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Raised overseas, Southern Sudanese are returning home to help world’s newest nation grow up
JUBA, Sudan — Lual D’Awol cultivated a passion for rap and basketball while living in Baltimore. Today he is in Southern Sudan, which becomes the world’s newest nation this weekend.
Southern Sudanese are returning to what will soon be the world
Southern Sudan will be born one of the poorest countries in the world. It has only a couple dozen miles of pavement. Literacy levels are low, and women who give birth are at grave risk because of a lack of medical facilities. But the south does have oil, and those in control of government funds appear to be growing in prosperity.
The former Lost Boy said leaders in Southern Sudan have gone from being the oppressed to the oppressor. He said as a trained accountant, he’s seen by some government leaders as a threat, and not an asset.
“It’s not only me, a lot of people who came back have been through that kind of experience,” he said.
The country is growing in other areas, though. It now has a new national basketball team, one that Simon Mayen has joined. The 21-year-old, who grew up in neighboring Kenya but has returned to Juba, says he is the second shortest player on the team.
During practice on a recent day in Juba, one of Mayen’s friends gave an old pair of shoes to a 16-year old aspiring player who said he had never had anything but plastic flip-flops in his life.
Mayen was born in Ethiopia, near the Sudanese border among the offspring of southern guerrilla fighters. He is the son of parents who played important roles in the south’s liberation struggle but had the means to see to it that their son was educated during the war with the intent that he come back to contribute to the product of their hard-won struggle.
When he first began coming to Juba from Nairobi five years ago on his school breaks, he said he was “shocked” at what he found: “No buildings, nothing, no toilets, no drinking water, no electricity.”
“But at the same time, I always knew, my dad has always been in the struggle, he’s always been telling us about the one day when we will go home. He’s an old man now,” Mayen said. “He’s always told me, ‘We are doing what we are doing now for us to do more in the future.’”
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
