Published: Mon, Oct. 27 11:26 p.m. MDT
ROY — Try to imagine, if you can, being 6 years old and suddenly learning that you've lost your home.
Imagine that you've also lost your parents and all of your siblings with the exception of your "big" brother, who's all of 11 years old himself.
Imagine the two of you suddenly being on your own, with nowhere to live, nowhere to sleep at night, and not knowing where you're going to get your next meal.
And try to imagine living that desperate existence for several years.
Opara Aikuli doesn't have to imagine any of those frightening scenarios.
After all, he lived them. All of them.
Aikuli, who's better known nowadays as Ben Aikuli, placekicker for Roy High's undefeated football team, and his brother, Bienfait Tanzito, amazingly found a way to survive that harrowing lifestyle.
Yes, two young boys on their own, torn apart from their family and home by a conflict between warring tribes — a conflict that has since escalated into a seemingly endless civil war which has raged on for two decades in Africa, claiming millions of lives in its deadly path — and yet somehow, they survived.
How they persevered, and wound up living in Utah, makes for an incredible example of the human spirit's strength and ability to overcome daunting obstacles and tremendous adversity in its unending will to survive.
Lives changed forever
Their story begins in 2002, in their village of Bunia in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Aikuli, who was just 6 years old at the time, and his 11-year-old brother were at school one day when, while outside during an afternoon break, their lives were changed forever.
"We could see a big fire and smoke everywhere around the school," Aikuli said. "We weren't quite sure what was going on, and it started to come toward the school.
"The teachers closed all the doors and windows, made sure nobody was out of the building. They were telling us to sit still and they would tell us what was going on. I was so little, when we looked out, we could see people running and there were car tires burning and houses were on fire.
"The bigger kids, they started breaking the doors," he recalled. "Parents came to the school and they were wrecking the doors and taking their kids and running away."
As the number of children left at the school steadily dwindled, a fear-stricken Aikuli decided it was time for him to flee, too.
He started walking home and, when he reached a place where people would stop, rest and perhaps buy sugar cane and bananas that were for sale there, he was confused about what to do next.
"I sat there and started crying," Aikuli said.
Thankfully, though, his brother Bienfait, who had been searching for Ben at the school, followed a similar path and eventually caught up with his little brother. "He saw me and grabbed me and we started heading home as quickly as we could," Aikuli said.
But as they approached their house, they could see that it was on fire. Luckily, articles of clothing had been left on their lawn and they each grabbed some clothes to take with them.
A neighbor who was a friend of their father's convinced them to go with him to find safety in the neighboring town of Mungalu and eventually to Brazzaville, the capital city of Congo, where they might be able to learn their parents' whereabouts.
But they knew that the rebel forces and their path of destruction was headed that way, too.
"We were confused. We didn't know what to do," Aikuli recalled. "We looked around for our parents for sure to see if they were there, but they weren't there and we didn't want to just be wandering around and get in somebody's way.
"So we started taking off on our way to the forest (an area we might refer to as the 'jungle'), and we still had the clothing we got from our home. We didn't really know where we were going. Our parents were so used to running in the forest and them coming back, so we thought we would do the same thing by going there. But at the same time, we were just going to there and we didn't know how to return.
"There were pygmies living in the forest that helped people cross rivers and lakes," he said. "They would spend their lives in the forest hunting, selling meat, exchanging it for clothing and other goods. When we approached them, we gave them clothing to help us, and they helped us cross the river."
And thus began an amazing journey of survival.
"We just started going," Aikuli said. "I don't know where we were going, we just started going and we didn't feel very hungry or worry about food. ... We ate foods that we knew that my dad taught us about, fruits and berries.
"We went through some villages, and in some of them, we would tell them we were lost and we would ask them for a place to sleep and for something to eat. Sometimes we would just sleep on the side of people's houses and leave early the next morning. I don't know how long we spent in the forest. ... We weren't sure where it was going to end, but we knew we had to keep going."
From village to village they traveled, usually by foot, relying on their own wits and the kindness and generosity of others to keep them going.
Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and, eventually, months turned into years.
But not all of their time was spent traveling.
One day, they met a woman named Martina in a marketplace and told her their story, asking if she could give them a place to sleep. "We told her we missed our bus home and asked if there was any way she could help us," Aikuli said. "She asked us a lot of details about how everything happened, how we had gotten there."
Martina graciously took them in and let them live with her for a long period of time that Aikuli estimates lasted "for a year and a couple of months."
"For some reason, she just let us live there because we were helping her cleaning dishes, farming with her kids and stuff," he said. "She planted some peanuts and we helped her with that.
"She told us we could stay there as long as we wanted, so we didn't feel the pressure of moving on then because we got used to eating food and sleeping. That was the main thing that kept us there, and we were cooperating well with her kids and her and helping her."
While living with Martina, she got the boys registered with a United Nations program in which they would take refugees' pictures and send copies of their photos to their actual homes and try to locate their families, as well as broadcasting their names on a radio station for the same purpose.
The U.N. program also offered to fly the boys back to their home in Bunia for a few days in an effort to find their parents, but they declined and eventually decided it was time to leave Martina's home very early one morning.
"We just wrote a little note to Martina and just thanked her for accepting us in her home and everything," Aikuli said. "We just told her we thought it was best for us to move on because we didn't feel like that was the end."
After a long, long walk — "We just kept going and going and going," Aikuli said — they made their way to Arua, the biggest city they had seen, in the Republic of Uganda.
Refugee camp
They saw a well-dressed man and approached him, telling him they were from Congo, had lost their parents, and had been on the run for a long time. He took them home, gave them food and a place to sleep, and told them of a place that took in refugees.
The next day, they went and registered as refugees and were given food. They stayed in a barracks for several days before they were shipped to the refugee camp.
"They gave us a machete, a metal cup, plastic plates, spoons, forks and a knife, a frying pan, blankets, the basic things that we needed," said Aikuli, who was probably 8 1/2 years old by then. "And they took us to this little house where the roof was leaking."
Once there, they were taught how to fix the leaks in the roof, and were taught how to make a bed — something they'd never done before. Like thousands of other fellow refugees, they were also given a plot of land where they could build their own place to live.
At the refugee camp, they were shown how to make an oven out of bricks, metal and thick soil, and they learned how to cook on it. The were supplied with food every month — "Oil, beans, corn, porridge powder and salt, and then you come up with your own meal," Aikuli said.
"We thought that was where we were gonna end. We had our own home, we had people giving us food, and we had our own place to sleep, so we kind of settled there."
They did a lot of fishing and hunting, setting out traps to catch ducks, did odd jobs for other people for food or money, and played soccer with a ball they made from balloons and leaves.
"You weren't allowed to leave the refugee camp if you were registered there," said Aikuli, who stayed home and did most of the cooking each day while Bienfait would go out hunting for something to cook, often catching small animals by smoking them out of their holes in the ground and then smacking them with a shovel to kill them.
Or they would catch fish by using a staple or other small piece of metal for a hook and taking nylon thread to use for the fishing line.
Since their parents had not been located, they stayed for more than five years at the refugee camp, where Aikuli was baptized in a Christian church and given the name Benjamin.
In the camp, there was a priest who worked with Catholic Community Services, or CCS, which helped refugees come to the United States if they were deemed orphans who no longer had families in Africa to take them in.
Through the help of CCS, the boys were initially going to be sent to Canada in 2006. But after that plan fell through, in 2009, they were interviewed again and it was determined they would come to the United States in 2010.
They had never heard of Utah before, and they had never spoken a word of English.
"They asked if we came to the U.S., what were we most interested in and what kind of families do we want to live with," Aikuli said. "They told us about the schooling and the lifestyle here and where we'll be, how we'll be changing to a new lifestyle.
"I never heard of the U.S. before. I've only heard of America, and I didn't know America was the U.S. When I was little, me and my brothers say that we will come to America someday and come to see white people because we've never seen white people before.
"When we got the interview, they were telling us 'Welcome to America' and showing us pictures of ice cream and hamburgers and people swimming on beaches and some of the activities they do here and stuff," he said of their orientation session. "And they told us how to look people in the eyes when you talk to them and being nice, stuff like that. ... We wondered what it would be like."
Now ages 14 and 19, Ben and his brother were also told what to expect when they arrived here.
"People next to me said if you come here, the roads were going to be shiny," Aikuli said. "They said you're never going to see a tree, everything is going to be up in the air, you're never going to see soil or the ground.
"They thought it was just like heaven, that you'd never see a concrete road; you'd see all mirrors and it would be all shiny."
After all their paperwork was cleared, they flew first to Europe — with some of the refugees on the airplane screaming in fear because they had never flown before — then on to New York City and finally to Salt Lake City.
"We didn't know how it was going to end up like. ... It did seem like heaven," Aikuli said of the U.S. "It's nicer than every place we've been to so far."
Foster mom
Susan Johnson of Roy works for Utah Youth Village, which is contracted through CCS to take in refugees. She had been encouraged by her son, who has foster children in his home, to get the license that is required to care for foster children.
"One day I got a phone call saying they had a refugee who was a really good kid and he's from Africa and asked if I would be interested in taking him in," Johnson said. "I read his profile, as much as they have information on them, which isn't a whole lot, and I said 'Yes.'"
She met Aikuli at the airport when he arrived here in 2010 and has since taken in two more refugees, a girl from the Congo and a boy from Thailand.
Aikuli came to her home and enrolled at Sand Ridge Junior High in Roy.
"I thought it was some building that the president was living in or something," he said of the junior high. "I started looking at the people and the food and everything, and it was just kinda clicking in little by little. Then I started meeting all the friends at school.
"She's a really good lady in giving her time to you and listening to all you're trying to say," he said of Johnson, "being there to help when she could. I've had a lot of people trying to ask me to move in with them, going from one place to another, but I feel like I was just meant to come here because every time I'm here I just feel like it's the best place for me until I'm ready to move on.
"I just think when I look back and everything that's happened since I left my home and coming here, for some reason I think it was just meant to be like that. Because there's no reason for me going through all those things and not knowing if we would have a place to sleep ending up in the U.S., which is even farther than where we came from. So I just somehow feel like, with the war and everything, like it was meant to happen that way."
"Sometimes even now," Johnson says, "he says it all feels kind of like a dream." A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Johnson also feels like the Lord definitely had a hand in bringing Aikuli here.
"When he got here, we had some pretty good talks and I told him, 'I feel like he was watching over you and he brought you here,'" she said.
Going separate ways
Ben's brother, meanwhile, was 20 years old by the time they arrived here — too old for the foster care system — and was sent to live in Salt Lake City, where he was given a state-issued I.D. and a work card and wound up with a job at a meat-processing plant.
Being separated from his little brother was terribly difficult.
"I was not able to take care of my brother, so Ben was sent to foster care," Bienfait said. "It's a government thing. Things happen for a reason. It was horrible, but God has a plan for us and nothing's impossible."
He, too, has a hard time believing everything that has transpired in their lives and attributes much of it to divine intervention.
"Even to ourselves, it is amazing," said Bienfait, who now lives in North Ogden with Debbie Green, who was Ben's teacher for two years at Sand Ridge Junior High, and her husband Max Green. "What I believe is God has a plan for you, so until you get done with his mission here, this is what you do. There was so many people dying around us every day, but we never lose our hope, we never give up.
"Every single day when I wake up, I mean every day like, I just can't imagine. I can't. It's like I'm going to wake up from a dream, because it's hard to think about it. It's really hard. When we had to figure out how we would end up here, it was just amazing.
"One thing was I lose all my fear," he said of somehow surviving their ordeal. "I didn't have any fear to scare me anymore because in that situation, I believed that was already enough. I didn't worry about what was going on, I was just living my life. I didn't care about being scared or fear. I didn't believe in that."
In their travels, when they would come to a river, it would serve two purposes — a way to bathe, as well as wash their clothes — and they'd jump in.
And sometimes, they were so hungry they'd eat anything they could find, including things they weren't sure were good for them.
"We'd never know that it's eatable or not," Bienfait said. "Things that we found, if they go in (their bellies) and never come back out, then it's eatable."
Bienfait admitted there were plenty of extremely difficult times along the way, but that their determination and faith, and the two boys' willingness to rely on each other, got them through it.
"He had a little bit of fear," he said of Ben, "but I was like encouraging him to give him a strong feeling that we'll make it. Wherever we were going, we'd encourage ourselves. Whenever he feel like we were getting down, he would bring me up. Whenever I feel like he was going down, I would bring him up. Pretty much we helped each other a lot.
"I would do anything possible to keep us alive. ... God was just doing amazing things for us at times. It was just like wow, we can't believe this.
"We were always looking forward, ahead, like what's going to happen tomorrow? Stuff like that. But one thing we never thought of was going back (to their home)," said Bienfait, who decided that after watching their house and village burn that there was no home to go back to.
Mother's Day
Their story took another amazing turn earlier this year when, two or three days before Mother's Day, Bienfait received a phone call from a friend who worked for the Red Cross, giving him a phone number to call in Africa.
It was the number of his family.
"When I called them, they just hung up the phone because they thought they were talking to a ghost," Bienfait said. "And they already did a funeral for us. ... I called Ben and told him our parents were still alive.
"I never believed them dead. My family thought that we were dead, but I never believed them dead. I always had them in my heart. And when we didn't find them, I always dream about them. ... I never believe that they died. I believe that they were still alive.
"Even now, I still can't even believe it, I just can't."
Then, on Mother's Day 2014, the two boys had a three-way conference call with their mom, who was in disbelief that her sons were still alive.
"Everyone was crying on the phone, nobody was talking," said Bienfait. "We've talked several times since then. She can talk without crying now. Now it's a happy moment."
Ben, who had been away from his family far longer — 11 years — than he had lived with them, could barely believe they were all still alive except for a younger sister, who had passed away with an illness.
"I didn't even know what to do that morning," he said. "I couldn't sleep that night before.
"My mom wasn't even talking. She said one or two things and then just start crying. She'd say another thing and just start crying again. She said they did a funeral for me and my brother about five years ago after they looked for us for a while.
"She said I just can't believe you guys are in America. I mean how would you guys be in America right now. It's not easy to just come to America."
Aikuli, too, had often dreamed about his family still being alive and well.
"I had a dream and I went there and they were in the same home and they were fishing and doing the other same things they did before my brother even called them," he said. "So that kind of like made me feel like you can't have a dream about somebody that's not there. So I thought they were there still, but I tried not to sit and think about it."
Help a brother out
Debbie Green, who befriended Aikuli after seeing him when he came to Sand Ridge Junior High, chose to go through the process of becoming a mentor for the state foster care program so she could continue to help him, meeting him at the Roy library so she could help him read.
"I had him for two years, and I actually just adopted him in my heart," she said. "He didn't talk about it (his background). When he did, it would really affect me emotionally — it still does — and he would say, 'Don't cry, because if I start crying I won't stop.'"
The boys told her they wanted to call her "Mom," and a few months ago, she got an opportunity to step in and help even more.
"Ben called Bienfait and found out that his brother had been fired," Green said. "He said, 'You call Mom. Put your things in a bag, pack your bags and come. There's a place for you.'
"He's the most incredible man I've ever met," she said of Bienfait, who is working toward getting his own high school diploma, has a job lined up at the new Smith's superstore in North Ogden, and would like to attend college and learn how to work on computers.
She says Bienfait is a very good fisherman and a great cook, and she is determined to help him succeed here in the states.
"With Ben, I've been able to see him and talk to him a lot, and I feel good about what's going on with them," Green said. "He's being an American kid, and he's an amazing boy.
"And then (Bienfait) comes to the United States having been the savior of his brother, and they're torn apart, and he's left to fend for himself. And I said I will be damned if these boys go through all that and then the American bureaucracy shuts them down when they come here.
"That's not gonna happen," she said with great emotion in her voice. "So we're gonna get him in school and going in the right direction, and it's going to be amazing."
Bienfait says Green has been pretty amazing herself.
"She's even more than special," he said. "Yeah, I know her more now, and she's more than special.
"It's just like God wanted us to be here. We just can't imagine it. It's just like unbelievable where we are right now."
And he is so pleased with all of his little brother's accomplishments.
"I'm really, really proud of him. I mean, he just amazes me what he's doing," Bienfait said, even though he has trouble trying to understand American football. "It's just amazing."
Royal treatment
Aikuli has become an accomplished placekicker and soccer player at Roy High. Now in his senior year, he has hit nearly 40 PATs this season for the unbeaten Region 5 champion Royals, and head football coach Fred Fernandes says Aikuli's presence has been a great benefit to their program for the past two-plus seasons.
"For the majority of his time here, he's lived with the thought his parents and family were deceased and he may never see them again," Fernandes said. "Since he found out they're still alive, he's been a true joy. He's walking around with a little more pep in his step, and he's got a smile on his face now. ... Everything about his life is just a lot happier for him now.
"He's told me and retold me the whole story, and there's just a lot more joy in the story now. He's talked to his mom several times now and found out his parents had the funeral for him. To think that his parents and the other kids were doing the same thing Ben and his brother were doing for two or three years, that's why they couldn't ever find him. After their home was burnt down and their village was ravaged, his parents were doing pretty much the same thing Ben and his brother were doing. They spent a couple of years living off the land in the jungle and trying to survive. They probably didn't go back to the village for three years, and by then Ben and his brother were living in the refugee camp.
"Besides the fact that he's a very pivotal cog in what we've done, he's won a couple games in the last second for us," Fernandes said. "This year he made a field goal late in the first half against Box Elder to help us go up by three scores, so he's been very pivotal in our success as a kicker.
"He's a real hard worker. One of my assistant coaches owns a roofing business, and he puts Ben to work any time Ben can do it. His other workers absolutely love Ben because he works from the minute he gets on the job until the minute they quit, so they get so much more work in when he's there. He puts in an honest hour's work for an hour's wages."
Fernandes relayed a story about how, while Aikuli was living in the refugee camp, they'd go down to a nearby river to get water. A friend of his did that one night was bit by a cobra and died.
"I guess there were a lot of people who came into that refugee camp that died while he was there," Fernandes said. "It was still dangerous living in the camp so, yeah, he knows we've got it pretty good here."
Coach Fernandes said Aikuli has found a way to break down many of the social barriers that exist in the high school atmosphere.
"High schoolers are usually pretty cliquish," he said. "You've got the jocks, the cowboys, the parking lot crew, but Ben is everyone's friend. He's got secret handshakes with people; everybody's taken to him, and he's got his own special deal with the people in this school.
"I'm so happy for him. When he told me about having that first conversation with his mom on Mother's Day, he was just beaming.
"He's improved a lot as a kicker in the time he's been here, too," Fernandes said. "His leg strength has gotten so much better. And he sure smiles a heck of a lot more now than he did a year ago."
Roy High soccer coach Craig Charlesworth says Aikuli has been a key performer for his team the past couple of years, too, and definitely has the potential to play at the next level.
"As a player, he's a hard-working young man that's very coachable," Charlesworth said. "He listens to what we tell him and he goes out there and tries to perform. As a person, he's just a great guy. He's someone you can talk with and have a meaningful conversation with, and the people who are around him really look up to him.
"Those are the kinds of stories you only see in movies," he said of Aikuli's life experiences. "Ben will sometimes tell some of his stories to the other players on our team. They'll see he has a scar and ask him about it, and they'll get to hear one of these amazing stories. It's awe-inspiring to see what he's been through, where he's at today, and where he's going in the future. He's really an amazing kid.
"Ben is definitely good enough to play college soccer. l'm making some contacts and putting together a player profile and reel of his better moments in soccer and trying to get him the opportunity. There are lots of colleges and junior colleges that would be happy to have Ben on their squad. I'm confident that, if that's really what he wants to do, then without question he can do it. He compares really well with the other kids we've had that have gone into the college ranks. So I think that's a really good possibility for him."
What pressure?
Aikuli will graduate next spring, and he and his brother are both hoping to get their U.S. citizenship next July. Farther down the road, they're hoping that someday they can return to Africa and see their family again.
And though soccer is the sport where his college future likely lies, Aikuli has certainly had his moments in football.
Last year, Aikuli hit a clutch 33-yard field goal on the final play of the game to give Roy a dramatic victory over Weber. As fans swarmed the field, lifting Aikuli onto their shoulders and chanting his name, Fernandes couldn't help but get emotional about what had taken place.
For most kickers, it would've been a tense, pressure situation.
But Ben Aikuli learned early in his life what true pressure is all about.
"It brings tears to my eyes," Fernandes said. "There's a lot of pressure in that situation, but compared to what he's seen, that wasn't any pressure. ... That was something else, especially after what he's been through, and I'm just so happy for him."
After what he and his brother have endured, it's pretty easy to be happy for them now.
EMAIL: rhollis@desnews.com