The Min Tree

Khartoum, Sudan — A min tree grows in the sand in a dust-blown courtyard of St. Joseph's Vocational Training Center in this old and troubled city of Khartoum. It stands thin and tall with elegant green leaves.

"The min tree needs very little water. Its roots are very deep, so it survives," says Brother Comino Giacomo, an Italian Silesian brother, who has spent the last 13 years here helping to train impoverished Sudanese young men to become carpenters, electricians, mechanics, plumbers and other professions that will be crucial to restarting, and ultimately sustaining, their livelihoods.

Aptly part of a program known as Homeward Bound, this center is a step toward a homecoming for millions of southern Sudanese after 21 years of devastating, deadly civil war. Conceived and managed by Catholic Relief Services, the training center, supports some 400 young displaced Sudanese in vocational programs designed to prepare them to return to their roots. It's a long-awaited homecoming.

Last January, the Islamic government in the north signed a peace treaty with rebels in the predominantly Christian and animist south after Africa's longest civil war, in which some 2 million people are believed to have been killed. Roughly 4 million others were driven from their homes by marauding Arab tribesmen who raped, pillaged and kidnapped with impunity, and the rebels who fought against them.

Between 1.5 million and 2 million Southern Sudanese displaced from the war still live in sprawling, dusty makeshift camps of mud dwellings around Khartoum. As in much of their quarter century experience with the ravages of war, the internally displaced people have depended on their own ingenuity and help from a vast array of foreign governments and nongovernment organizations like Catholic Relief Services to survive.

The challenge — now that a peace treaty has been signed and the Khartoum government and southern rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Army have agreed to form a national unity government — is to ensure a safe return of Sudanese to their ancestral homeland.

The Homeward Bound project is designed to provide them with the skills to rebuild the southern part of the country and to undertake a dignified, peaceful, and sustainable resettlement in their traditional southern homelands.

"The training program is the best thing that could have happened," says Deng Maween Akok, a Dinka tribal leader in the Jebel Awlia IDP camp about 25 miles outside Khartoum, speaking through an interpreter. He and his family fled the south in 1986 and have lived in two displaced communities since arriving in Khartoum's unwelcoming environment.

"When they go south, they can help rebuild the country," he says of the young men learning brick-laying and construction at the St. Vincent de Paul training school next to Jebel Awlia.

In the mud-walled hut he has built in the Jebel Awlia community since marrying recently, Malwan Dan, who is 30 and older than most of the students enrolled at the St. Vincent training school, speaks of a day when he and his mother, Ajak Arou, and the rest of the family will return south.

"We have not had this hope before," Dan says, speaking through an interpreter. "When I finish (the program at St. Vincent's), I will try to go for more courses. Then I will go south and work.

"They will need me," he says. "It is our own country. We must go back to our own country."

At the St. Joseph Training School in Khartoum , 18-year-old Thomas Loira, speaks some English. He tells of his excitement when he saw the advertisement in his church bulletin inviting young men from the south to apply for places in the Homeward Bound project at St. Joseph's.

"I applied right away," he says. "This was very exciting. I want to be a carpenter. I wanted to make our situation good for when we return. Now I am learning to be a carpenter and I will return to my home in Juba and work as a carpenter."

At St. Joseph's, the 246 students enrolled in the Homeward Bound courses are studying to become carpenters, plumbers and electricians, three of the eight courses offered by the school.

The Homeward Bound program, supported with funds from CRS and Trocaire, the humanitarian agency of the Irish Catholic Church, and managed by CRS, provides tuition, food for one mid-day meal, and supplies such as wood for the carpenters and plumbing and electrical equipment for the aspiring plumbers and electricians. Upon graduation from the eight-month program, each student receives a tool kit values at $140 to embark upon his new livelihood.

Having escaped to Khartoum from the abiding battle grounds and hardships of the south, 10, 15 and 20 years ago, the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of southerners who settled in Khartoum found a harsh life.

They settled on barren land and built dwellings without help from the government, which was supporting the Arab marauders in the south. The government provided no services, such as schools, water and health care. Occasionally deciding they wanted the land for other purposes, the displaced southerners had to move further out to other barren places to rebuild their settlements and try to eke out a living.

These were farmers and herders, but there was no livestock for them here and no arable land, so the women became a major source of support, working as domestics in the homes of Islamic families in Khartoum. The men would find work as laborers when they could, but not much was available.

The women also generated income by brewing beer, which is prohibited by the government under Islamic law, along with all other forms of alcohol. So the camps often are raided, and the women are taken away to prison.

The fear exists that these tribal people have been away from their agrarian roots so long that they may not be able to recapture that life.

But they still dream of returning to the south and resuming their way of life. When they actually will be able to do this is unknown. Largely, it depends on international donors who have pledged more than $4 billion to rebuilding the south, and who have yet to fulfill their pledges — including $1.7 billion from the United States.

The pledges are tied to progress in other events like an end to the genocide in Darfur. The northern and the southern parts of Sudan have until July 9 to agree on a constitution and to actually form a government of national unity.

Yet, these conditions elude the average displaced person living in a camp in or around Khartoum. They only think of when they can go home and what they will need to restore their lives in the south.

"How are we going to go back?" demands Garang Majek, a tribal leader in the Wad el Bashir camp closer to Khartoum, where the wind blows dust and sand that clings in the pores and tears at the huts of plastic, cardboard and pieces of wood.

"And how will we live there?" he asks. "We need tools for farming. We need cattle or money for buying them."

And, it's reasonable to expect, tools for plumbing and building and electrifying, for moving into the 21 st century. The beneficiaries of the Homeward Bound program will be ready with those when the time comes.

Like the min tree, they will endure.