SARAH Tang passes her sleepy seven-month old baby boy to a friendly staff babysitter at the Sunraysia Murray Ethnic Communities Council, and sits patiently on an office chair, hands on her lap, responding to my opening questions in a quiet, calm voice.
She is 31. Born in the Ethiopian town of Gambela, she emigrated to Australia from Kenya with her husband and first daughter in 2000.
But she identifies as neither Ethiopian nor Kenyan. Her late father was a Nuer tribesman from Nasir, on the banks of the white Nile, in Sudan’s predominantly Christian south.
If these fragments of her early life seem unremarkable, they collectively hint at an astonishing story of survival, human resilience, and the powerful, durable bonds of family.
Sarah’s father Tang died in 1991, when she was nine. She and older brother Koang were living apart from the rest of the family in Gambela, when Arabs from Sudan’s Islamist north crossed the border, took the rest of her family captive, and forcibly repatriated them to Nasir.
The borders between southern Sudan, Kenya and Ethiopa are poorly defined, and permeable; old tribal kingdoms straddle national borders. During the civil war between the Islamist north and the Christian south, thousands of Nuer people fled across the border to find haven among their kinsmen in western Ethiopia.
Why was Sarah’s father killed?
“They asked him to be a Muslim. He refused,” she explains, without emotion, as if death by torture were an everyday occurrence. It was.
Her father was one of hundreds of thousands of people who died in the Second Sudanese Civil War after Lieutenant-General Omar al-Bashir seized power in Sudan in 1989 and established military rule. Bashir’s junta embarked on a murderous program of ethnic and religious cleansing in Sudan’s fertile south, and, later and notoriously, in the arid Darfur region of western Sudan.
After their father’s death, Sarah and Koang lived for six years in western Ethiopia’s Tongo refugee camp, close to the three-way junction of the Kenyan, Sudanese and Ethiopian borders. The camp is administered by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
In 1998, Arab raiders forcibly recruiting young men and male children as soldiers for the northern Islamist cause crossed the border and captured Koang. When he refused to renounce his religion and join them, he was tortured and killed – like his father.
Sarah’s recollections of the time are hazy and confused – she was young, and fear and stress play havoc with short-term memory. Their mother remained in Nasir with the rest of her children: two daughters and a son. Sarah has not seen them since.
She was dismayed to learn that in 1997, northern Sudanese raiders had abducted her youngest brother, John, then aged five, and taken him north with several other young boys from Nasir, to be trained as child soldiers.
After her older brother was killed, Sarah found herself alone, with no family, living in fear for her life. She decided her best chance of surviving lay in finding someone to look after her, so she tagged along with a group of Nuer people who decided to leave Ethiopia and walk to the UNHCR’s Kakuma refugee camp, just west of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. The journey south, on foot, took six months.
At Kakuma, she put her name up on a board that listed new arrivals – standard practice for refugees hoping to find family members, friends or relatives.
A friend of her father who lived in the camp with his family took her in, on condition that she marry his son. She readily agreed. Without family, a refugee camp is a perilous place for a 14-year-old girl.
“I feel my life was terrible. I did not have my mum or dad, I am always hungry and sad, and asking myself why I am still alive when all my family are dead. I often thought it might be better to die.
At 15, she married 19-year old David Kong. Their daughter Maya was born in Kakuma just over a year later, in 2000.
Life in the camp was harsh and tedious.
“It was worse than the camp in Ethiopia,” Sarah said.
“They didn’t have a tap in the house for water. We had to get up at 1am to stand in a long line to get water from the one tap in the area,” she said.
“The water came on between 7am and 9am, and if you didn’t stay in line, you had to wait two days for more water. But you could take as much as you wanted when it was your turn – I used to take three or four buckets.”
The “house” was a tiny wattle-and-daub hut with a thatched grass roof, and only one bedroom for 20 people: men, women, teens, children and babies slept crushed up against each other, with no privacy.
By day, some residents would leave the hut, creating room for the women to cook on a single wood fire inside the hut – on frequent rainy days, everyone crowded inside.
Firewood was scarce, and available only by leaving the camp and walking long distances.
The camp was established on land owned by the Shipda people, who resented the intrusion. “Taking wood is not allowed, and if they catch you, they might kill you,” Sarah said.
“People cannot sleep outside the huts at night, because the Shipda will come into the camp and kill you. We were always frightened.”
The camp crawled with deadly scorpions that invaded huts and hid in bedding, delivering potentially lethal stings when disturbed.
Sarah holds up the her right hand. The middle finger is bent sideways with arthritis, the legacy of a scorpion sting not long after she arrived in Kakuma.
She learned English at the camp’s school, and, after Year 9, became a teacher herself, teaching mainly young children. Some of her “prep” students were late starters – people up to 30 years old who had never attended school, in a region that seethed with ethnic and religious conflicts.
Her father-in-law had a friend who had migrated to Australia. In 2001, he suggested Sarah and her husband apply to migrate to Australia as refugees. Sarah had applied before she married, without success; this time she and her husband and daughter were accepted as refugees.
She wept at the airport terminal in Mombasa because she could not believe she was going to have new life in Australia with her family, free of fear and danger.
But mostly, she wept at the thought of leaving so many friends behind in the Kakuma camp. What would become of them? The question haunted her after she settled into her new life in Cranbourne, south-east of Melbourne.
Sarah and her husband had two more children after settling in Melbourne, but the marriage failed. As a full-time, single parent, she was forced to give up her dream of becoming a Baptist minister.
In 2009, she received a telephone call from Kakuma camp in Kenya. It was from her youngest brother, John, who she believed had died when he was only five.
In fact he and another boy, aged 9, had slipped away from their Arab captors in 1991; somehow the found their way back into Ethiopia, where they lived for years before deciding to go to the Kakuma camp in Kenya in 2008.
There he saw his sister’s name on the board, and learnt that she was living in Australia. He found her number, and called her.
Sarah, who believed she was the sole survivor in her family, was overjoyed. It took her a year to raise the $1900 required to bring her brother to Australia in 2009.
Sarah continued to send second-hand clothes to the Kakuma camp. Her sense of obligation now produced another miracle.
A young woman in the Kakuma camp named Martha, saw another young woman wearing a new dress, and asked where it had come from.
She learned it had been sent by a former camp resident, Sarah Tang, who had left for Australia in 2002 with her husband and daughter.
Martha Tang was immediately intrigued. Her older sister had been called Sarah, but she and sister Rhoda, and their mother Mary had lost contact with her when family members became separated after the death of their father in 1991.
Martha obtained Sarah’s telephone number, and called her.
“It was an enormous shock,” Sarah said. “I felt someone was pretending to know me because they had learned my background.”
The Nuer memorise their family pedigrees in great detail. By the time Sarah and Martha named their grandmother, it was clear there was no hoax. The sisters and their mother cried for joy.
Now, there were five survivors – a real family.
But there has been no family reunion yet.
When southern Sudan gained its independence from the north last year, and became the world’s newest nation, South Sudan, Sarah’s mother and sisters felt it safe to return to Nasir.
But old tribal rivalries have flared into violent ethnic conflicts in the new nation.
Sarah’s mother initially asked her to return to Nasir. Sarah felt it would be better to bring her mother and sisters to Australia
She needs to raise around $6000 to bring the rest of her family to safety in Australia. But on a single mother’s benefit, there’s little chance of that happening soon.
She has a new fiance, Biel, like her, a South Sudanese. They have had two children together.
Through distance education, Sarah is doing a TAFE medical technology course, that she will complete this year. She hopes to find a job at Mildura Base Hospital or a local medical clinic.
Does she like living in Mildura, and has she experienced any racism since settling here?
“All of the people here are good. There is no issue,” she replies.
“When there is a misunderstanding, we can come to the right thing.
“If one or two persons are against me, I will ignore it. There is no point in fighting or arguing.”
This article appeared in Saturday’s Sunraysia Daily 04/02/2012.
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