Coming to America

Refugees from war-ravaged Sudan make a new home in Maine.

By Noah Bruce

The civil war in Sudan is not something that appears on the mental radar screens of most Americans. You won’t read much about it in the newspaper; that is, unless you’re a frequent reader of the international section of the New York Times. The Channel 8 news team isn’t going to run a story about the state of affairs between the Muslim government of the north and its war against the Christian militia groups that make up the Southern People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) following a feature on the busting of the local high school basketball team for drinking a few beers after losing the state finals.

And in a sense, you can’t blame the media. For one thing, Sudan falls into that broad category of countries the vast majority of Americans couldn’t find on a map. Because its name recognition has not been bolstered by US military intervention, as in the case of Albania or Rwanda, it remains lumped together in the popular American consciousness with the likes of other African nations like Congo or Uganda. Second, the media loses interest in an old story. At the beginning of the Gulf War, the conflict dominated newspaper headlines, but a few months later, you had to root around on page two or three to find out that America had dropped another 500 lb. payload of explosives on Baghdad. Raging fairly consistently since 1955, the civil war in Sudan, though it has cost two million lives since 1983, simply isn’t big news anymore.

Yet, for the estimated 400 Sudanese in Portland, the civil war occupies huge tracts of mental territory. It has left memories of violence, oppression, and the dead. It is the reason these people left their homes and began journeys that ended several years and thousands of miles later in Portland. And because the Sudanese in Portland remain mentally and financially tied to their homeland, they cannot find rest while the civil war rages.

Florence Olebe, a panelist at the Sudanese Conference held at the Center for Cultural Exchange on April 28, summed up this feeling of unrest. “We are not comfortable,” she said. “We have a lot of problems. We are worried about our people back home. We work many jobs to support our people back home.”

“While we live amongst you,” said conference organizer Juan (pronounced Jew-Wan) Lado, “we ache for what is happening in our country.”

The conference, fully titled Sudanese Conference 2001— From Sudan to Maine: Past, Present, was a sort of coming out for Portland’s Sudanese community. Bau Graves, the Center’s co-director said “The Sudanese learn more and more about Maine and Mainers, but Mainers do not know much about the Sudanese. This conference is an attempt to bridge that gap.”

SUDAN

See my fingernails. They are not good, see,” says Regina Nataniel, extending her fingers.

“Look,” she says as she begins to peel off what at first glance appears to be her reddish, purplish polish. A closer look reveals that Nataniel is peeling polish, but she’s also removing layers of the nail itself.

“This is from the electricity,” she says, explaining that her weak nails are a result of the four sessions of torture she underwent at the hands of the Sudanese military.

Nataniel was subject to two kinds of torture. In the first, electricity was conducted through her body from wires attached to her fingertips.

“You feel it here,” she says, again displaying her fingers and then using her other hand to point out the path of the electricity as it traveled from her fingers to her hand, up her arm to her shoulder and finally to her heart. “You feel it like this,” she says, and her hand quivvers to demonstrate how the electricity made her heart vibrate and shake. “After they finish, you fall down.”

In the other form, the torturer touched Nataniel’s skin with a small electric pin , conducting a tremendous burst of electricity into her body. “It is a little pin, but it throws you across the room,” she says.

Nataniel was a first lieutenant in the Sudanese Army. Upon graduation from the University of Khartoum in 1996, she, along with her entire graduating class, was forced to join the army. This was an awkward position for Nataniel, who was born in Juba, the largest city in southern Sudan. As a Southerner and a Christian, she was a member of the group of people the government and its army were oppressing. “In reality, they coerced us to join the army. There was no choice,” she explains.

She proved a useful soldier — bright, organized, and most importantly, able to speak English and Arabic in addition to several tribal languages.

It was her ability to speak English, Nataniel says, that won her the assignment of personal assistant to one of the two most powerful southern rebel leaders, Riek Machar. Machar had recently defected from the SPLA, and had, for the time being, become affiliated with the government in Khartoum.

Yet, the government did not trust Machar. It quickly became apparent to Nataniel that her superiors were using her to spy on the ex-rebel leader.

But as a southern Christian, Nataniel felt more kinship with Machar than she did with the army. “How could I betray this man. He was a southerner like me. They wanted me to talk about Machar, but I say nothing.”

This is where the torture came in, but even electricity couldn’t make her talk. “Whenever they ask me something, I look them in the eyes, but I don’t talk. I don’t say anything . . . If it means death,” she shrugs her shoulders, “many have died already.”

Nataniel almost did die. She was thrown into a military prison. She describes her cell as “like a trailer, with half of it underground.” The air in the cell was stifling and “hot, very hot,” and there was only a small space above the door where air could flow in and out. Nataniel was the only woman in the cell with seven men. Luckily, her fellow prisoners took pity on her and allowed her the space nearest the vent.

The prison food, the men quickly told her, was poisoned. There was, however, a guard sympathetic to the prisoners who brought them fresh water, salt, and every once in a while, some peanuts. Most days, Nataniel subsisted on only water and salt.

Perhaps worst of all was the presence of the dead bodies in the bunker. “When someone died, they poured a solution on the body and just left them there. They did not care.”

Nataniel lived in this hell for three months. She recounts the story calmly, with the kind of indignation one might display when recounting the story of receiving a ticket for driving five miles over the speed limit.

Abruptly, Nataniel’s fates changed. A general, on his yearly visit to the prison, recognized her as an able, multi-lingual soldier who had served him well in the past. She was freed and sent home with the understanding that when she recovered from the prison experience she was to report to his office to serve under him.

Nataniel returned to her family “like a dead body, not like a human . . . I wish they had taken a photo of me. You would not believe what I looked like,” she says. She was taken to the hospital and given fluids via an IV. Nataniel spent three days in the hospital. When she got out, she knew she had to leave Sudan.

“I was not going back to the general. I had to get out,” she says.

Robert Oryem was fortunate that he was not thrown in prison or tortured like Nataniel, but his story carries its own share of pain. Oryem was a leader of student protests against the government, a dangerous position to hold in Sudan.

He was a high school student living in Juba when he escaped the country in 1991. In that year, the government instituted a new policy that forced kindergarten-aged children to go to “kalua,” which Oryem, who is Christian, explains is the Islamic version of catechism. This policy was part of a larger agenda to “Islamisize” the population in southern Sudan to Islam. “They were forcing us to become Muslim,” he says.

To protest the policy, many of the students in Juba boycotted class and staged a protest. In the days following the boycott, government security forces began arresting the students, and Oryem, a leader in the protests, lived in fear that he, too, would be taken into custody.

Before the government got him, though, the rebels began attacking Juba. “Juba became a target for the SPLA,” he says. “They were trying to take the town from the government. They were shelling the city.”

Oryem was forced to flee with his school friends. There was not time to find his family. “I had to just run away. My family, they were left there. Later I learned that my father had a piece of land and that area was destroyed. Our home was destroyed.”

COMMUNITY LEADER: Angelo Okot worked to create a tight-knit Sudanese community.

ESCAPE

On the map, Juba looks right on the border with Kenya,” says Oryem, “but on foot it is not so near.” Before they could begin the week-long hike to cross the border, however, Oryem and his friends were caught by rebel soldiers and taken to a military camp. “We were picked up by the SPLA,” he says. “If you fall into the hands of the SPLA they will make you a soldier.” The SPLA, like the Sudanese army, practices forced conscription to man its front line.

Luckily, one of Oryem’s friends knew the lay of the land and was confident he could lead them to Kenya. “We knew somebody who was familiar with the villages in the area. We went like we were going to take a short walk down to the stream maybe to take bath, and we were gone.”

After a week of walking with little food, Oryem found United Nations workers near the border who took him to Nairobi, where he received refugee status. This was an important step as it meant that the UN was now aware of Oryem’s plight and could begin the process of relocating him, a process that was to take two years. Staying in Kenya is not an option for a Sudanese, however, as Kenya is not one of the nations that resettles refugees.

In Nairobi, Oryem learned the location of a refugee camp where a number of his friends from school were staying, and asked to be brought there.

Oryem estimates there were about 3000 Sudanese and Somalians in the refugee camp, all struggling with the very basics of human existence — food, clothing, and shelter.

“Life in the camp was very difficult,” he says. “The first day I was in the camp, Somalian rebels with guns came and they took my clothing. It was horrible. That was a horrible day.”

Oryem lived with five friends in a tent that provided less than adequate shelter. “When the rain comes,” he says, “it’s leaking and the tent breaks into pieces.”

“In the morning, you wake up and you think about food, whether you will have enough food.” On average, Oryem ate one meal of corn meal and beans every day. Securing even this meager sustenance was a struggle. The UN workers who ran the camp would provide the refugees with varying rations — sometimes a little oil, sometimes dry corn, sometimes dry beans. Oryem’s group of friends would pool their food together in order to sell off the oil, which they didn’t need to prepare their meals, to local Kenyans. Then they would take the money to a local miller who would grind their corn into flour so they could prepare cornbread.

Oryem describes waiting in line for three hours for his turn at the water pump. “It was important to have containers,” he explains. “If you only have one bucket, it is not enough. You need the water for drinking and cooking, but then you start thinking about taking a shower.”

Oryem lived this life for two years. Then one day a representative from a US agency arrived at the camp. “Sometimes magic happens. It was magic,” he says.

The US official interviewed Oryem and his friends. “We explained why we left Sudan and why we think we cannot go back to Sudan.”

Oryem believed it helped their case that he knew a UN worker from Juba and used his name as a reference. He heard nothing for three months, then they received a letter saying their case was being studied by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service. A month later, lawyers from this agency came to the camp and interviewed Oryem and his friends. “A lot of people got turned down after the interview, but me and my friends were lucky. This was a big thing in my life.”

Oryem and his friends were taken to Nairobi and on April 28, 1993, they boarded a plane headed to New York, where they cleared immigration and took another plane to Portland. After a two-and-a-half year hiatus, Oryem was allowed to begin his life again, in a place he knew nothing about.

Like Oryem, Angelo Okot was a community leader in Sudan who was forced to leave his country after criticizing the government. “You have people coming up to you pointing at you, saying if you continue doing these things you will have trouble. This is not a joke. They really will get you. Once you have these warnings, your days are calculated. If you waste time, as many of my friends did, you were killed. We lost so many family friends.”

Together with his wife and five children, Okot traveled from Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, to Halfa, a Sudanese city on the border of Egypt. Because Okot had money, he had an easy time with border officials. “When you meet resistance, you give some money, and the resistance dies down.” He and his family took a boat across the Nile to the Egyptian city of Aswan. From there they took a bus to Cairo.

Okot’s family stayed with family friends until he found a job working as an accountant for a timber importer. The job did not pay well, and was unstable because Okot did not have a work permit, but he says “I was hanging in there.”

By chance, Okot found a better paying job through an old connection. “There was a man I knew from Khartoum. He was an African-American professor working at the University of Khartoum. I was working at the UN development office. Every week he would come and pick up a check and I was the one who gave him the check.”

In Egypt, Okot bumped into the man who was now a professor at the University of Cairo, “while out strolling one day.” The man eventually found him a job as office manager of the psychology department at the university. “This job paid $300 per month — good money in Egypt.”

In addition to this work, Okot received a grant through a Christian organization in the Netherlands to organize the Sudanese in Cairo to start a craft business. He rented an apartment to house the business and trained other refugees to make baskets, tie-died shirts, and belts. Then the goods were sold in the market and to the embassies, especially the US embassy. The profits were shared by the community.

When Okot and his family arrived in Cairo, the Sudanese in Egypt had not yet received refugee status from the UN. Okot explains that the UN incorrectly assumed that for a Sudanese person, Egypt was familiar territory. “[They thought] we the Sudanese have a relationship with Egyptian people, that if a Sudanese come to Cairo it’s like his own home. It used to be you don’t need passport.” But clearly this was not the case, as Okot was forced to work under the table. He and other Sudanese representatives met with the UN to petition for refugee status, and won this designation in May of 1995. This allowed the Sudanese in Egypt the right to be reconsidered for resettlement.

Okot’s family was fortunate. A month after he filled out his paperwork, his name appeared on the list of refugees being considered for relocation in the US. He went for an interview at the US embassy and took his family for their medical exams. In December of 1995, after three and a half years in Cairo, the Okot family flew to New York, and after a day waiting for a snowstorm to pass, they boarded the plane to Portland.

COMMUNITY GATHERING: A panel of experts discusses the civil war in Sudan.

PORTLAND

W hen they first arrive in Portland, refugees are met at the airport by a representative from Catholic Charities of Maine, the non-profit group that resettles nearly all the refugees who are placed in Southern Maine. They are taken to what Ward calls “the Welcome House,” which serves as transitional housing until the family can afford to move out on its own. Ward will not reveal where this housing is located in Portland, saying only “some people don’t like foreigners in their neighborhood.”

Refugees receive a stipend from the government for up to eight months or until they find a job. However, Ward says that refugees with Catholic Charities rarely take this long. “Ninety percent of the refugees are self-sufficient in 90 days,” he says. “We are required to get them at least one job interview, but we usually get them three or four so they have a choice. That is not the case everywhere. Plenty of agencies give them one job interview and that’s it. We believe people have a stronger commitment when they make the choice themselves.”

Ward also explains that Catholic Charities finds refugees several apartments to choose from. The non-profit provides a case manager who will refer the family to whatever services they need, from English lessons to family counseling.

While the Sudanese refugees have their most basic needs — food, shelter, clothing — met immediately, and usually find work relatively quickly, the cultural adjustment to life in Portland takes much longer.

Nearly every Sudanese speaker at the conference expressed gratitude to both the United States and the people of Portland for the treatment they had received. As Simeon Allolding, current chair of the Sudanese Community Organization, said in his welcoming address, “If you compare the treatment of our people in other states like California, you will see that Maine is the best place for our people.” But it was clear that the leap from Sudan to America was not easy.

For one thing, educated refugees find that in America they often must look for jobs that carry less prestige than the positions they held in Sudan. As Angelo Okot said at the conference, “If you were a doctor in another country and you work at the food store here, that is really hard.”

Okot should know. He was an accountant in Sudan, but, when he came to the US, he was lucky to find clerical work at People’s Bank. He worked at this job for two years before deciding to go back to school to get his degree in accounting at the University of Southern Maine.

Regina Nataniel has a different view of working a lower-class job. A college-educated woman who held the rank of lieutenant in the Sudanese army, Nataniel today works at Wal-Mart. Yet the demotion doesn’t seem to phase her. “Work is work,” she says. “My work in Wal-Mart is not bad.”

The Sudanese in Portland also face the same struggle central to the experience of any immigrant group in the US — the attempt to retain traditional values amidst the onslaught of American culture.

From the beginning, the Sudanese in Portland have sought to protect their culture by organizing themselves into a tightly knit, well organized community. When he first arrived in Portland, Angelo Okot started the Sudanese Community Organization, a group that helps Sudanese refugees “adjust to life in America and encourages our traditions and culture so the youth do not lose their identity,” he says.

Raising children in America can pose particularly vexing problems. Florence Olebe articulated some of the issues at the conference when she said: “We work many jobs to support people back home. This does not allow us to spend enough time at home. The rights given to our children are very conflicting with our tradition. We are afraid of our children turning astray. We cannot discipline our children in the way we do in Sudan. The government should let us discipline them in the traditional way.”

Sudanese parents have been surprised by their children who, Okot says, are “taught in the school to call 911 whenever they have any little thing,” including “a spank on the hand.”

In America today, popular sentiment runs against spanking a child, but in Sudan the reverse is true. In fact, a typical American punishment would be seen as overly harsh. Ward explains that placing a child in time-out would be seen as abusive in Sudan, “where isolation is seen as cruel.”

Tensions also exist between parents who expect to raise their children in the old ways and children who expect the same rights their American friends have. For instance, Nataniel explains that in Sudan her daughter would never be allowed to bring a boy home, but she knows that in a few years, when her daughter is a teenager, this is an issue she will have to face. She also wonders if her son will want to leave home after he graduates high school. In Sudan, children stay at home until they are married. “What am I going to do with my son when he is 18 and he wants to leave?”

At the conference, Nataniel also raised a cultural issue that many Americans, especially American women, find hard to stomach. “[In the Sudan] a husband is supposed to tell the woman what to do, and the woman is supposed to listen,” she said to a burst of applause from the audience. “A man can even hit the woman in Sudan,” she told the Phoenix. She explained that state intervention separating the couple to protect the woman is the worst thing that can happen in such a situation. “If you are having problems, go before the community,” she urged the conference-goers, “do not call the police.”

Okot explains that in Sudan, when a husband and wife are having difficulties, they involve other community members to help mediate the problem. Here in Portland, the Community Organization makes sure the practice is continued. “Either the woman or the husband goes to a friend and we get two or three people to sit down and talk about the dispute. We try very hard not to embarrass any people. We look at where the man was wrong and where the woman was wrong. We say ‘Don’t let these wild disagreements come in front of your kids. This is shameful, this is not acceptable.’ ”

In addition to helping Sudanese adjust to life in Portland, the Community Organization eventually plans on raising money to help the Sudanese who are still in camps.

Robert Oryem has already begun this work. Together with his friends who lived with him in the refugee camp, he created a group called the Action For Self-Reliance Association. Recently, they held a benefit dinner that raised $10,000 to build a kindergarten in a refugee camp in Uganda.

Despite the presence of the Community Organization, however, it is apparent that the Sudanese retain something of the political tensions that abound in their homeland. While most of the Sudanese in Portland are Christians from the south, this does not mean they necessarily see eye-to-eye politically. The Southern Sudan is home to many different ethnicities, each with its own language and customs. The splits in the forces that make up the SPLA mirror these ethnic differences. Though they all fight the Islamic government from the north, the different rebel groups also take turns fighting each other.

This factionalism was in evidence during the planning phase of the Sudanese Conference explained Bau Graves, co-director of the Center for Cultural Exchange. One of the originally planned speakers, Steven Wondu, a leading proponent of one of the SPLA groups, had to be disinvited after many in the community objected to his presence.

Yet the organizers of the conference did not try to gloss over this controversy, choosing instead to explain it to the audience. The result was a feeling of openness and honesty.

According to Robert Oryem, “the Sudanese in Portland disagree over things politically, but for social occasions they forget about these things.” And there is more and more occasion for social gathering. The Sudanese community has grown from “almost nothing” eight years ago to somewhere “between 300 and 500 people,” today says Ward. Now that the community has reached a critical mass, its growth will probably increase. Refugees that have family members in Portland will be more likely to be resettled here. And refugees resettled in other places may choose to pick up and move to Portland.

Such was the case with Juan Lado who was resettled in Atlanta. Lado was more or less satisfied in Atlanta, but her son was not. “He was the only Sudanese in his school and he did not like it. We heard there were many Sudanese in Portland High.”

And Portland is certainly preferable to living in a refugee camp or in a country in the midst of a civil war.

But will it ever be home? Depends on which Sudanese you ask.

“Maine is my home,” says Okot who has lived in Portland for five and a half years. “I will stay here.”

But ask Regina Nataniel, who has lived in Portland for just over a year, and she responds: “I like it here, but home is home.” Her children are a different story. “My kids,” she says, “they’re happy. They want to be in school. I may think of home, but they don’t.”n

Noah Bruce can be reached at nbruce@phx.com.