The following is excerpted from an interview with Gat Luak, who immigrated from Sudan to the United States in 1995, settled in Nashville, and eventually helped found the Sudanese Refugee Center.
I’m a family man now with a wife and two kids. My wife is not working; she just had a baby. I work here at the Sudanese Center, which I founded with a group of the guys. It’s not really a bad life to be honest. Every day I receive thanks from the people I serve. It makes me feel good about what I do. So my life is happy. I may not be making enough to support my family, but we are supporting one another. I might not be living in a very fancy place, but I live in an apartment and I like the apartment that I live in. I might not have the kind of car that I could drive, but I like the car that I drive. Nothing is more challenging to me than dealing with what is going on in other people’s lives. I don’t focus a lot on my own personal problems as I do with other people.
I was born in a village in south Sudan. I grew up playing with my brother. We lived in the village and I didn’t go to school. My dad was a farmer.
I did not know how Christianity arrived at my village. But for me it seemed that my family and the family that was close to us were the first to embrace Christianity. So my dad was not really a Christian, but he allowed us to go. We did not have a preacher and we did not even have an evangelist, but a man in my village called himself an evangelist.
I liked beating the drum and I liked singing, so we went every afternoon to sing. I can envision now that it was me, my other two brothers, my cousin, and some other boy that were there and then two girls came and joined us. Then this guy would sing a song for us in my language. He told us about Jesus, but we really didn’t know about Jesus. I would look and wonder what kind of person Jesus was. None of us could read or write, and he could just tell it like history. When we went home, the only thing we could remember were the songs. Then the next day we would go and encourage another boy to go join us.
I was six years old when the war came. When the war came, I was scared. Places that were not attacked were afraid they would be attacked. In the places that were attacked, people would run away. There was a lot of fear because people heard about people being bombed and killed, children being kidnapped, women being raped, cows being destroyed. Bombs just started falling on you and killed you. My village was attacked several times. This was a war between the government and rebel soldiers. It happened to be fought at our place. When that happens, you run with nothing on your body. You run with who you are. You don’t even grab something small.
There were two occasions when this happened. One time it happened at night, the other time in the morning. So we had to run, and not all of us returned. Some of us survived, but those who did get killed were gone.
After the attack we were trying to move around place to place to find somewhere to settle. At the time, my older brother was not with us. My other brother was there, and so it was me, my other young one, and my dad. We had to leave together with my dad. I remember walking at night and we came to a river and we did not know how to swim. So my dad put sticks together and put us on top of it to cross the river. It was a difficult time. In the middle of the river, the sticks came apart and my mom had to try to hold my neck above water and my dad had to hold my brother.
Those were the hard days, when you don’t have anything with you. You don’t even have food. Sometimes you would find meat somewhere. Sometimes you depend on fruit on the trees. If you find a place where no one was there, you could try to find whatever you could—dried beans, dried fruit. Your clothes are what you have on your body and your fear everybody. You never know if someone you run into on the street is an enemy.
I think I got to a refugee camp in 1988. Camp life was difficult because you are depending on someone else to assist you. It was a UN camp but the security was provided by local government. Ten families would be put in one tent. People were getting rations, but it would not last a day. A lot of people in one place with no sanitation. If one person gets sick, everyone will. For drinking water, people take water from the river, where people go and take baths. There was no hospital. There was no education.
The older kids were taken by the military for training to go to war, so you had to be very careful. The rebel army would come and collect the kids because they would support them during the war. You had to look as young as possible, because they take from six years old up. So there was no exception for me. I was taken. By then I think I was about ten. After a year a group of us sneaked out. I came back to the camp and tried to make a life with my family.
During that time, whenever I had a problem, I had a song that I sang that said, “My God is my savior and there is nothing that I fear.” You probably know that song in English. And it says, “Anywhere I am, anywhere I be, He is there with me.” So I look at that as “oh, ok, that is the God that is here with me, and nothing can be more powerful than that.” It was outside of Sudan. That was when we got to the Ethiopian border.
It was hard to leave my country. I didn’t really know much about “country” because I was young and in the village. But I liked the things we did in the village. I had the protection of my parents and I was thinking that nothing was bigger than them.
There were times that I had the feeling that “we can go back.” But there were other times that I felt, even if I could go back it would not be the same. I would think, “You can go back and see your home, but if I go back I will have the memory of everybody and everything thing I had lost.”
When we moved to the camp in Ethiopia, we still had all our family together. But while we were at the camp Sudanese refugees became victims. The only place to run was back to Sudan, which was still in the war. After family went to back to Sudan, my dad left me with my young brother. It was 1992-3. My brother and I had to leave Ethiopia to come to Kenya. We had heard that if we went to that camp we might be able to get away to America. I was about seventeen and my brother thirteen. In 1995 we got permission to come to the United States.
But to come to the United States is a long process. After being approved to come, you have to go through a process that included doing an interview, doing some orientation, doing a medical check up. Once you do this and all this is clear for you, you have to work on how to come to the United States. Who in the US is going to receive you and be responsible for you? The person had to work with an agency that is the local state or region and they had to have your name.
In our case, after we got this process completed, we had to go to South Dakota. It was springtime. We saw the snow and it was like “wow.” We had never seen snow before. It was so cold. We had clothes like this—just a jacket. When we got there, our sponsor took us to where we were supposed to live and helped us. But things did not work out for us there. We were not there long. It was too cold. Neither of us could speak the language. By that time my brother was fourteen years old and had to attend high school. So I am the “parent,” and must take my brother to and from school, and I had to be the one to provide food for him at school. But I had to work and I didn’t have a car. I told my sponsor that I don’t think this works for me. I need to find another place to go. But the conversation between me and my sponsor was difficult because we needed someone else to translate.
But then a friend who lives in Nashville told me that there were jobs here that don’t even require you to speak the language. So I asked my friend to send me tickets for the bus. When we came we didn’t really know where we were going to be. So we had to get permission from the sponsor and we could share information through the sponsors. After we got here I got a job but there was no direct bus from my neighborhood to the job. So I caught a bus to downtown and then another bus from downtown, and then another bus to my job. Then at night I took the bus part way back but had to walk some of the way. I did that for more than three months. After that my friend and I bought a car.
I had a feeling that one or two jobs would not be enough. I think there was a reason I came to the United States, and I did not feel comfortable just supporting myself and my brother. I found myself saying, maybe there is something bigger than this. I had to learn how to read and to write. So I started taking English as a Second Language. I tried for two days a week. It was not enough so I did three days a week. Three days was not enough so I did four days a week. Four days a week was not enough so I did five days. Five days a week was not enough so I did six days a week. Six days was not enough so I did seven days a week. I did two hours a day for seven days a week.
After that I earned a high school diploma, and I decided to go to Tennessee State University with a major in computer science and a minor in math. I earned a dual degree in three and a half years. So I graduated with that and people were shocked. Just shocked. They just knew me yesterday and then they see me today as a very different guy. From there I decided, well I’ve got a job, I had become a supervisor, but I found that doing the computer was not my passion. My passion was to do something for other people.
At that time I went to Africa and got married to a girl that I knew in the camps. We did not keep in touch until a few years after I had left. When I brought her here she was not educated. So I bought a chalkboard and put it in our apartment to teach her the alphabet. Then some ladies joined her, my cousin’s wife and some other women coming to my apartment. I thought that we needed to rent a place where they can learn. The problem at the community center was that those learning places had not been designed for people with no education; they start with people who have dropped out of high school.
We started by collecting $5, $10 a month. Then we got enough money to rent the place. Step one to step two. And that was the origin of the Sudanese Center. [need a description of that here] From there the center has been to help people. I decided to go back to school to get my masters, because I knew how to work with machines but not how to work with people. So I went back and got my masters in public service in 2007.
I considered myself a refugee when I first came to Nashville. I didn’t have the kind of support that I would have had if I were back home – especially if I were in my village. Then again, with some of the cases that I’m dealing with now, I think when there is a need for someone to be educated, someone else also needs to know about that. I feel that I am very blessed that I can be here doing things for myself and other people. I feel that I cannot be a refugee because I’m thinking of helping people instead of having people help me. I can’t even be still calling myself Sudanese. You can be born of the nation, or your grandparents can be born of the nation, but you don’t have this much opportunity.