Special: Report from Sudan
Five years since arriving in the States, more than a few of Metrowest’s Lost Boys have journeyed back to their native country. For some, it has been an opportunity to marry. For others, it has been a chance to locate relatives – including brothers and mothers whom some had thought were dead.
For all, it has been a sobering and bittersweet opportunity to assess the state of southern Sudan. Says Abraham Gai Yol of Worcester, just back from a three-month trip to meet his mother for the first time in 18 years: “They are really in a poor condition. Everyone is sick. There is no clean water. No medication.”
His sentiments are echoed by Gabriel Akau of Lincoln, who returned to Africa to meet his intended bride Aruar Malith, a high-schooler in Kampala, Uganda. Gabriel also went north into Sudan, visiting the southern city of Juba and traveling to Yei. “The roads are really bad. You can’t believe you can pass that way,” says Akau, a student at Bunker Hill Community College.
Other recent returnees, including Marko Akec of Worcester and Lincoln’s Charles Adeng Chayor, have similar reports – observations of a nation devastated by decades of war, tantalized by the promise of peace, and only now starting on the road to reconstruction.
But for every vision of a roofless grass hut or of cattle in need of vaccines, there are images of hope. Gai Yol reports on the NGOs’ hum of activity – the jobs they are providing for returning Sudanese and the schools and hospitals that will be built. Road construction is under way again to link Uganda and Kenya to southern Sudan. And Gabriel Akau describes the buzz of business in the border town of Yei.
Yet many of those exiled for years by civil war are not waiting for tarmac highways to lead them back. “The people are going slowly by slowly,” says Gai Yol. “They are now starting to go back to their original areas.” What they find is not always what they left behind. The new oil discoveries in Gai Yol’s homeland near the Nile town of Bor will bring prosperity to a few – and doubtless open new debates about resources.
And then there are the many displaced who have gone to ground, most likely unaware that peace between north and south is now old news. According to Gabriel, a roving task force has been set up to take the news throughout the countryside – no small challenge in Africa’s largest nation. “Even the government cannot find them,” says Gabriel of those hiding out.
It is a haunting indication of the monumental task that the reconstruction of Sudan will be – and a reminder of how well-equipped the returnees like Gabriel and Gai Yol will have to be when, one day, they return for good.
by John Kerr
