Hornell resident aids refugees in South Sudan - Hornell Evening Tribune

For 28-year-old Hornell resident Brendan Kraft, the decision to help refugees in the Gendrassa camp in South Sudan was a no-brainer.

"I'm grateful as an American citizen and a lot of people from all parts of the world don't have those opportunities that we have and so to be able to go overseas on somebody's well-intentioned dime and help people out who are much less fortunate than we are, I don't know that I hesitated to volunteer for that," he said.

In June of this year, a certain Facebook post that mentioned Team Rubicon, a nonprofit organization that repurposes the skills of young military veterans for humanitarian disasters, caught Kraft's attention. The post said the organization would head to South Sudan to help International Medical Corps, a global humanitarian nonprofit organization, establish humanitarian aid in refugee camps.

Kraft, who served as a corporal in the U.S. Army from 2004 to 2008 and specialized in public health, volunteered for the mission. At the beginning of August, he and four other veterans from around the country met at New York City before flying to Gendrassa to help between 8,000-10,000 refugees.

"It turns out, there are about five major refugee areas in South Sudan and this is the newest one and it was basically like an overflow and a new refugee site. A couple of the camps had flooded from the heavy rains over the summer and so they were sending people who had been displaced from their refugee camp into this new camp, which had no medical support or anything like that," Kraft said.

On July 9, 2011, South Sudan gained its freedom after almost 99 percent of the population voted for independence from Sudan.

However, the two successor states have continued fighting over various secession issues, specifically the question of shared oil revenues and the precise border demarcation. Tens of thousands of refugees from the Blue Nile state, a remote rebel-held area in Sudan, have since made their way into South Sudan.

Malnourished, sick and overcrowded in ill-prepared sites, the refugees were undeniably in need of assistance.

While in South Sudan, Kraft served as a Team Rubicon water and sanitary health specialist and supported the team's construction crew. He said he helped assess the health level and the sanitation quality of the Gendrassa camp and "provided input and did some footwork" to establish future sanitation policies in the area.

The team worked in 100-plus-degree temperatures, sometimes in 100 percent humidity because it was the country's rainy season, Kraft said.

"The working conditions were something you typically experience in a third-world or second-world country that is in trouble at the time and we had little access by plane or by barge and there were quite a few other nonprofits in the area competing for the barge and plane cargo space, so it was very austere," he said.

From April 2005 to April 2006, Kraft worked in a regional combat support hospital in Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S. government's official name for the war in Afghanistan. He said though much of his public health experience was more applicable in Afghanistan, his combat support experience helped him deal with "things that were shocking or graphic or just overall sad" in Sudan.

"Being able to witness that stuff and being able to respond to it with love and concern and having learned how to set aside that horror or sadness for another time, it made it very useful," he said.

After just under a month and a half in South Sudan, Kraft returned home Sept. 10. He said he would like to think the people he and his group assisted felt the intention of their efforts.

"Even if it didn't make a huge logistical difference, hopefully the people we interacted with picked up on just our desire to be over there and to do good for them and maybe that made as much of a difference as actually providing a long-term service or something like that," he said.