jacob hopes to see his parents again someday.

"We miss our family," Jacob says. "God is great. Maybe there is a time I will see them, if they did not die."

Gabriel, who hopes to become a commercial airline pilot, says he won't go back to Sudan unless the country finds peace.

"If the war is stopped we can go and see what is there," Gabriel says, adding skeptically, "There will be no peace."

New Americans

Betsy Higley, the program manager for unaccompanied minors placed by Catholic Community Services, says many of the refugees placed by the program are feeling reality settle in after seven months of adjustment.

"Now they realize, this is it. They're probably not going to go back for a long, long time," Higley says. "It's setting in -- their loss of country, loss of culture."

But Gabriel and Primo -- and all the boys -- have ways to remember their roots.

Both keep their Christian prayer and song books handy, and each have cassette tapes of African singing.

Michael, at the MacKnights, often brings out his Dinka song book and sings in his native dialect to the tune of "Jesus Loves Me."

Higley says the Sudanese boys and girls in the region meet for support groups and summer trips.

Though America is safer than Kakuma, they'll face many challenges in American life, Higley says.

"They want to be successful and get a good education and a good job and help the people in their country.

"It's going to take a while, and that's OK. They'll be the new Americans."

New hope

After one successful semester at Yelm High as juniors, the boys have started to dream about their American futures.

Primo, who also is learning to play the piano, is considering the priesthood. Michael wants to be a U.S. military pilot. Jacob dreams of medical school.

And though they're just starting to understand the Internet, caller ID and debit cards, they study with passion and intensity.

"Education is their number one priority," McCarthy says. "They're very good workers."

McCarthy says the boys will stay as long as they like at the McCarthy home, which includes three other adopted toddlers and the McCarthy's 11-year-old birth son, Joseph.

"We want to treat them like our own kids," McCarthy says, adding that the boys will get cars as soon as they're ready to drive.

"We're starting to feel more like a family. They call me 'Mom.' "

Future

Primo and Gabriel and the boys at the MacKnights have a lot to look forward to this fall.

Their outgoing, buoyant personalities, six places in the Yelm High choir and slots on various sports teams have allowed them to step easily into student life, says Brandi Wilson, who graduated from Yelm this spring and helped take the boys to prom.

"They're fitting in, actually, really good," Wilson says.

"Usually it takes new people quite a long time to fit in and actually get to know people. By the second day they were in school, they were talking to different groups and meeting people."

More dances -- homecoming and, again, prom -- await the amicable boys this year along with a game new to them -- football.

They have started their new lives, while clinging closely to their native language and culture.

"Sometimes I feel heavy and sad when I hear my dialect," Gabriel says while listening to a tape of Dinka singing.

But, in a way, it makes him feel as if "somebody is there" for him.

When McCarthy goes to bed a night, she hopes she's giving the boys a happier life.

Though it would seem a certainty, she still worries.

What if there were peace in Sudan?

"It's a good feeling knowing that you are providing them with a -- I don't know if I'd say 'better life,' " McCarthy wonders. "If they had a choice, would they pick this life over Africa?"