Private U.S. aid groups guided by Lost Boy refugees are mobilizing to support southern Sudan before a vote that likely will split Africa’s largest country in two.
“It is a duty for us to do what we can to help our country,” said Daniel Gai, 29, who as a barefoot boy fled attacks on his village, then worked nights in Denver warehouses, graduated from college and, this week, returned to his homeland.
One group from Denver begins training leaders next week in Sudan.
Another Denver group is expanding its well-drilling and school-building projects in off-the-grid villages.
Colorado water experts, who recently installed a dam in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains, are preparing to introduce a rain-harvesting roof system to help farmers endure drought.
These projects are among at least 27 private U.S. initiatives aimed at bolstering a fledgling South Sudan before and after a Jan. 9 independence vote.
“America’s a great country for many reasons, including opening their heart and mind for those who need help,” Gai said. “We’re going back as citizens of America.”
Gai was one of the 3,600 Lost Boys the U.S. government accepted in 2001. As the refugees made new lives for themselves, working and studying in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, California and elsewhere, they told tales of Sudan’s 21-year civil war.
They never stopped talking about forming a free nation. “In their struggle, we see remnants of our own revolutionary period,” said Anita Sanborn, president of the Colorado Episcopal Foundation, who left Thursday to help run the Leadership Institute of New Sudan (LIONS) training course in Juba, the capital of southern Sudan.
A 2005 cease-fire deal included an option for residents of semi-autonomous southern Sudan to vote to become independent. They are expected to do so.
Southern leaders contend that northern Arab and Muslim rulers have failed to deliver a promised equal share of revenues from the oil that Sudan (pop. 43 million), one-quarter the size of the U.S., sells to China.
Southern Sudan, twice the size of Texas, lacks paved roads, communications, running water and electricity.
“We’ve been down because of lack of education. Now, we’ve got some education, but no experience to implement what Sudan needs,” said Isaac Khor Bher, 30, who as a boy escaped while government forces attacked his village, carrying an injured friend on his back. He ended up in Denver, where he works as an apartment repairman and leasing specialist and, in his spare time, builds traditional tribal guitars.
Bher has teamed up with former interior decorator Carol Rinehart, who went with him to southern Sudan in 2005 to locate his mother. They launched Project Education Sudan, which has established four schools with wells and distributes grain-grinders to women.
Now Bher and others are strategizing. Land will be available for returnees, they reckon, and linking Sudan with outside supporters will be crucial.
“We all have a duty. It’s an obligation on us. Each of us must have something to do,” said Francis Bok, 31, who was hauled from his village after his parents and siblings were slaughtered. Bok wrote a book about how he was forced into servitude, tending cattle for his captors. He escaped to Egypt as a teenager and eventually was sent to Iowa.
“I still feel that part of my body is in my country. I’m always thinking about my country,” Bok said last weekend in Denver, where he met with high school and college students at a forum by Peacejam and the Colorado Coalition for Genocide Awareness.
Yet the possibility of fresh violence looms.
Sudan’s northern rulers have not said whether they’ll accept results of the vote. For more than 50 years, Sudan’s rulers have sanctioned slaughters of ethnic Africans in southern and western (Darfur) provinces. Sudan’s President Omar Bashir faces International Criminal Court war crimes charges over the continuing conflict in Darfur.
A state-run newspaper this month denounced leaders of the Colorado-based LIONS initiative as “Mossad agents” — Israel-backed infiltrators.
“Even though our group is a leader-training group not linked to any government, it could get very sticky,” said anthropologist Peter van Arsdale, director of African Initiatives for the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies.
Van Arsdale helped hone the LIONS training curriculum at DU, working with Sudanese immigrants, to ensure it is suited for Sudan. He’s scheduled to land in Juba next week and conduct seminars on human rights and humanitarian principles. The goal: developing leaders who can avoid the corruption and squabbling that have hurt other newly independent nations.
Meanwhile, fighters still are armed from the war, which claimed 2 million lives. Much of Sudan’s oil sits in the south. A pipeline moving oil to a Red Sea port starts in southern Sudan. Sudanese-Americans say that, if northern rulers reject a new nation, the pipeline probably will be targeted. Military forces are gathering along it, near where the Colorado-based Nuba Water Project last summer completed a dam.
Water project leaders now are mobilizing to introduce a low-cost roofing system that uses a thin layer of concrete and latex. Designed by Afghanistan aid veteran George Nez, the roof funnels water into gutters and cisterns. Because the water travels down smooth surfaces, it is clean enough to drink from the cisterns.
Sudanese authorities “already think Americans in the Nuba Mountains are CIA agents. That’s the label we’ve got,” project leader Steve Riley said. “If there are people shooting at each other across the border, then we won’t be able to go in.”
Bruce Finley: 303-954-1700 or bfinley@denverpost.com
Denver-based aid groups working in Sudan
Leadership Institute of New Sudan (LIONS)
303-534-6778
TSC Global — Roofs for the World
303-825-1535 ext. 202
Nuba Water Project
720-290-1537
Project Education Sudan
303-316-4528
