by Majok Marier
Stephen Chol Bayok greets his mother after 20-year separation. His grandmother (right, sitting beside them) looks on.
Our families were still in flux, still not back in their villages, probably. We did not know in many cases where our families were. Communication with a family was all by word of mouth, as there are few landline telephones in South Sudan, and there is no postal system. If someone went to Sudan and they returned and told you they had seen someone, a relative, that is how you found out about them. I didn’t know where my family was or even who was alive after this long war.
John Garang, the leader of the SPLA and the Sudanese Peoples’ Liberation Movement (SPLM), was hailed as a hero. A former Sudanese Army officer who joined a mass SA defection to resist the Khartoum government back in 1983, he was to play a major role in a Unity Government, also called for in the CPA, that would rule in the six years before the referendum. There were to be representatives of the ruling Islamic political party as well as the SPLM running the country. He was first vice president, and also the administrator of South Sudan. Unfortunately, he died with a dozen others when his helicopter crashed three weeks after he took office in July 2005. This set off riots among southern Sudanese in Khartoum and Juba, and the mystery of why the helicopter crashed has never been solved.
Nevertheless, the SPLM and its large army took the lead in working to see that a peaceful process was observed and that the government made good on its parts of the CPA, especially preparing for elections set to occur in early 2011. The Lost Boys who were part of the Rumbek Youth Vision accelerated plans to go back to Sudan, especially after Stephen Chol Bayok, my friend from back in Pinyudo Camp, heard that his mother was alive and efforts were made to make contact with her. After a very long and difficult effort involving his mother traveling to Uganda to stay and to telephone him, the two were reunited over the phone, and he made plans to meet her. Others were able to hear, also, or were planning to go to find their relatives once they arrived in the Rumbek area. Likewise, I submitted my application for a travel document from what was then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service (now Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Unfortunately, these did not come in time, and I was unable to go.
MAMA GINI GOES TO SUDAN
Gini Eagen, known to the Lost Boys in Clarkston, Georgia, as Mama Gini, is a pastoral associate at Corpus Christi Catholic Church in Stone Mountain, Georgia. In 2001, she heard about the Lost Boys resettling in nearby Clarkston. She said she initially resisted getting involved.
“Once they entered my life, I knew my life would be forever changed,” she said. “I knew I could never be simply a bystander, but they would enter into my heart and soul,” she said. “This has proved to be true.”
Corpus Christi is served by the Claretian Fathers, an order of Roman Catholic priests that has a worldwide presence, but that has for many years operated in Latin America. Most of the priests are bilingual in Spanish, and Corpus Christi has about 80 countries represented among its parishioners. So it was not unusual for the Lost Boys to contact the church.
Gini tried to tell them how to get to the church. After the directions using MARTA resulted in their getting lost on Memorial Drive, Gini drove to their apartments to ride MARTA with them. This proved difficult as well, as the bus let them out and they still had to walk a long way. So, with the help of the pastor, Father Greg Kenny, Gini arranged to have a special Mass celebrated for the boys and for other members of the Sudanese community each Sunday afternoon at Clarkston Community Center.
The pastor, Father Greg Kenny, and then Father Jim Curran followed by Father Jose Kochuparampil, said the Mass every Sunday over several years. Worship was full of song and joy and African drums. Meeting in community was a great help to the boys as well as the other Sudanese community members, most of whom did not have transportation. Gini recognized that a number of agencies and volunteers were assisting the boys, so the church looked for ways of helping that were not already occurring.
“We began meeting here at Corpus Christi with Lost Boys from the Rumbek area that lived in different parts of the United States,” Gini related. “This group of young men knew that they could not solve all the problems of southern Sudan, but they felt compelled to do something for those they left behind. It weighed heavily on them to know that they had food and shelter and opportunities for education and work, when those they left behind had none of these things.”
Also about this time, the young men began to hear that family members were still alive—family who thought they were long dead. The began to try to reach their relatives, while at the same time making a plan to gather the youth of the Rumbek area, to bring them hope and establish an organization with which they could communicate across the continents that separated them.
Simple communications that most Americans take for granted are difficult in South Sudan. A good example of this is the lengthy process of connecting Stephen Chol Bayok with his mother. A friend in Uganda called Stephen and said he had been in Sudan and had seen Stephen’s mother. This was the first news for Stephen that his mother survived the civil war. Stephen’s mother had to travel to Uganda, a distance of 300 miles, with almost no roads, in order to use a telephone to call Stephen in Clarkston. Southern Sudan has historically been left out of Sudan’s infrastructure development, and the 22-year civil war also knocked out any existing communication links.
Stephen, who at the time had a job in maintenance at Georgia State University, started working two full-time jobs to earn the $400 for his friend to take his mother to Uganda and support her while she was there. Gini found out about the extra jobs; knowing two jobs and little sleep would jeopardize Stephen’s health, she raised the money, and several months later, Stephen’s mother called him. He recognized her voice, but she could not believe he was her Stephen. She grilled him about family members. When she finally realized this was her son, she fainted. The scene repeated itself many more times over the next years with more Lost Boys.
For a couple of years, the group of Rumbek area Lost Boys met, and they formed the Rumbek Youth Vision Association. As the long war that had cast them on American shores drew to a close, their plans to return took on a new energy. They could go back to Sudan and perhaps find family, and they could inspire the young men in the villages they had left. Their planning finally culminated in a trip scheduled for December 26, 2005. The boys always assumed Mama Gini, as the project manager for the trip, would go with them. Gini was not so sure, but in August 2005, her husband of many years, Dennis Eagen, died suddenly. After this great loss, Gini decided to make the trip. She felt she was destined to accompany the boys on what would be a spiritual journey for sure.
Eight Lost Boys, a Rwandan refugee worker, and Gini—blond, 64, and grandmotherly—flew to Uganda in late December. Clarkston residents Stephen Bayok, James Maliet, Moses Poundak, and James Malual, along with Lost Boys from other states, made the trip. They stayed at a Ugandan mission station of the Missionaries of the Poor. Gini was well acquainted with the missionaries, as she organized and accompanied more than a dozen annual trips where Corpus Christi parishioners assisted the MOP brothers in Jamaica as they ministered to the poor and destitute there.
The missionaries helped them obtain the paperwork needed in order to fly to Sudan. It was a small airline that flew them, and the boys were concerned about that and about making the trip into Sudan.
“On our return trip to Kampala, Uganda we were surprised when the pilots asked us for money to help fuel the plane on a stop before we got to Kampala,” Gini said. The pilots did not have the right kind of currency. Their currency was not the right year of issue. The U.S. currency their passengers had was more acceptable to the man dispensing the fuel than that of the pilots. Some banks did not exchange certain years of U.S. dollars—possibly because of counterfeit money being floated there recently, Gini said. “We weren’t exactly sure why—all we knew is that some of our money they would take, but not the pilots’.” When the plane landed in Rumbek, Sudan,
Gini was surprised that the town they had spoken of so much was so undeveloped. The plane appeared to land in a field of dust. No tarmac—only a dirt field.
They were all so welcoming, Gini said. “Later, in a village, we were standing by a fence made of sticks, and they showed me this large cow with these great horns and I was admiring the horns, and then suddenly the cow was on its back and it was at my feet and its throat was slit,” Gini said. “Then I was supposed to step over it before meeting the people who’d come to greet us. As the honored guest, I was expected to step over first. That’s when I came face to face with a very important ritual in Sudan.
“They think the ritual comes from Bible stories that the Christian people heard about but could not read for themselves—the Old Testament story of Moses’ sacrifice. They believe when you step over the animal, your sins are forgiven. And it’s especially important to perform if people are being reunited after a long absence. That way, if the shock of seeing the other people again causes someone to die, that person would be at peace.”
Stephen’s reunion with his mother was a high point of the trip.
“It took us a while to find Stephen’s mother,” Gini said. “I’m not sure how we found her, as there are no roads with which to give direction. We got out of the truck and walked on rough ground through high grasses, and when we got there she wasn’t there. It was very disappointing. Then we went another day, and she was there and his grandma was there. The two got to meet and embrace. It was very moving. To have been part of that—it’s something.”
Three goats were slaughtered in a later ceremony honoring Stephen. Gini stepped with him over each of the goats, as she was also being honored. His brother had provided one goat, and his uncles the other two. In fact, at each gathering where a Lost Boy found his family, there was a joyful reunion, and at each one the ceremonial slaughter to welcome the visitors.
The Dinka do not have a great deal of meat in their diet—it is primarily from grains, groundnuts and vegetables grown in their gardens. The cattle are their wealth, used for marriages and sometimes to settle debts or fines; the same is true of other livestock. During marriage negotiations, members of extended families will offer some of their cattle in order to secure the marriage. The groom will later be expected to contribute to other family members’ marriage dowries just as he has benefited from their gifts.
But then they were on to the next village, as their goal was to invite the youth of all these five villages that make up the Rumbek area to a meeting “under the trees,” the expression they use for coming together for support and decision-making. They told the people in the villages that they were lucky to be alive, and they wanted to share their message of hope, and to share dinner under the trees the following Saturday. So the full reunions had to wait until after they had this meeting at the end of the first week.
So they all gathered, and the boys told what had happened to them in their journeys during the war. They said that they were committed to helping them, but that their resources would be very limited. The most they wanted to share was their hope—if they had survived these terrible tragedies in the civil war, then there was hope for them in their villages, in the new Sudan.
Seeing the needs that were remaining in their villages, the Rumbek Youth Vision organization went back to Clarkston and other towns and raised $3,500; with that money, they purchased and distributed satellite-operated cell phones for each of their villages.
“We were there two weeks,” Gini said. “In the second week, the boys did spend time with their families. During that first week of travelling to the five areas, there was one place, Maper, where the boys did not want me to travel with them. It was 75 miles away, a rough five-hour ride over cow paths. Apparently there were some tribal fights still going on in that area, and it was considered dangerous.
“That was when I told them that if the reason they didn’t want me to go was because I was a white American woman and that would cause a problem for them, I would understand that,” Gini said. “But if it was simply because they were concerned for my safety, that wasn’t fair because I was part of the group. And so they met—they were always meeting—and they came back and said I could go.”
So they came to pick her up in an SUV the next morning at 3 a.m. The SUV was carrying an extra passenger—a guard with a rifle. The local leaders had provided a car and security for the trip. The area they went to was hard to access in dry season, which this was, and cut off from the rest of the area during the long rainy season. The group saw a lion, but otherwise made the trip safely, and invited the people to the gathering “under the trees.”
James stayed at the village where his father lived rather than accompanying the boys on the rest of their rounds. He had an opportunity to spend time with his father and he was very grateful. When he rejoined the group, he talked about his father and his wisdom, and that his father “told him to live cleanly and with God.”
Also later, the group told Gini that the reason James stayed back was that “if something happened to us, he would be the one to go tell the others’ families,” Gini related. “This impressed me. They plan for these kinds of things,” Gini said.
“I’m in awe of these people.”
“Majok Marier’s mother walked for miles to find me where I was staying near Rumbek,” Gini said. His mother was living now in Pulkar, not far from the village where Majok was when the war came, at Adut Maguen.
“Father Andrea of the Diocese of Rumbek arranged for a translator so I could talk with her. I told her if she had been standing with 100 women I would have known her, because Majok looks just like her. We talked a while; I told her Majok wanted to come, but he did not receive his travel documents in time.
“She told me she hoped Majok could come to see her soon. And then she went down the road, walking back to her village.”
Gini interacted with women when she could, although she found that she was given a role of respect mostly reserved for men. In Uganda, Stephen’s uncle and about 70 men gathered outside a home where they ate together, and then sat in chairs in a circle. The lights went out at 5 p.m. as power is cut every night in that area, and candles were lit. Gini was sitting among the men. She insisted on seeing where the women were.
“It might have been because it was night, and everything was by candlelight, it was such a unique scene,” she said. “But I found a building next door where there were all these rooms and in each room there were women and their children. The touched me and they caressed me and we sang and prayed together. Women have a fairly subservient role there, but when things change, the women there will be amazingly powerful.”
In saying farewell, Stephen’s mother laid her hands on Gini and said, “You are my son’s mother.”
“We can share him,” Gini said she told Stephen’s mother.
“All of them gave them back to me,” Gini said. “‘You are the mother,’ they told me. I took it as a compliment that they thought I was helping each of their sons.”
Mama Gini, who’d recently lost her husband, also traveled with the group, which left December 26, 2005. I was so sad that I could not go. I was depressed for more than three months because of this problem of the travel documents. What made it bad was that I promised my mother I would come home in 2005. She traveled from Sudan to Uganda, like Stephen’s mom. She stayed for several months with a relative in Kampala. I talked to her on the phone. She asked me when I could come home, and I did tell her that I could come in December 2005 to see her, so she was hoping to see me in person. In fact, she decided to return to the very poor village in Sudan where she was staying in order to be there to greet me. I needed my family to know that I was a person who could support them right now. I wondered what I could do to make them happy. Not going to Sudan felt like I was not a son they could depend on.
A major goal of the Lost Boys’ Rumbek trip was to speak to young people in our home villages and to urge them to make good lives for themselves, to improve their communities. I wanted
to be able to tell my story to the youths of Rumbek, as the group planned to do when they traveled with Gini to Sudan.
I decided I would use another method to tell the young people my story. I began writing this book, because I wanted people to know what happened, and not to forget our struggle to live despite all the animal attacks and thirst and starvation along our long journey. I wanted them to know the problems in the refugee camps. And they needed to know what our lives have been like since coming to the United States.
At the time we came here, we did not have much of a choice, as our villages were still involved in the civil war, and just as we had to leave Sudan again when Kapoeta fell to the Sudanese Army and flee across the border to Lokichoiko, we would be facing that kind of life again, and we would not get our education. That goal of education had become more important, especially as we contemplated being the main leaders of a separate South Sudan, which even back in our days in the camps looked like the only option for our area. We were told we would be able to get our educations in the United States. In fact, this was very difficult, and for me, it was not happening.
I began study at Georgia Perimeter College, and after attending for some time, I had acquired a better command of English and writing skills, but all my classes were English as a Second Language courses. No college credit applied toward a degree. It was very expensive, and my work was such that I did not have hours off to attend classes. Studying late at night—after work, after classes—was very difficult. So I stopped attending. And the goal of resettling in the United States—to receive my education—was not fulfilled. Nevertheless, I still have my goal of one day becoming a geologist so that I can find more of South Sudan’s oil and other valuable resources.