Healing, hope for refugees

Two women had common history: crucible of Sudan

By James B. Meadow, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published November 29, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Photo by Barry Gutierrez / The Rocky

Micklina Peter Kenyi, one of the Lost Girls of Sudan, talks about the apartment fire that left her friends homeless in Boulder.

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First, you run. You run as fast as you can.

You run for your life. You run from the bombs and the bullets and the sheets of fire that destroy your village. You run from soldiers who will rape you before they kill you. You run and you leave everything and everyone behind because that is what you do when you're terrified, when your world is "whole confusion" and you must run for your life.

Micklina Peter Kenyi is not running now. She is holding her 7-week-old son, Abalu. She is happy, but she is also sad. Happy to be a new mother in a warm apartment but sad to know that even here, in Boulder, 8,000 miles from the horror, "things can still happen and rip us apart, and we can't do anything." She is sad because Susan Moi, a fellow Lost Girl of Sudan, lies in a hospital, victim of a terrible fire.

The fire occurred Nov. 15 in Susan's apartment, where she left food on the stove unattended. Moi, 21, and a fellow tenant of the Fairways Apartments, Kaianna Kadivnik, 26, were seriously burned. They are recovering, but slowly.

Kenyi, 30, saw the fire burning. It was "terrible." It was almost like seeing Chukudum, her village, disappear in flames 10 years ago as civil war raged. It was probably the same with Moi's village, with all the villages of the 16 lucky and determined young women who have come to Boulder to live and be educated and one day help the unlucky who still live in the war-torn crucible that is Sudan.

That is why Susan Moi was in Boulder - to follow in the footsteps of Micklina Peter Kenyi. Footsteps that took Kenyi through corridors of terror and want to a place wonderful, amazing and painfully strange.

Foster family

Kakuma Refugee Camp sat in a hostile nook of northwest Kenya where the sun could bake the air to 110 degrees, the sky never shed rain and the ground seemed only good for growing the scorpions whose sting could kill the young. Malaria and sexually transmitted diseases were abundant, but medical care wasn't. The United Nations enclave may have been safer than Sudan, but for many of its 100,000 inhabitants, life in Kukuma was spartan and dangerous.

Food was meager. Wells could be accessed for but a few hours a day. Roofs of many homes were sheets of plastic. Meanwhile, outside its fences, desperately poor Kenyans who lacked Kukuma's scant resources might attack refugees seeking firewood. Kenyi knew people who were killed doing just that.

She also knew how hard it was to be a girl. She was lucky; although her frantic emigration had separated her from her mother and siblings, she found relatives at Kukuma. Otherwise, she might have wound up with a foster family who would treat her as a servant. Who would want to marry her off to collect a dowry, even if the man was much older and might beat her. School was a mirage.

"If you are a girl," Kenyi knew, "you are told you are too weak to stand on your own; you have no say in anything."

A visiting nun noticed her sharp mind. Took her to Nairobi. She began learning English. Applied for a U.S. visa. Waited for an answer. After six months of interviews, background checks and medical exams, the answer was "yes."

July 9, 2004.

Micklina Peter Kenyi, meet Aurora, Colorado. Here is the Sudanese family we have arranged for you to stay with. Your tribal backgrounds and native dialects are completely different. The family is large and won't pay too much attention to you. Make the best of it.

So she did. Even though she was lonely and lost in the indifference of a foster family. Even though she would spend days riding buses all over metro Denver just to do something.

But the rides helped; she learned how to get around. She honed her new mother tongue. Like many of the Sudanese girls who would follow her, Kenyi spoke different languages and dialects - Arabic, Didinga, Swahili, Turkana. But English, she knew, was the key.

That fall, she was accepted into the University of Colorado. She moved to Boulder. Boulder was different - its mantle of foothills reminded her of Chukudum. She felt good about that. She didn't feel so good her first day of school.

At registration, she couldn't decipher the computer keyboard - "I didn't know the backspace key or nothing." Her English was "not that great." She sat there "almost crying." She survived. She registered.

But if her English became smoother and her navigation through the shoals of higher education became more nimble, she still struggled with the alien world she now lived in.

When the leaves drop from the trees, "It makes me very sad. Trees in Sudan do not do this." And although her first encounter with snow was "very beautiful and exciting," waking up to a major storm that covered everything she could see was "shocking" and "scary."

She missed the food she had grown up with - American dishes were often "so strange," laden with odd sauces and "all this cheese." She felt her dark skin acutely. She felt "so different."

Even worse was the sense of isolation. Of being in her apartment, a lonely island in a sea of strangers. In Sudan, "everybody knows your neighbors. You eat together, you share a lot. Your neighbors are like your clothes. If you don't know them, you are naked."

From the ashes

Life got better when she and Omunu Abalu reconnected. They had met in Nairobi; now he was at CU. They fell in love. They began to feel, as he would say, "like we were both healing internally."

Kenyi had learned her mother was still alive; she had run for her life to Egypt. She began working to have her mother join her. She helped a brother and a nephew reach the U.S.

She also helped relatives in Africa if she could. But their needs were so many and so great, often she couldn't. So when a family member died of meningitis, "I feel it is all my fault."

But many good things were also her fault. Take the Community of Sudanese and American Women/Men, a nonprofit she founded to make life easier for Sudanese refugees in Boulder.

CSAW could help find health care and affordable housing. It could offer "mentorship and friendship." It could help "make them feel they have the power, the security, the safety to work hard and achieve." It could help them feel clothed.

One of the women for whom CSAW brought solace from the percolating confusion of her new home was Susan Moi. Like Kenyi, Moi was an alumnus of Kakuma with a nightmarish past: When she was 5, her father was shot dead by soldiers. In front of her.

Soon, she had to run for her life, too, scattered from family and safety. From this storming chaos, she arrived in July 2006, battered, yes, but "with a lot of strength and independence."

At least that's what Susan Pfretzschner felt. Pfretzschner, whose church helped bring some of the Sudanese young women to Boulder, came to know Moi, came to appreciate her inner drive, watching her juggle a job with going to school.

So did Ed Porritt, director of Catalyst High School, where Susan went. He saw an "outgoing, smart, strong-willed young woman; she knows what she wants."

As Moi was settling in, Kenyi's life was also flowering. In May, she graduated from CU with a double major in political science and women's studies. In October, Abalu was born to her and Omunu - the first in their family to become a U.S. citizen.

But not the last. On Nov. 12, Kenyi officially became an American, an event that "just makes me so happy."

Then, three days after such joy, she stood helpless, watching flames scorch the sky, burn a friend, destroy the homes of 32 innocent souls - reliving the nightmare of fire gone wild.

But from out of the ashes, has come a phoenix of hope. Citing the torrent of support - clothing, household goods, money, new housing - that has poured in, Pfretzschner says, "We have created a village here. There has been a coming together of the entire community."

The donations came from friends of the girls, supporters of CSAW, but also from strangers. Strangers who became neighbors. Neighbors who have reminded Micklina Peter Kenyi that even in a strange land, you don't have to be naked.

meadowj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2606

How to help

* A fundraiser to help the children of Sudan will be held from 3 to 5 p.m. today in Boulder at Centennial Middle School, 2205 Norwood Ave.

* For more information about CSAW, go to csawco.tripod.com.

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