The sound of the generator clicking on at 9pm in Marial Bai secondary school, south Sudan, is a noise that students know well. In a region with no electricity or running water and battered by more than two decades of civil war, the three hours of generated power allow a little more time to prepare for the next morning’s physics exam. The young men and women pick up their notebooks to study through the night. They are here tonight thanks to the generator, but mostly thanks to two particular friends, who value action over debate.
Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng had been in the US for a year when, in 2002, he told Mary Williams, daughter of Jane Fonda and founder of the Lost Boys Foundation, that he wanted to tell the real story of south Sudan’s “Lost Boys” in a book. When she recommended the US writer Dave Eggers to assist, her logic seemed clear: Eggers had gained literary recognition through publishing a memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, that chronicled life after the death of both of his parents within a five-week period, and Valentino had not seen his parents since he was nine years old.
“She said he will understand you better than any other writer,” Achak Deng said.
However, when Eggers and Achak Deng first met in Atlanta, Georgia, seven years ago, neither realized they were about to embark on a lasting friendship that would span continents, cultures and wars, and would even lead to the building of a school.
“I went to Atlanta to meet with Val and Mary, not really expecting to undertake a four-year project,” said Eggers, who is based in San Francisco. “But Val and I got along so well, and his story seemed so urgent that I felt I would at least try to do it justice.”
Achak Deng was one of an estimated group of 27,000 young southern Sudanese boys who were forced to leave their homes, families and villages during the 22-year Sudanese civil war, which killed more than 2 million Sudanese and displaced 4 million more. Chased out of their villages by government-armed Arab militias from north Sudan, the unaccompanied children — largely boys — walked for months across their country. They were named “Lost Boys” by aid workers, who likened their appearance to the orphans in JM Barrie’s Peter Pan.
“The connotation in the US implied that we were lost and that we didn’t know anything, that we had no nation, no families, that we were unruly,” said Achak Deng, looking out over his school in the dusty terrain of Marial Bai, south Sudan. “But I never considered myself lost, not a single day, even when I would see a fellow countryman dead, I knew that I was doing something that would be tangible in the future, if I was to survive.”
Twenty-three years after the nine-year-old Achak Deng played under the bottom of his tree and saw the Northern army advance, he appears anything but lost. In fact, while Eggers immortalized his story in his 2006 best-selling novel, What Is The What, which US President Barack Obama advised every one of his White House aides to read, the real beneficiaries of the transatlantic friendship are the 260 Sudanese students now enrolled in their region’s first functioning secondary school, built thanks to Eggers and Achak Deng.
Things have changed since 2003, when there were estimated to be only 500 remaining inhabitants in Marial Bai, and when Eggers accompanied Achak Deng on his first trip back home in 17 years. As the first “Lost Boy” to return to South Sudan, Achak Deng boarded three planes with Eggers and traveled into Marial Bai on a noisy cargo flight, packed to the rafters with bicycles, medicines and grain.
When they landed, Achak Deng was able to hug his own aged parents on the airstrip.
“It made me realize I had been lucky, because although I had to go from one refugee camp to another or from one country to another, I had escaped, and many people hadn’t. It helped me visualize things like this school, projects that I could build, how I could use my experience, and life and friendships in America in a way that could help transform this community,” he said.
For Achak Deng, that trip was also a defining moment between him and Eggers.
“He flew into Sudan at a time when Westerners were not allowed to come here, so already I had seen him put himself at risk. Whatever it would take, I knew it was a point of trust then, not just a book,” Achak Deng said.
While Eggers and Achak Deng always knew they would use the money from What Is The What to help rebuild Achak Deng’s hometown, it was not until the pair returned to Marial Bai in 2007 that the need for a secondary school became clear. While 48 percent of children are now officially enrolled at primary school, only 3 percent attend any secondary education in south Sudan. In Northern Bahr el Ghazal state, where Marial Bai is located, only 0.3 percent of 14-to-17-year-olds attended secondary school last year.
“We went back to his town, after the book came out, and told the elders that there would be money coming to a new foundation, and that Val planned to build a school,” Eggers said. “Then we listened for a week or so in countless meetings. What we learned was that they needed a secondary school above all. Thus we learned a lot by listening first — something I always recommend, but which some NGOs don’t necessarily do.”
During that trip, Achak Deng was ceded some land outside of Marial Bai’s main marketplace for his school.
“There was a ceremony to bless the land and the whole community came out,” Eggers said.
According to the most recent census, 51 percent of south Sudan’s population are under 17 years of age, yet there are only 10 government-run secondary schools nationwide. While Marial Bai secondary school is built out of locally made bricks, other construction materials, such as timber, iron and cement, had to be purchased in Uganda and brought over by trucks, bikes and boats. The aim was to hire local teachers, but in some states as few as 2 percent of teachers have had any training, making it difficult to recruit staff for the school.
Yet, for a man who spent 13 years in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, such problems were merely obstacles to be overcome. And a year ago, after 10 months’ construction, the school opened its doors. Despite being 241km from the nearest paved road, the Marial Bai secondary school had 85 students, 12 of whom were girls, who had made it through the screening exam. They started their classes before the school was even fitted with windows and doors.
“I believe a person who spent a minute in the class is better than someone who never did,” Achak Deng said. “I also believe everything is possible, and it’s just the determination and faith people put in it. I know we didn’t have bulldozers, or big carriers, or even professional teachers at the time, but we could not wait and wait and wait until someone else came in and decided there was a school here. No, we needed to build it ourselves.”
A year on, one of the biggest challenges Achak Deng faces is encouraging families to allow their girls to attend. According to a 2006 survey, only 2.5 percent of women aged between 15 and 24 in south Sudan are literate, compared with 56.4 percent of women in the north. Girls in south Sudan are still more likely to die in childbirth than they are to finish primary school.
Yet, armed with knowledge of the community, Achak Deng took to the road to make sure that more than the current 22 girls can attend his school. After visiting families all over his state, he built two female dormitories so that at least 100 women can stay at the school and be free from the responsibilities they have at home — female students like 17-year-old Aquiliana Adhel Majok, whose mother sent her to be educated in Kenya during the war. Aquiliana is happy to be one of the first girls to board at the school.
“This is the best school in south Sudan and we are all very, very proud to be here,” said Aquiliana, who returned to Marial Bai last year from Kenya. “In Sudan, so many girls used to go to primary school, but then they give up, get married and stay at home. Whenever other girls see us female students in uniform at the market, they wish they could go to secondary school as well, so they could learn.”
For Eggers, the school in Sudan is “a life-changing thing.”
Reflecting on its first year, he said: “Before it was built, there were few options for those who graduated from primary schools, and there were almost no opportunities at all for young girls, but now students are coming from hundreds of miles around to attend the school, and this is an essential development to the rebuilding of south Sudan.”
Citing his friend’s “single-mindedness” as crucial to the school’s success, he said: “We see things in a very similar way, and that is why we’ve been close partners for so long. I think it comes down to the fact that both of us are more bricks-and-mortar people than theory people. We didn’t spend years designing the school in the US, with theories and abstract ideas. We agreed that the better idea would be to focus on what the people of Marial Bai needed, and then get started right away.”
Now, with three Kenyan teachers and five Sudanese teachers, who have returned home after a decade of displacement, Marial Bai secondary school is attracting praise from across the country. Just five months before the planned referendum on south Sudan’s independence from the north, the government of south Sudan has already expressed an interest in Achak Deng taking on a more national role.
While Marial Bai is still in desperate need of funding, Eggers is certain that it will succeed. He has promised to help Achak Deng “whenever or wherever he needs me.”
However, he said: “I don’t think he needs me very often. I think with his knowledge and his ability to get things done, there’s no limit to the impact he can have in south Sudan.”
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