BY BILL KAUFMANN  
Some of us struggle to find meaning in life.

Others labour exhaustively to live up to a meaning that’s long been apparent, but seemingly beyond reach.

Last Tuesday, three young Sudanese physicians studying in Calgary demonstrated the latter, told through epic odysseys of death, deliverance, sacrifice and hope.

As pre-teens, they joined a harried exodus from their home villages of southern Sudan, shortly after the resumption of a half-century’s war in that troubled east African nation.

“I was nine years old and three of my aunties had been killed by government soldiers … I had to flee with another aunt,” said Michael Tut Pur of the 1984 escape.

After a week’s march, they arrived in Itang refugee camp in a region of Ethiopia where countrymen Daniel Thon Duop and Martha Martin Dar would also seek safe haven.

There, orphaned children were outfitted with AK-47s by the Sudanese Peoples’ Liberation Movement to battle their genocidal oppressors from Sudan’s North.

“They were going to the war, to lose their lives with no future,” recalls Dar.

Dar and her two compatriots were selected to leave behind the misery and conflict of the camps, to set sail for Cuba and schooling with the hope they’d one day return to help.

“My mom didn't want me to go—I was too young,” says Dar who nonetheless left behind her family at the age of 13.

“She said ‘maybe one day you can find me, you can take care of yourself and support your brothers.’”

With a pact between Fidel Castro and Ethiopia’s Marxist regime, the three boarded Soviet passenger ships.

It was a voyage from the other side of the Cold War divide that belied perceptions coloured in black and white.

“We didn’t have help from the West, so at the very beginning we had help from the Communists,” says Pur.

He’d spend 15 years in Cuba, a place where he nurtured an awareness of the island’s authoritarianism but also a humane social system that schooled him in advanced medicine.

“Their political system may not be right, but their health system is very good… they gave us what they could,” he says.

“They graduated 7,500 doctors in 2001, with 1,500 from Africa.”

But the plan to repatriate them back to Sudan came to grief when some of their number who’d returned weren’t able to pursue their chosen profession and were pressed into battle.

When some were killed, the decision was made, through a UN program to instead disperse the educated refugees to the U.S., Australia and Canada.

Due to a lack of qualifications, the Cuban-trained doctors were forced to settle for jobs outside the medical sphere; Duop and Dar toiled at Alberta meat-packing plants.

“At first, I was so frustrated—I couldn't imagine myself working at that place,” says Dar, adding the multi-ethnic complexion of the Lakeside Packers staff redeemed her time there.

Fortune aligned with a year-old ceasefire in southern Sudan and a partnership between evangelical charity Samaritan’s Purse and the University of Calgary.

Their goal of one day returning to help the survivors of genocide was resurrected. Following a six-month refresher course at the U of C, they'll return to Sudan in June.

Pur says he’s even willing to venture into violent Darfur, cognizant the intelligentsia would be in the crosshairs of government-backed Islamic militias.

“I don’t care if I am a first target, if I can help, it’s a worthy cause even if I die,” says Canadian citizen Pur, who expects to work at a charity-run hospital in southeastern Sudan. “The government of Sudan doesn’t do anything in the South.”

Duop, 33, says they're obligated—partly due to the helping hands they’ve received here—to go back to a devastated country where disease is rampant.

“This has become not just a mission of Sudanese, but a mission of Canadians and Calgarians,” he says.

Says Pur: “I always call myself Sudanese, Canadian, Cuban.”

They recognize that with further education, they could lucratively practise medicine in Canada and, in any case, enjoy the creature comforts of living in an affluent, peaceful land.

“Money isn't everything when others are in need,” says Dar.

For a dozen of their Sudanese colleagues being schooled in Ontario, the determination to go back is just as unwavering.

“We’re still of the same mind, of the same mission,” says Dar.

“It’s a dream come true.”

How many of us could even remotely imagine saying the same.
 
 
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