South Sudan's Nuer tribe seeks community center in Austin - Post-Bulletin

Members of South Sudan's Nuer tribe traveled half way around the world looking for a safe place to build their lives away from the fighting in their homeland. They found it in Austin.

"We like southeast Minnesota," said John Brown Bol, citing the availability of jobs and potential to successfully rebuild their lives.

That's why Austin, which ranks fifth out of 11 cities in Minnesota in terms of Nuer population numbers, is the top choice for a Nuer community center, Bol said. The center is proposed by Nuer Community Development Services, a national nonprofit organization formed in 1999 in Faribault and now headquartered in Omaha, Neb.

"A lot of people are moving down here and want to build our community center here to make it our home," said Austin's Bol, who was elected chairman of the Nuer Community Development Services community center committee in 2009.

While the group continues to raise money to rent or build a facility, the need is undeniable, he said.

"People are killing themselves because they think the life is too hard in America," Bol said, referring to the recent suicide deaths of two members of the Nuer community, one in Omaha the other in Portland.

"It's really hard to be a leader and understand the difficulty of the people," he said. "But to have nothing in hand to help is really painful."

While the Nuer people meet at St. Olaf Lutheran Church in Austin each Sunday to pray, a community center could serve as a resource for Nuer from as far as Wisconsin and Michigan, he said.

The center could offer everything from both English and Nuer dialect classes to access to mental health resources for Nuer suffering psychological problems after living through war, he said.

"They need somebody who knows them and their background," Bol said.

Of the 56 tribes in South Sudan, the Nuer people make up the largest portion of the South Sudanese people in the United States and possibly South Sudan, Bol said. But because the majority of Nuer live in the bush of South Sudan, where census takers cannot travel, the census is being put on hold until roads and bridges are constructed, he said.

Minnesota has the highest number of Nuer residents in the United States, followed by Nebraska, Tennessee, Washington, South Dakota, Colorado, Wisconsin and Michigan, in that order, he said.

"We grew up in a problem, but now that we are in this country it does not mean we have to grow up in a problem, too," Bol said. "Now America is our first home and South Sudan is our second home."