Search  CIP Home  UD Home

Spotlights Bill Lorenz '84 University of Dayton Quarterly, Summer 2007 Hear his story >> The Road Home For Bill Lorenz ’84, the southwest of Sudan, near where the country boarders the Central African Republic, did not seem like a bad place to be in the summer of 2005. The small town of Tambura where he was had an airstrip, a main street and food, including “great mangoes.” But for a group of 5,000 Sudanese nearby, whom Lorenz came to help, the area had one major drawback. It was not The road home. Home was more than 200 miles away. Home was where they had been for years, displaced by decades of civil war. Months earlier the central government and the souther rebels agreed on a permanent cease-fire and an eventual referendum on independence. Among the issues of the war was the resistance of the southerners (mostly black Christians and those who practice traditional African religions) to a government that wished to impose Islamic law on the country. Lorenz works for the International Organization for Migration in its regional office in Nairobi, Kenya. As an operations officer, he oversees movement of refugees accepts for resettlement in Canada, Australia and the United States. And he leads special projects like the one for which he came to Tambura. These southern Sudanese waiting to go home were technically not refugees because they had not left their country; they were labeled “IDPs” or “internally displaced persons.” Lorenz went to Tambura to help set up a temporary camp known as Cambonie, 30 miles north of Tambura, where the 5,000 Sudanese would spend several months waiting out the rainy season before being assisted by the United Nations to return home to the land of Raja and Wau in Western Bahr el Ghazal province. The timing for their 200-mile journey home was critical. If they went early in the dry season, they would not have water to sustain them. If they left too soon before the rainy season, they would still thirst. If they left too late, the swollen swamps and rivers could leave them stranded. Before Lorenz arrived, the 5,000 Sudanese, people from 13 tribes, impatient after years of being displaced, decided not to wait and set off for home. Not far into the journey, a truck crashed. Sixteen people died. Other trucks abandoned the group. But the 5,000 did not turn back. So, when Lorenz and his team (consisting of Andrew Gethi, Abass Ahmed and Dr. Aden Guliye) arrived in Tambura, his job had changed. He was now to try to help the 5,000 make the journey as safely as possible. He knew he needed trucks. He requested seven; after 10 days, he got five. Getting the group to Raja was something else. There was no road from Cambonie to Raja—at least not direct or safe. To the east lay a much longer route, via a road mined during the war. The Sudanese were confident in a more direct route to Raja through forest, river, swamp, rive and then savannah. Some of the men were hunters, and this area was their traditional hunting ground. They thought they could make it in 30 days—before the heavy rain. They were wrong. It took three times that. Traveling with women and children takes longer than it does with just a hunting party. And then there was the matter of the road that did not exist. They attacked this problem by setting up three work teams. First, a scouting team, composed mostly of hunters, went ahead and marked trees. Then a cutting team cleared a 4-meter wide path through the trees, opening the way for a road. Finally a bridge building team cut down trees large enough to make bridges, 25 of them before the trip was over. Lorenz and the IOM team meet up with the group at the first camp. “We had to cross a swamp,” he said. “To me, it looked like a lake.” Rising out of the water, however, were sticks, which on close inspection marked the sides of a long road. Using that submerged road, even the big trucks made it across the swamp. That success built Lorenz’ confidence in this temporary Sudanese community of which he was now part. His early confidence sagged somewhat as he realized that his IOM colleagues with him had never camped before in their lives. He also wondered about the camping experience of those at his home office; they had given him a pup tent with no rain flap. But these turned out to be minor problems, alleviated by plastic sheeting and other supplies provided by air drops. As the party moved slowly forward, trucks occasionally returned to Tambura for supplies and fuel. One truck—a 15-ton, six-wheel-drive logging truck—made use of one of the non-automotive supplies, two cartons of bug spray intended to combat tsetse flies. The spray was used as starter fluid for the truck’s flawed ignition. “The same guy using the bug spray siphoned fuel, too,” said Lorenz with admiration. Air drops provided food—sorghum, lentils, sugar, salt—for the 5,000. Sometimes there were delays—accompanied by grim humor. A blind man led by an 8-year-old boy helped spread news through the camp. The blind man earned a nickname—“minister of public information”. Some people brought cows. Many had chickens, so there were eggs. And people found food along the way. Some extracted oil from the nuts of the lulu tree. Others gathered honey from bees. Some hunted animals including monkeys, anteaters and pythons. Lorenz learned that the best way to kill a python is to put a spike through its head just after it has eaten. “I told them I’d eat anything,” Lorenz said, “except monkeys. Camp sites had strict water rules. Water for drinking came from upstream; laundry downstream. Several kits from UNICEP aided healthcare. “A team of Sudanese health workers and traditional birth attendants led by Dr. Guliye were well-trained,” Lorenz said. Sometimes training is not enough. On one Tuesday, a 6-day-old baby girl died of tetanus despite the constant efforts of the doctor to save her. The next day an old and sickly man died. He had been with a group farther along the trail than the doctor, who learned of the man’s death only as he passed the man’s grave. “The dead were buried in a grave by the side of the road,” Lorenz said, “with an ax or a shovel as a marker. There was not long to mourn.” The same day the 6-day-old child died, another baby girl was born. Thirty-four people died en route. Forty-three were born. Some of the 5,000 barely survived the trip—a mother whose baby was stillborn, a boy with a burst appendix. They were on foot as the group neared its destination. On foot, because the rains had come in full force. Everyone was walking; the trucks that hadn’t broken down were stuck in mud. More than the weather presented obstacles to finishing the trip. News reached the group that Sudan’s vice president of three weeks, who had been the leader of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army, had died in a helicopter crash. News then came of riots in Khartoum, the nation’s capital. A Sudanese army garrison near the travelers’ destination became nervous; rumor expanded the 50 Sudan People’s Liberation Army escorts traveling with the group to a fighting force of 5,000. But truth overcame rumor. The travelers’ leaders calmed the people, telling them to wait until they got to Raja to mourn. Feet replaced trucks. Lorenz said he had been surprised on the trip by seeing a poor family with a new pair of shoes carefully wrapped in plastic sheeting. He learned, though, that everyone had brought new clothes. They may have worn only two sets of clothing on the journey, but as they came to the camp in Raja they wore new clothes. Some had even found ways to starch them. As more and more came into camp, they were welcomed by those who had already arrived. “Theirs is not a hugging culture,” Lorenz said. But he could hear “joy in their voices.” Although Lorenz retuned recently to his home state of Ohio to share in the celebration of his parents’ 50th anniversary and stop by UD, his home remains in Nairobi, where his office is. He continues his job of helping people move, people such as a group of Ethiopian migrants who became stranded in Somalia while seeking to migrate to work in the Gulf States. In Sudan, the southern Sudanese continue to recover from civil war. To the north of them, Darfur continues to suffer. Throughout Africa and elsewhere millions are hungy and far from their homes. Nevertheless, a few thousand Sudanese have come, through forest and savannah, across swamps and rivers, to a place where there is decent soil, usable water, friends and family. They have come home. —Thomas M. Columbus

Center for International Programs · University of Dayton · 300 College Park · Dayton, OH 45469-0315 Telephone: (937) 229-3514 Questions and comments: Webmaster