Skye Wheeler
1 September 2008
Juba — Bona Bol's ambitions are even bigger than his 6 ft 5 frame. Together with his partner Majok Wek, he has already started a company importing goods into war-devastated Southern Sudan.
Bol and Wek break into Spanish from time to time while they confer during the interview, a habit they share with the other 91 "Cubans" Bol reckons have returned to the south already.
They have already imported cars, food and building materials and are hoping to raise funds to buy a plane, and become the first south Sudanese to compete in the skies against an emerging market of charter-aircraft dominated by Kenyans and Ugandans.
Children far from home
Twenty years ago, Bol and Wek were two of 600 children sent to Cuba for an education during the bloody decades of Sudan's north-south conflict.
Many of the children were already members of the southern rebel army when they walked across the south's swamps and vast plains and then crossed the border into Ethiopia. They were then flown or shipped halfway around the world to Cuba's Isla de la Juventud.
Described by outsiders as a close-knit group, they frequently dance salsa together at a night club in the south's dusty capital, Juba. "La Habana" was started by a handful of their number, named in tribute to their shared Caribbean childhood.
"We have a good time," Bol said.
Dr. Martha Martin Dar, who trained as a doctor in Cuba and now works in Juba Teaching Hospital, clearly remembers the island's warm colors and the smell of fruit heavy on the humid air.
When not in class, the children worked on plantations and sometimes camped on beaches at weekends. They slept together in dormitories at a school dedicated to the southerners.
To remind them of the important role they would play, the southern rebel SPLA's charismatic leader John Garang, who died in a helicopter crash in 2005, visited Cuba several times.
They were told their education -- a gift from Fidel Castro -- was to be crucial in the fight against northern marginalization.
In the good years, the best two students each year were awarded a trip to Ethiopia. They would return with photographs and letters from their - and sometimes other children's -- families.
The children and teenagers were supposed to be picked equitably from across the south, representing each of the states.
"But the (rebel) leadership proceeded to select their own children, relatives and people from their own areas," Barri Wanji, a senior member of the southern parliament, said.
The sense of purpose endured: "We were not forced to leave, we were sent on a mission and it is not completed," said, Daniel Madit, one of 15 Cuban-trained doctors now back in the south.
Long road home
By the time Madit and his fellow doctors graduated, the Soviet Union had collapsed and Cuba's economy was in trouble. But they could not go home as the south's insurgency raged on. Worse, the southern rebel movement split along ethnic lines in 1991, leading to thousands of deaths in a particularly bloody internal conflict. Communication with home dwindled.
Madit remember those days in Cuba. "Food became more difficult ... it was difficult for a good five years," he said.
For the first time, Cuba asked the United Nations' refugee agency UNHCR to register the Sudanese as refugees to allow them to apply for residency in other host countries. The organisation did and Canada gave around half of them a new home.
Because their Cuban degrees did not meet Canadian medical requirements, Madit worked in a meat-packing factory, while Dar worked in a bank.
"All was white, cold and freezing for the first time in your life," Madit said.
When he heard about the peace deal, Madit approached the Christian Samaritans Purse organization, which was already working in the south and desperately looking for trained medical staff. "They were amazed when they found there were 15 of us," he said. After refresher training in Canada and then in Kenya, the doctors were finally brought back home, to begin their work.
A lack of facilities and medicines means the work is frustrating. But there are moments of great satisfaction, Madit says. He is certainly making his mark: four babies have already been names "Dr. Daniel" after Madit assisted their mothers in giving birth.
Being back is good, Dar says. She feels, deeply, that it is the right thing for her to be doing.
But it has been bittersweet. When she first saw her father at Juba's airport, a relative had to confirm who he was. "It was difficult for us to communicate. It was like my first memory. I had forgotten him completely."
Dar recalled her first impressions of south Sudan's best hospital in Juba. "There was a lack of everything, five or six children in a bed. People were on the floor," she said.
South Sudan has some of the world's worst health statistics, and the 15 doctors have been eagerly sucked into the threadbare health care system that officials estimate only reaches 25 percent of the population. The south has the world's worst maternal mortality rate and over 13 percent of children die before their 5th birthday.
It's a serious business being back home. The south's tiny economy is in tatters after two consecutive north-south wars engulfed the last 50 years leaving the south with little infrastructure.
A 2005 peace deal between Khartoum and the southern rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) has given businessmen like Bol and Wek an opportunity to play a crucial rebuilding role as well as setting an example for other southerners.
The very slow return of south Sudan's Diaspora - there are hundreds of thousands of southerners in America, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom - has been disappointing to many who were counting on a post-peace influx of skills and cash.
But those overseas have mortgages to pay and families to feed and no one is certain that the fragile peace deal will hold. Even for the most homesick exiles it's a difficult choice to trade in good education and health care for the uncertainties of home.
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