Refugee returning home to develop schools in South Sudan
Mar 13, 2006 (FARGO, North Dakota ) — A Sudanese refugee who fled the country in 1993 is returning home to help develop schools in war-ravaged southern Sudan.
Kenneth Masungu will leave his wife and seven children behind in North Dakota to spend a year as an adviser to the education minister for the fledgling government in southern Sudan.
The 48-year-old emigre, now a U.S. citizen, will live in a tent while he helps create an education system in the south of the poor African nation torn by more than 20 years of civil war.
Masungu earned a master’s degree in education two years ago at North Dakota State University. He is now pursuing a doctorate.
He fled Sudan some 13 years ago after learning the military planned to arrest him. He had helped establish a school and mill used to make traditional African bread with backing from European charities. The school later closed because of the spreading civil war that killed 2 million people.
A truce last year ended Africa’s longest-running civil war, fought by Christians and animists in the south who resisted the imposition of Islamic law by the Arab-dominated government in northern Sudan. However, fighting continues in Sudan’s western Darfur region.
Former rebel leaders with an army drawn from their Sudanese People’s Liberation Army have formed a government in southern Sudan.
Refugees have been flooding back since the truce more than a year ago, only to find that most of the schools were destroyed, Masungu said.
“Now they’re all coming home and they need education,” Masungu says. “Illiteracy is the biggest common enemy.”
Masungu will be based in Juba, the regional capital, where he taught 30 years ago. He continued his own education later in Egypt, where he taught secondary school for two years in the mid-1980s.
“It’s a hard task ahead of me,” he said. “I’m giving back to the Sudanese government what they have given to me.”
Masungu came to Fargo, North Dakota, as a refugee in 1999. He worked as an instructor of English as a second language for adults at a local high School until resigning recently to prepare for his return to Sudan.
Masungu is an elder in the Fargo-Moorhead Sudanese community, estimated at more than 800 members. He said many young, resettled Sudanese have to be persuaded to continue their education.
Working with the CHARISM community center in south Fargo, Masungu helped start sewing classes taught by professional tailors. The idea was to teach refugees a skill they could use to become self-sufficient, he said.
(ST/AP)