A found man returns to South Sudan

Peter Keny sat on the side of the road in late December as the sun disappeared behind the acacia trees. He had traveled more than 7,000 miles from Burlington, only to be stranded just north of the South Sudanese capital of Juba.

The taxi he hired an hour earlier had broken down, and he was still 50 miles south of his destination, his native village of Kalthok. The driver walked back to Juba five hours earlier and had yet to return.

Keny took another delay in stride, as he had waited to return home since fleeing his country's civil war 25 years earlier. That decade-long journey, forged in tragedy and perseverance, took Keny on a dangerous trek through the Sudanese bush to a series of refugee camps and, finally, to a new start in America.

For most of his life, Keny has straddled two worlds. Each day he reconciles his life of opportunity in the United States with a longing for his war-torn homeland. For years, Keny balanced work to put himself through school and to save for a trip to Kalthok, the village of his brief childhood and keeper of the only memories of his parents.

Exhausted from two flights and a 12-hour bus ride from Uganda, Keny tried to imagine what the reunion would be like. As he peered through darkness toward Kalthok, he wondered if anyone would remember him.

A child of war

Keny was born in Kalthok in 1982, the youngest of four sons. He lived with his mother and father, who like many in the village were sorghum farmers. The Kenys belonged to the Dinka tribe, the largest ethnic group in southern Sudan.

In November 1989, farmers had finished the annual harvest as the wet season came to a close. One afternoon, 6-year-old Keny and a group of boys played on the banks of the White Nile north of Kalthok, as they often did when little else occupied their time. Around five o'clock, the boys heard gunfire and saw smoke in the village's direction. They rushed toward home but were intercepted by a villager who told them returning was unsafe. The boys, some of whom were Keny's cousins, hid along a riverbank that night. Keny would never again see his parents.

For most of the past 60 years, Sudan has been engulfed in civil war. By 1989, the Second Sudanese Civil War already had raged for six years. When war ended in 2005, 1 million to 2 million people were dead and another 2 million were displaced. Many of those killed or displaced were from the Dinka tribe.

As a child Keny knew about the war, but until that day in 1989, fighting had never come to Kalthok.

"We were all the way to the south of the country, and the government militia did not have a problem with the local people," Keny recalled in a recent interview in Burlington. "There was no tension."

Unable to return to their village, Keny and his friends faced a harrowing journey. The morning after the attack on Kalthok, the boys crossed the river and joined a larger group of refugees who were walking east, away from the fighting. They walked each day until their legs could carry them no farther. Each time the boys stopped to rest, they feared lion attacks and roaming militias, which abducted children to use as soldiers. Keny was shoeless and without a change of clothing. He thought only of how to survive another day.

"The worry was, 'Are you going to make it to the next town?' " he recalled. "You focused on living to the next day, and that's all. There was nothing else you could do."

The Sudanese government was able to distribute grain to fleeing refugees. Keny and others received two cups each, which they made last as long as they could. Keny had nowhere to put the grain, so he wrapped it carefully in his shirt. When the grain ran out, the boys foraged for wild fruit and berries whenever they stopped to rest.

Keny said he was among an estimated 20,000 "Lost Boys of Sudan" — children separated from their parents during the war. As many as half died of disease and starvation during the journey to refugee camps.

After traveling several hundred miles over three months, Keny crossed from Sudan into Ethiopia and settled with others at Dimma, a refugee camp established by the Ethiopian government in 1986 to handle an enormous influx of Sudanese refugees.

Keny remained at Dimma for about a year, until spring 1991, when rebels overthrew Ethiopia's government in a coup. The boys fled back across the border and camped near the Sudanese community of Pakok until 1992, when the United Nations moved thousands of refugees to the newly opened Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. Keny would live there for nine years.

At the Kakuma camp, Keny learned English and went to school daily. He said U.N. staff members encouraged the boys to settle into a routine. But he could not stop thinking about his family. Keny said some of the Lost Boys tried to find their way back to their villages, but he judged the trip back to Kalthok too dangerous. Refugees at Kakuma relied on new arrivals and wounded soldiers seeking care at the U.N. hospital for news about the war.

"The hope was that I would see someone from my village, so I might ask the situation of my family," Keny said. "But no one ever showed up. It was very difficult for me. I never knew whether someone was still there or not."

Keny received a surprise in 1998, when his oldest brother, Riak, found him at the Kakuma camp. Riak had joined the Sudanese army and had been granted a one-month leave. The brothers had not seen each other in nine years.

"It was one of the best days of my life, after going all that time without seeing my family," Keny said.

But the reunion was bittersweet. Riak brought news Keny had long feared: Their parents and brother were killed in the war, and remaining brother had died of disease. Keny was devastated, but relieved finally to know the fate of his family. Riak tried to lift his spirits.

"He was like, 'Look, this is what it is. Someone has to die for someone to live. If we all had to die, and you lived, that's the best we can do,' " Keny recalled his brother saying.

Riak and Peter spent several weeks together, until the soldier's leave expired and he returned to war. Keny never again saw his brother. Riak died in 2006 after he succumbed to injuries received years earlier.

A new life in America

In 2001, when he was 19, Keny moved to the U.S. through the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. He had several cities to choose among, but he picked Burlington because his cousin Abraham Awolich already had settled there. Five others from the Kakuma camp came with him.

For the first time in his life, Keny thought about his future.

"It was like a dream that had come true," he said. "I felt like this is the moment, if I don't have my parents, maybe in the future I'll be able to meet my extended family. Maybe I would be able to do something that my family would remember me."

In the U.S., Keny became proficient in English, earned a high school degree and dreamed of attending college.

Now 32, Keny lives in a small apartment on Front Street in Burlington with three other Lost Boys who immigrated to the U.S. He works as a janitor for the University of Vermont, where he cleans the athletic complex from 10 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., five days a week. When school is in session, he attends classes during the day, where he is a decade older than his peers. In the next year and a half, he hopes to complete a degree in community development and applied economics.

Keny is able to cram in only a few hours of sleep before walking uphill to class, but he said he must work to afford tuition if he ever hopes to find a better-paying job.

"It's about being willing," he said, sitting on the front porch of his home. "If I don't do it, I will be stuck here. I just tell myself I have to do it. Otherwise I don't have options."

Ever since moving to the U.S., Keny always hoped return to visit Kalthok. He was able to contact several uncles by telephone in 2002 and remained in touch with relatives regularly. He secured a travel visa in 2006 but was unable to use it, because a trip would have interrupted his studies at community college.

"The biggest fact was that I was struggling with my education," Keny said. "Every time I'd say, 'If I go home while I'm trying to complete this process, I might fall behind.' "

While studying, Keny kept abreast of news back home.

In 2005, civil war ended with a peace agreement that many Sudanese hoped finally would put an end to violence that had torn apart the country for half a century. In 2011, southern Sudanese voted overwhelmingly to break off from the north to form a new nation, South Sudan. The fragile peace collapsed two years later, when South Sudan plunged into civil war. Keny said Kalthok has so far been spared heavy violence, but the community is inundated with refugees again fleeing to the east.

Finally, in 2014, Keny acquired a new visa and was able to raise enough money for the costly trip, which required a stopover in Europe.

Return to South Sudan

Even after dusk in December, the air was still humid. Keny's driver returned around 7 p.m. with tools, but couldn't fix the car. Keny planned to spend the night on the side of the road and at dawn walk back to Juba. He lay down in the brush, careful not to wrinkle the dress shirt and slacks he had put on for the reunion.

Keny was comforted that he at least had company: Some of his cousins, who met him at the bus station in Juba, agreed to wait until another ride could be arranged.

Around midnight, Keny's fortunes turned. A Somali trader came upon him and agreed to drive him to Kalthok. As he braced himself for potholes that shook the vehicle, Keny tried to piece together fragmented memories of his youth.

"Will I remember anyone in the village? Will I remember the places I used to know? Is life still the same as when I left? All those questions were on my mind," Keny said.

Although the trip was only 55 miles, the roads were in such poor condition that Keny arrived in Kalthok at 5 a.m. It was Christmas morning. He was exhausted and hoped to find somewhere to sleep, but he found the entire village had stayed up waiting for him in the church.

"They were singing and dancing and praying for us, because they heard we had car trouble," Keny said.

At 8 a.m., Kalthok's villagers held a welcome ceremony. Keny said he recognized only a few faces, his maternal and paternal uncles. But all the village elders remembered him.

"They said, 'You look just like you did when you left,' " he recalled. "There was a lot of emotional reaction. They talked about my family, my mom and my dad."

Keny stood at the front of the sanctuary to greet the hundreds of villagers who came to see him. After daybreak they took him around Kalthok, but Keny couldn't pick out any landmarks.

He asked his cousins to take him to a lake with a waterfall he remembered from childhood. From there he looked back toward the village, and memories came back to him. He was able to point out his uncles' houses.

"They said, 'Yes, you now know. You recognize this place,' " Keny said.

Instead of having Keny stay in one of his uncles' homes, villagers arranged for him to sleep in the church. Each evening for the three weeks he was in Kalthok, villagers set up tents and slept outside the church to be closer to their returned son. Keny said many were surprised he came back after settling into a prosperous life in the U.S.

"They thought I would never go back, because I don't have a living parent anymore," Keny said. "But they still believe I belong to the village."

Keny had another reason to return to Kalthok, beside visiting relatives. He wanted to ensure success of the local clinic the Sudan Development Foundation, a Burlington nonprofit, helped fund. The clinic is vital to Kalthok, Keny said. In South Sudan, some villages are more than 100 miles from a hospital. South Sudan's infrastructure is so poor this can mean several days of traveling on foot.

Keny returned to Vermont in mid-January. He said leaving his uncles and cousins was difficult, but his visa expired after 30 days.

Straddling two worlds

The son of Kalthok said he is unsure if he will ever move back to South Sudan. Keny wants to help Kalthok and keep the clinic operational. He worries war will come again to the village.

"I see myself living in two worlds, here and South Sudan," he said. "I want to help my people in any form they need. If I ever get married, maybe I would bring my wife over."

Keny talks to his uncles regularly. A consequence of war, inflation has made staple goods too expensive for many villagers. A drought has raised the prospect of crop failure.

"This month they are supposed to cultivate, but there is no rain," he said, referring to May.

Keny wants to help his countrymen and -women in Vermont. More than 150 Sudanese have resettled in Burlington since the late 1990s, and many have started families here. Keny said the small community rents out local halls and churches to meet and celebrate holidays such as South Sudan's Independence Day.

Keny hopes to help lease or purchase a permanent home to aid local Sudanese in preserving their culture. He said parents are concerned children will forget tribal languages when they speak English outside the home.

Keny reflects on what his life would have been like if he never had the opportunity to immigrate to the United States. If he stayed in South Sudan, Keny believes he likely would have been killed in the war or conscripted into the army. He said he feels blessed to have been given the chance to start a new life here, because so many Sudanese never had that option.

"It gave me the chance to look at the world differently," he said. "I have people who support me, and even though I do not yet have a college degree, I feel I've learned enough to help myself and help my people."

Keny often thinks of his brothers and parents. In their memory, he wants to make the most of opportunities he now has.

"You have this feeling that for the rest of your life, you're going to be living knowing that you don't have someone you'd be taking care of," he said. "I just want to make sure I live a better life, and live it in a peaceful way."

Contact Zach Despart at 651-4826 or zdespart@burlingtonfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ZachDespart.