A Sudanese soldier's vision

He came up to me with the awkwardness of a young man who was experiencing a place like this for the first time. We were together at a modern 5-star resort hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, for an annual gathering of emerging church leaders from across Africa, together with friends from around the world. We were from 22 countries total. I’m from the US. He is from South Sudan – I could tell that by looking at him. I was pretty sure he was from the Dinka tribe, but I would have to ask him (later) to be sure – very black skin, tall (about 6’ 3”), thin – the look of a cattle herder, but one who I would later learn had taken up arms in the struggle and served as an SPLA soldier for twenty years. He barely looked 20 now.

Abraham is somewhere around 30 years old, however. He doesn’t know exactly how old he is. His mother can only tell him that he was born during the rains about that long ago. They had no records. They had no paper to write down such things. But they remember things like rain. Years later when he was confronted with bureaucratic forms asking for a birth date, he decided to put down March 6, 1980, as his birthday, so that’s what he continues to tell people.

Leaving one of our plenary sessions at the Amahoro Gathering, Abraham first approached me and, with the deference he naturally showed to his elders and people he considered to be in some position of authority, asked to set a time to meet with me. Abraham hadn’t met many people like me before, but his pastor suggested he find an opportunity to speak with me. I suggested we go sit down right then, which we did. Starting off earnestly and somewhat hesitantly, his story began to unfold over the next hour or so. It began with the present, the predicted story of hardship and need, of being away from his home and his people, and living off the generosity of others, of dreams as yet unfulfilled.

Life is hard for Abraham in Uganda, where he now lives. He went there from Sudan to seek education after leaving the military two years ago. Education is everything for the Sudanese, perhaps because (and certainly in spite) of the fact that it is so abysmally unavailable to so many of them. There are many bright, intelligent people in Sudan (Abraham is certainly one of them) but few who are well-educated – a fact which leaves South Sudan’s future in a great deal of question, and underscores the importance of dreamers like my new friend. He explained how he had been attempting to enter the university in Uganda, and indeed had been accepted, but he could not get the scholarship that would be required for him to take advantage of this opportunity. For the time being, he was dependent on the generosity of a church in Kampala and the people there who were providing him with a place to stay and a community of support. His pastor, Kennedy Kurui, whom I had met two years ago in Rwanda, thought that coming to the Amahoro Gathering this year would be a good experience for him, and arranged for him to come to Mombasa to be with us.

Until two years ago, being a soldier was the only life Abraham had known since he was nine years old. He had been part of the South’s struggle against the Islamic Republic of Sudan and what the international community would come to recognize as a genocide against the non-Arab Africans of Sudan, the Christian and animist peoples of the south, during a bloody twenty year conflict that had left over 2 million people dead or displaced from their homes. Abraham was a nephew of John Garang, the legendary leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, who died in a suspicious plane crash on July 31, 2005, only months after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement had been signed with the Government of Sudan. Garang was a highly respected leader among the South Sudanese, a real hero, partly because he was a brilliant and well-educated man, and also because he had been able like no one before him to make peace between the Dinka and Nuer, two of the south’s major tribes and traditional enemies. “Nephew” could mean many things in Dinka culture, but it was a close enough relationship that people knew that Abraham was related, and often congratulated him on accomplishments of Garang during his leadership of the people of South Sudan. His loss was a great tragedy for all southerners.

Abraham continued his story. Recently, after laying down his gun, he had embarked on a new journey. He wants to be a pastor, someone who participates in the healing of his country and his people. Initiating a conversation with me was part of the plan, and one I am very familiar with in gatherings like this. Just being a muzungu – a white person – in Africa earns one the presumption of wealth and connections that will pave the way to their dreams for a young man like this. I’ve had several of those conversation (and even a written, bound, proposal) in the past week, conversations I’m happy to have, in spite of my inability to satisfy all of those dreams. Just having the conversation is important – for them and especially for me.

This conversation was especially important to me because I have cared a lot about Sudan for a long time. As a graduate student in international conflict resolution a number of years ago, I took a special interest in the Sudan conflict and wrote several papers on the subject. I had also met a number of Sudanese refugees in the US, including some of the so-called Lost Boys of Sudan. My only trip to Sudan had taken place just two years ago, to the opening of South Sudan’s first secondary school for girls in Yei – a project our church had gotten behind and provided some modest support for. It was an amazing experience to be there in the land about which I had read so much and imagined even more. I had traveled there together with a Kenyan friend who worked at Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya at the time the Lost Boys arrived there in 1992. Martin was a child protection officer with UNHCR (the United Nations High Commission on Refugees) who was responsible for the intake, settlement, and oversight of the 15,000 undernourished, unclothed, skin and bones boys (and some girls) who arrived at the camp after their four year odyssey in the deserts of Sudan, Ethiopia and now Kenya.

Abraham, it turns out, was one of them. Unlike many of the Lost Boys I had met in the US (including the very articulate and personable Panther Alier, who had spoken at Christ Church Andover and captivated the imagination of our young people a few years ago), Abraham had been recruited into the south’s rebel army – the SPLA – during his time at Kakuma. He would not become one of the 7,000 or so who would eventually emigrate to the United States. From nine years of age, he went to school in the camp during the mornings, and in the afternoons he participated in drills and military exercises that would prepare him to go back into the deserts and jungles of Sudan to fight for his people’s survival and liberation. They practiced with wooden rifles as young boys, and at age 15 he left Kakuma to return to Sudan, where he was handed his AK-47.

Two years ago, several things changed for Abraham. He left the army and returned to his home. His brother had just been killed in inter-tribal violence by a Nuer, leaving three wives and nine children. Abraham, being the next brother in age, would be responsible for his brother’s family. He does his best, from Uganda, to send what little support he can put together for them. His father was also killed by a Nuer – the same man.

What began to come out of Abraham next was perhaps the most surprising thing of all. He began to talk about how he feels he must participate in the healing of Sudan, out of the suffering of his own life. He knows the man who killed his father and brother, and he thinks about him a lot. He imagines a day when he will sit down and speak with him, and through God’s power and not his own, offer him the good news of repentance and forgiveness. Abraham understands that there is no other way. Forgiveness and reconciliation are the only key to breaking the cycle of violence for Sudan, and that all its peoples must heal their divisions and animosities if they are to have a future together. He wants so desperately to be a part of that, and he feels sure that if there is a reason for all of the suffering that he has had to endure in his life, it is so that he can bear witness through his own experience of adversity to the potential for transformation of people and society. People will not be able to say to him, “you do not know what we have experienced.” This attitude, in my book, is a mark of real transformative leadership potential.

Next year, in 2011, South Sudan will have a referendum on independence from the north. It is a foregone conclusion that the people of the south will vote for secession. What is not as clear is how they will be governed, and whether historic inter-tribal rivalries will frustrate their hopes for creating a stable, independent society for South Sudan. People like Abraham, I think, are key to setting a new course.

I told Abraham that I had been to Sudan, and that I had also been to Kakuma Refugee Camp – a place that when I visited it two years ago felt like the very end of the earth to me. For him, it had been the best home he ever knew, and a place he remembered fondly as a place where there was always plenty of food, and where he got to go to school, and where he had a deep sense of community among his fellow Lost Boys in Group B. I told him that on my laptop in my room, I had some pictures of Kakuma – and of Yei, Sudan – that I would like to show to him. We agreed that sometime in the next day or so, we would look at them together.

We did. He came to my room where I showed them to him. Kakuma changed a lot after he and his friends left, some into the SPLA and some to the US or other places. Finally, once the peace agreement was signed in 2005, all the Sudanese refugees there had left, and the camp went from 100,000 residents to about 40,000. The Sudanese area of Kakuma is mostly uninhabited now, and many of the huts have disappeared or are in disrepair. He recognized the places I showed him in my pictures and explained where Group B had been located. His eyes filled with memories as I showed him through the Ethiopian and Burundian and Congolese communities they had abutted there. We saw the Episcopal Church of Sudan in the camp – his church – as well as others defined primarily by nationality and language.

When we went on to the pictures of Yei, Sudan, he recognized places there as well. He travels through Yei when going from his home in Bor to Uganda and vice versa. He looked at the faces of the children and told me one by one which tribe they all belonged to – some Dinka, some Kakwa, and a variety of others I do not remember. He showed me the subtle differences in anatomy and facial structure that were the cues known to all but nearly indistinguishable to me. “This boy,” he said, pointing to one, “is from my town.” We came to the picture of me with the Bishop of Rumbek. “That’s Bishop Alapayo,” he said. “I know him.” I had by chance bumped into the bishop during my brief stay in Yei during a walk around town. He and other Sudanese bishops were gathered for a meeting at the cathedral in Yei, and I happened to be walking by during a break, met him, and asked a passerby to take our picture. “I’ll tell him we met when I see him,” Abraham promised.

I don’t have any idea what Abraham’s university tuition and expenses will be or how he will come up with them. I do know that I want to do what I can to help him. It can’t be much, compared to what it would cost in the US. I can’t do it by myself, but I can do it with the help of others. If you (dear reader) would like to help, let me know.

We spent the following day talking again several times, laughing and joking about things. Gone was the hesitance and awkwardness. We are friends. He left this morning to return by bus with his group to Uganda. We promised to stay in touch and to pray for each other. I have a good feeling about Abraham – and the role of people like him in the future of South Sudan.