From the AP...
Salva Dut neatly divides his time between two very different worlds.
In the first half of this year, he oversaw the drilling of five deep-water wells for nomadic tribes in southern Sudan, the war-sundered wilderness he fled as a child 20 years ago.
On his return to America, the polite church clerk sought out new audiences for his unnerving tale of survival as one of the thousands of rescued "Lost Boys of Sudan" - and his mission to enable a few dozen isolated communities to tap into clean running water.
"These are village leaders trying to decide which village will get the well, and which village will wait," Dut said at a recent Rotary Club dinner, narrating a slide show of his bittersweet journey to Lounariik, his mud-hut birthplace.
"This is one of my father's wives and she just passed away while I was there because of rabies. The dog bite her, and (there's) no treatment there," he said. "And that's my aunt. She was crying because I left when I was so little and now I'm a grown-up person helping my people, and that's why she's crying."
Hardly a week goes by that Dut, the tall, self-effacing son of a Dinka cattle herdsman, doesn't win an invitation to speak. His fund-raising success at churches, clubs and colleges seems to turn less on his harrowing past than on a cause at once intimate and momentous for so many.
"What a wonderful project - it kills you to hear it," said Steve Knorr, a retired print shop owner whose Rotary Club in the [Rochester, N.Y.] suburb of Fairport gave Dut $1,000. "Water is just something taken for granted, isn't it?"
With the dry season now under way, Dut is preparing to spend another six months with a crew from Uganda drilling bore-holes in and around Tonj, his home county in one of the poorest places on earth. The first five, extending into aquifers as much as 200 feet down, are used by some 17,000 people.
Dut has collected $140,000 since 2003 to get his nonprofit, Water for Sudan Inc., up and running, and is hoping to build 25 more wells next year. His aim is to collect another $300,000 to furnish Texas-sized southern Sudan with a water network big enough to quell tribal disputes and banish water-borne diseases.
"It made me really feel good to see them staying in their own village and not having to walk far away to find water," Dut said.
Whenever water holes are discovered as the land turns dusty between October and May, "other tribes, other villages come in and claim `This is my territory,"' he said. "And they kill each other. I was happy to see I'm breaking that kind of conflict."
Fellow parishioners at St. Paul's Episcopal Church who helped Dut set up his charity are now thinking of building a health clinic, and maybe a school someday, in Lounariik, the town of 10,000 where Dut was raised.
In December 1985, when he was 11, Sudan's civil war shattered Dut's family along with millions of others. After a decade fleeing violence and famine, crisscrossing hundreds of miles of Africa with 17,000 mostly orphaned children, Dut was among 3,800 plucked from refugee camps and sent to live in the United States.
He only learned of his family's fate in 2000. When his father showed up at a United Nations hospital, his stomach riddled with worms from drinking contaminated water, Dut rushed back to Sudan to meet him. His anguished experience - his father recovered after surgery - made him realize in a flash what he had to do.
The 21-year civil war left 2 million people dead and displaced 4 million others, and the mainly Christian and animist southern region is now relatively calm. But war and pillaging that the northern-based Islamic government has been unwilling or unable to halt have intensified in the western province of Darfur.
Wells could provide stability for the Dinka, who must migrate with their animals when water is scarce. Forced to use fetid pools, many end up stricken with Guinea worms, schistosomes and other parasites.
Dut's lonely odyssey came full circle when he arrived in Lounariik in February. After two weeks of drilling and waiting for the cement cap to harden, elders led a prayer service, mud-caked children frolicked under the pump-handle tap, and a cow was sacrificed and eaten with a sorghum brew.
Each well is designed for up to 1,000 people but thousands more show up deep into the night. Committees have been put in charge in each place and a villager trained to do repairs and water-quality tests.
"As part of the deal, there's a social mobilization effort," said Jim Blake, a retired computer consultant who helped Dut obtain government permits and hire a reputable drilling contractor.
"It may begin the establishment of long-term communities, it may exacerbate tribal problems with providing water to different groups. It's hard to say," Blake said. "In the meantime, however, people are dying because of lack of water or certainly lack of clean water. The diseases they get are horrific."
Their savior, he marveled, is "just a guy who gave up his schooling, his career and everything else so he could establish this for his people, his home. It's profoundly moving."
The U.S. Agency for International Development had promised to contribute up to 80 percent of drilling costs after a year or two but so far has not made a firm commitment to join in the venture.
For Dut, who became a U.S. citizen in 2001, linking up again with his bygone life brought joy - a reunion with his mother, bonds with countless strangers - as well as pain on learning so many relatives and neighbors had died in the war. But the hardest part was encountering multitudes of sick children.
"You just can't do anything for them," he said. "You move on with what you are doing. That's the only option.
"I was having a tough life when I was young," he added. "Now I'm in a different life with totally different challenges. It give me a lot of energy that I'm doing something. It doesn't allow me to think about the past, it just make me move on and on."
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