Leuth was born to a large family in the upper Nile region of southern Sudan. His father was a businessman, a cattle owner and the husband of four wives. When Leuth was seven, war broke out in Bor, the capital of Jonglei state; his family moved to safer ground, settling permanently in a village where they used to spend only part of each year. The war followed them.
One afternoon, Leuth took his family’s goats out to graze and joined a game with other children. “While we were playing, we heard a sound such as one that you would hear when it is about to rain—thunder—and we ignored it, thinking maybe it was going to be raining,” he said. The sound gradually turned into gunfire. When he turned to run back to the village, Leuth saw uniformed soldiers and ran for the bush instead. He climbed a tree and stayed there for two days, listening to sudden bursts of gunfire in the distance.
Twenty-two years later, Leuth is sitting across from me in the home of a Presbyterian elder in Calgary. Only two days after arriving at the Calgary immigration centre in 2004, he wrote to his friends to say that he was in “the best place for human coexistence.” He hasn’t changed his opinion since that day. Still, he admits that life in Canada was not easy at first “especially if you don’t have any skills.” It has been a strange, long and disturbing journey for Leuth. His story mirrors that of his birth country. And Grace Presbyterian, Calgary, plays a small part as a place of restoration and solace for both of these grand narratives.
On a warm afternoon last August, in the sweltering confines of the church hall, more than 300 south Sudanese gathered with only a day’s notice. They were dressed in their finest, thrilled to greet members of a delegation from their homeland; the representatives had been visiting Quebec, learning about the 1995 referendum process that almost saw the francophone province secede from Canada. When the travellers heard about the large south Sudanese community in Calgary, they decided on a last-minute visit. And they brought good news: south Sudanese in Canada would be able to participate in an historic referendum to determine the future of Sudan. A deafening cheer filled the building.
“You should have heard them,” said Bonnie Noyce Faust, an elder at Grace Presbyterian who has become like a grandmother to the lost boys and girls. “You probably did hear them. I think all of Canada must have heard them.” This January, southerners—including those scattered across the globe as refugees—decided whether to keep Africa’s largest country unified or split into two nations. In addition to Sudan, voting stations operated in eight countries. In Canada, they were set up in Calgary and Toronto.
Sudan has been torn by civil war since before it became an independent nation. The north, which is arid and populated mostly by Arab Muslims, is very different from the lusher south, which is inhabited by black Christians and animists. In 1955, the year before it shrugged off Anglo/Egyptian rule, the north and south clashed in what became a 17-year war. A 1972 peace agreement, which provided semi-autonomous rule for the south, offered a decade-long reprieve. But after then-president Gaafar Mohamed El-Nimeiri introduced nationwide Shariah law in 1983, a rebellion coalesced under the leadership of John Garang and the Southern People’s Liberation Army was born. The second Sudanese civil war raged between SPLA and government forces until the signing of a comprehensive peace agreement in January 2005. It left more than two million dead and displaced countless others.
Calgary is home to about 10,000 Sudanese, many who fled their homes as children during the second war. Stories of burning villages and uniformed soldiers are commonplace, as are tales of long journeys from ruined homes to the nominal shelter of refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. Many of the fleeing children banded together, forming large groups that learned to lick moisture from the grass in the morning and sleep in circles to avoid lions at night. Some joined the SPLA as child soldiers, carrying AK-47s taller than they were. They were dubbed the lost boys and girls of Sudan.
When eight-year-old Deng Leuth ventured from his tree, he had difficulty finding what used to be his home. The landscape had changed; houses and crops were burned, and on footpaths he stumbled across bodies that sent him fleeing back to the trees. Eventually he joined a group of fellow survivors. On the advice of SPLA soldiers, they set out for Ethiopia, a journey that took more than a month by foot.
“We lived in a refugee camp for three years,” he said. “Then in Ethiopia another war was being fought by the Ethiopians themselves, and that war forced us back into Sudan in 1991. And back in Sudan it was the same thing again, and we moved basically from one place to another. The government of Sudan was always after us. They would send helicopters and foot soldiers to try to find us, so we were always running and hiding. And eventually I became a soldier myself. Since August 1992 to, I think, September of 1993 I was in the army. Then eventually I left it and went to Kenya. I was 13.”
“In Kenya, I almost thought of going back to Sudan because it was better and safer. The aboriginals who were around the refugee camp became the enemy of the refugees. Even during the day or night, they would come to the camp and kill people. So we decided to make fences around our own houses. It was like being in prison waiting to die. It wasn’t a good feeling. I lost some of my friends, people I played with, just through that. And at some point I felt, just like many others, that the best thing was to go back to Sudan. Then you would have your AK-47. It would be just who pulls the trigger first when someone comes to look for you. But then I decided that making that choice may not give me the long-term desires that I needed. So I thought about finding my way out of Kenya to a place somewhere like Canada. If I went back to Sudan, I thought, I would not get that opportunity. So I left Kakuma, which was the refugee camp where I was, to go to another refugee camp called Dadaab, which is in Kenya, too.”
From Dadaab, a camp of predominantly Muslim Somalis who fled fighting in their own country, Leuth and some of the other lost boys and girls were accepted as refugees to Canada. He arrived on Sept. 14, 2004—16 years after he first fled his home.
For lost boys who had, in most cases, spent more than a decade in refugee camps, a western education was a dream they refused to abandon easily. With only part-time, minimum wage jobs, they were dogged by financial difficulties, and many struggled to pay back the government loans they incurred as refugees. Leuth was on the verge of dropping out of school when Grace Presbyterian lived up to its name.
“Grace discovered us and they actually paid that money. It is what is keeping me in school today. That is something that I cannot describe in words. It is something you cannot find anywhere. I have not travelled Europe or other parts of North America, but I do think—because I have friends all around and have heard stories—never anywhere would you find anything like what Grace has done for us.”
The relationship between the lost boys and Grace began not in church, but in a classroom. A young man approached his sociology professor, Mark Durieux, at the end of a lecture one day. He was James Nguen, a lost boy who had begun forming an association for lost boys and girls who lived in Calgary. Could Grace help them? Thanks to Durieux’s prompting, three of the lost boys would come to session and tell their stories; by the time they finished the elders would be in tears.
“None of us, I don’t think anybody, had heard these stories,” said Rev. Victor Kim, minister at Grace. “We couldn’t believe what we were hearing. The level of human suffering and evil that caused this, what they endured, what they’d overcome and the story of compassion; how, if nobody teaches you that you should hate someone because of your differences, you really won’t. If nobody tells you, you’re Nuer and he’s Dinka and you’re historic enemies, and if the two of you are six years old and you’re running through the desert, or through the forest with a lion on your tail, it doesn’t matter which one’s which. You’ll carry that other person and that other person will carry you.” These young kids were learning to care for each other. They have become a group defined by compassion.
“Our session and our church rallied around that and said, we want to be part of the story. This is the church’s mission.” Members pitched in to create a fund that the association could use to pay off the loans the refugees had incurred for medical checks and plane tickets; the recipients in turn began to pay the money back in modest installments so it can be lent out again or, in the future, put to another purpose.
“This is their money,” stressed Durieux, who helped create the interest-free loans as convener of the mission committee. Although Grace administers the fund at the association’s request, it is the lost boys and girls who determine when and where it’s distributed.
The church has also introduced the group to a community health program, run in partnership with Grace, that connects them with nurses-in-training from the University of Calgary.
“It’s so ironic that they would have endured what they did, and then end up dying here in Canada needlessly,” said Durieux. “In the past two months, two people have passed away, and it looks like they had illnesses that could have been dealt with early on. But they didn’t know how to access the healthcare system.”
Things like oral hygiene, nutrition, and how and when to go to a doctor are not common knowledge; they must be learned. And learning has been something the Sudanese are willing—even desperate—to do. Now, with university educations and a drive to see their home country develop and succeed, they “not only represent the future of southern Sudan in terms of repatriating skills, they are the vanguard of leadership,” Durieux observed.
Some of the association’s members are well respected by the southern government in Juba. Dhieu Dok Minyang, president of the Calgary Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan Association, spearheaded the spontaneous event that brought visiting south Sudanese delegates to Grace, on only a day’s notice.
“I thought I was doing something small, but at the end of the day, it was huge,” he said. “In this case, acting locally is acting globally,” said Victor Kim. “There are opportunities to make a difference in the world by investing in the people that God sends our way. And we may never know what kind of an influence or impact we’re having through the ripple effect.”
On the outskirts of the city, through the blowing snow, south Sudanese flooded to the voting centre on January 9. The referendum was expected to yield a landslide in favour of secession for the south. As he waited in line, one man pumped his fist in the air and sang a chorus from a south Sudanese anthem. “It means we will fight, we will fight until we are free,” translated James Mathiang, a lost boy whose forehead is marked by ritual scarring. It means he is a man among the Nuer people, able to accept the pain of a blade on his forehead without crying or flinching. He was only seven when he fled his home. He became a man when he was very young.
Of the tens of thousands of south Sudanese living in Canada, less than 2,300 voted in the referendum. Widespread mistrust and a suspicion of any information perceived to come from Khartoum kept many from the registration tables. Although the International Organization for Migration, a third party tasked with running the referendum, did its best to allay fears and address misinformation, many worried their registrations would be used against them by the Khartoum government. Others were deterred by distance or erratic weather, although the Calgary centre drew voters from as far as Maryland and P.E.I.
Overall, the referendum process has been lauded by the international community. Although the future of Sudan’s fertile and oil-producing Abyei region, which lies between the north and south, remains in dispute, the result of the referendum is clear: with an almost unanimous voice, the south called for secession.
Still, violence and mistrust persist. Almost one month to the day since Mathiang cast his ballot in Calgary, his hometown in Jonglei state was attacked by troops loyal to George Athor, a high-ranking officer who rebelled against the SPLA last April. According to officials, the clash killed between 100 and 200, most of them civilians. Mathiang’s parents weren’t in town that day, but some of his relatives were found among the dead. The southern government has accused the north of arming Athor’s soldiers; Khartoum denies it. And the sporadic local violence makes life uneasy.
For Leuth, who was among the 99 per cent who voted for seperation, the referendum itself was a way for all south Sudanese to begin to heal. “Most of the time I live as though I’m pretending,” he admitted. “Everything is so good here; I have food to eat, I have water to drink, I go to school. But the people I was born with are not having the same things. And whenever I think about them, everything I have here becomes meaningless. When they have the same peace, everything I have here would be very meaningful to me. If South Sudan is a country, and if an end will come to the conflict and everything that has happened since, then their peace would be my peace.”
