Lost Boys weigh stay in U.S. as Bulls’ Luol Deng and Sudanese community prepare to open center

Kalle Eko/MEDILL

The board of directors of the Sudanese Community Association of Illinois meets after surveying space for the new Sudanese Community Center in Rogers Park on Friday.

BY KALLE EKO

APRIL 10, 2012

Chicago Bulls NBA All-Star Luol Deng and the Sudanese Community Association of Illinois will open a Sudanese community center in Rogers Park in late April. But as the center opens, some of Chicago’s Lost Boys, who have been instrumental in securing the space, are contemplating their future in the United States.In a converted warehouse that is the home of the Ethiopian Community Association of Chicago, 1730 W. Greenleaf, the Sudanese community will open a space on April 22. Deng, a member of the Sudanese Community Association’s board of directors, has lent his name to a number of events benefiting the Sudanese diaspora in Chicago and abroad.Erku Yimer, executive director of the Ethiopian Community Association of Chicago, said that the building’s 19,000 square feet of space offer both groups plenty of room to provide resources and host community events. As a welcoming gesture to the Sudanese community, the Ethiopian Community Association does not expect to charge it for the first three months of their tenure in the facility.

“It’s a perfect space because of its large size,” said Sean Tenner, a Sudanese Community Association board member who has spent years volunteering for the local community and was instrumental in helping secure the space. “It’s the fact that there is a computer lab, English classes, job training, daycare and other education services.”

But the center’s opening comes at a critical juncture for some of the people most involved in acquiring the center. Many of the Lost Boys of Sudan, who comprise the majority of the community association’s executive board, are contemplating whether to return to newly independent South Sudan a decade after they came to the United States.

After fleeing war in their homeland when they were young boys in the late 1980s, the Lost Boys walked a thousand miles across Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya. Of the approximately 20,000 who left Sudan, it is estimated that half perished before reaching refugee camps. Those who made it spent over decade living in camps across East Africa, where they became known by refugee workers as the Lost Boys of Sudan.

In 2001, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, helped resettle 3,800 of the Lost Boys in a number of towns across the United States, where they struggled to adjust to American life.

Peter Magai Bul was one of the 150 who came to Chicago. He fled Sudan in 1988 at the age of 7 and eventually found himself in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. He was resettled in Edgewater in 2001 after living his entire life in rural Sudan and in refugee camps.

“Everything was just confusing, from turning on the light to using the stove,” said Magai Bul, who is currently a student at Northeastern Illinois University and serving as the assistant secretary of the Sudanese association. “The biggest problem is that we didn’t have any job experience.”

But a decade after resettlement, many of Chicago’s Lost Boys found a community in Chicago, went on to earn college degrees and created foundations in Sudan. Magai Bul has invested effort and secured money from local benefactors to build the Pongborong Primary School in Jonglei State, South Sudan. He and other Lost Boys raised funds for the Rogers Park center mostly through public speaking engagements.

Lori Handrahan, a lecturer in the School of International Service at American University, said that the resettlement of the Lost Boys has been thoroughly beneficial for both the United States and the new Republic of South Sudan. A former UN consultant in East Africa, Handrahan said that Lost Boys in the United States will be instrumental in building South Sudan.

“The Lost Boys are a really good story of why America benefits when we take in refugees,” Handrahan said. “They thrived and survived in the face of extreme pain and are now going home and rebuilding people’s lives.”

The center mirrors the broad ambitions of the Lost Boys to serve the local Sudanese community well beyond their South Sudanese community. It is their hope that refugees fleeing the continued instability in Darfur, the Nuba region and elsewhere in Sudan will seek the center’s services.

“We have to come together as a community, not just the Lost Boys,” said John Kuol, a board member and master’s student in accounting at Robert Morris University. “All the opportunities that have been available to me, I feel obligated to bring back to the community.”

While the Sudanese community once had a center in suburban Wheaton, the new Rogers Park center will be more centrally located to serve the majority of the area’s Sudanese diaspora that lives in Chicago. The Lost Boys see the Sudanese Community Center as a starting point to coalesce Chicago’s Sudanese diaspora and bring stability to their homeland.

A number of the Lost Boys have visited their homeland decades after leaving, but most say that permanently returning to South Sudan is still far off. Despite issues finding employment in the United States, many are now American citizens and feel that they are better able to help by marshaling funds and resources from abroad.

“My plan is to be back and forth,” said Malual Awak, president of the Sudanese Community Association. “I have two homes: One is in Southern Sudan, one is in Chicago.”