All the baby wants is to be fed, loved and cared for. But it’s not as hard as how some people describe it. Are you going to take the baby or not?” It took me half an hour to make my mind up.īeing a single dad – okay, it is hard, especially the first few months when the baby wakes up every single hour. So when Sunday was born, the child safety called me and said: “This is your child – the mother can’t keep her. It was a one-night stand and she got pregnant. Her mother had drug problems, which I never knew when I first met her. My daughter is 16 months old – she was given to me when she was only eight days old. At the moment I’m getting along pretty good with the mother and I try and help her in every way.īut now I’m also a single dad raising a child by myself. But my message to dads who don’t have access to their kids is never, ever, ever give up. It took me a long time to get access to him. I don’t break my promises with my children. I feel really good that somebody is looking up to me, and I’m making promises that I stick to. When I play with my son now, I’m living my childhood through him. And being a child soldier too, I wasn’t raised with my own family so I missed out on my own childhood, too. He is studying, working as an actor and volunteering at his local PCYC.Īn incredibly honest book showing that recovering from torture and war is a process of lifelong learning, choices and challenges.I wanted my kid to know what it’s like to have a father, because I missed out on all that. Thankfully a number of forces (including the law, parenthood and a better psychiatrist) eventually set Ayik on the straight and narrow. They do not interact then, but on their next encounter, a few years later, Ayik speaks with Anyang and says if they were still in Africa he would kill him. One day at a Brisbane church he looks across and sees his childhood torturer and is filled with hate. He is misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and is wrongly medicated for years. He regularly ran away, sometimes to refugee camps, but was found, dragged back and brutally punished by then fourteen-year-old Anyang, the man now sitting opposite him.Īfter a tumultuous life in Africa, Ayik brings that trauma with him to Australia and at various times gets in trouble with the law over violence, alcohol and drugs. One of them, Ayik, was once a ten-year-old boy soldier training in the junior forces of the SPLA and like many of the young boys hating it. In episode 1 of the Ray Martin fronted SBS series Look me in the eye two South Sudanese migrants now resident in Brisbane sat across from each other.

The Lost Boy by Ayik Chut Deng