By Daniela Caride
Contributor
4/24/08
The Sudanese couple with eight family members—four of them children—walks 10 miles to the nearest bus stop. The first bus to Uganda’s capital, Kampala, is full. They get on the next bus 24 hours later.
When they arrive, two days have passed without their eating or drinking any water, and some of them are sick. Peter Nhiany—the couple’s son who now lives and studies in Milton—is waiting for them in Kampala.
“Everybody was crying,” he remembers.
This happened in 2006 and was Nhiany’s first encounter with what was left of his family after a 19-year separation. He is one of the 3,800 orphaned Southern Sudanese known as “the Lost Boys of Sudan”—children brought to America after surviving a civil war that killed two million people since 1983. About 200 Lost Boys currently live in the Boston area.
Appalled by poverty and sickness in Africa, Nhiany decided to do something when he got back home. The Curry College junior gathered friends and founded the “One Curry Club,” which raises awareness about extreme world poverty. Its first goal is to build a well in Bor, Nhiany’s village.
“Our people are suffering,” says Nhiany. “[They] need clean water.” Bor villagers walk miles to get water and return with the water carried in buckets on their heads.
Nhiany has been writing letters, organizing parties and making presentations to raise money for the well, which will cost $5,000 to $13,000. Sudanese contractors constantly raise its price, he says.
Nhiany is hoping to get help from the Milton Rotary Club, whose members he met at a luncheon at Fuller Village recently. He also organized a recent fundraiser at Curry College.
Nhiany’s task list, though, goes on and on. When he’s not studying or raising funds for Africa, he is working to meet his family’s immediate needs.
He sends all the money he earns from temporary jobs to his three sisters and a brother, who have 12 children between them, and his parents, to pay for their food, housing and health care.
“There is virtually no medical care in South Sudan where they are from,” says Jeanette Cohan, medical research administrator at Harvard, who is Nhiany’s guardian. “And they are dependent upon him.”
Nhiany worked the overnight shift at the Marriott Hotel in Cambridge during the summer of 2006 and at the Lincoln Department of Public Works last summer. This winter, he shoveled the sidewalks at Curry College and helped the maintenance staff.
Cohan believes Peter’s responsibility is a huge burden on him.
“But he accepts it willingly,” she says. Nhiany is used to difficult times.
He was perhaps three years old in 1987, when he was separated from his family. He trekked 1,000 miles on foot through the wilderness of Sudan to escape a massive attack by northern Sudanese groups. At the time, Arab Muslims from the north were exterminating black Christians from the south.
Looking for a safer place, Nhiany walked for three months to Ethiopia along with 25,000 other refugees—most of them children. Many died from starvation, thirst and militia attacks.
Three years later, the refugee camp was attacked and the “Lost Boys” ran again, this time 1,000 miles back to Sudan. Many more died trying to get across rivers during the rainy season. Lions, hyenas and crocodiles attacked them.
“You could hear people crying at night. In the morning, they disappeared,” he remembers.
At the Sudanese border, the United Nations took survivors to the Kakuma refugee camp, in Kenya, where Nhiany lived with little food and education for 10 years.
He was resettled in the United States in 2001 and taken into Cohan’s family in Lincoln. He moved to Milton when he was accepted to Curry College, where he majors in communications.
While there he became convinced that the only way to provide a better life to the people of Sudan is to raise public awareness here and educate people there. So, after providing water to his village, education is the next step.
“Now in Africa, you see a huge number of people sick from HIV and malaria … because they’re not educated, they don’t know what they’re doing,” says Nhiany.
“We need to teach them … how to protect themselves against diseases. Education is everything.”