Disturbed in Their Nests: A Journey from Sudan's Dinkaland to San Diego's City Heights

Nineteen-year-old refugee Alephonsion Deng, from war-ravaged Sudan, had great expectations when he arrived in America three weeks before two planes crashed into the World Trade Towers. Money, he’d been told, was given to you in pillows. Machines did all the work. Education was free.

Suburban mom Judy Bernstein had her own assumptions. The teenaged “Lost Boys of Sudan”—who’d traveled barefoot and starving for a thousand miles—needed a little mothering and a change of scenery: a trip to the zo...