A Harrowing Tale of Survival and Hope
By Michael W. Kahn, Electric Co-op Today Vol 15. No. 8

Vivek Talvadkar (Senior Vice President of NRECA International) and Abraham Awolich at the International Luncheon.

To call Abraham Awolich’s story a triumph over adversity may well be an understatement.

Awolich was an 8-year-old child on his family’s farm in Sudan when that country’s civil war reached his village in 1989. It was the start of an 11 year nightmare in which Awolich would become one of Sudan’s Lost Boys, among the thousands orphaned or displaced.

Now 29, he told his story at the NRECA International Program Luncheon, which was fitting given the Foundation’s involvement in Sudan.

Awolich said although it was calm for a time, the attackers eventually returned one day when he was at school.

“Our best option was to run into the river,” he said. “There were islands, so we were hiding there for several hours hoping the war would end.”

The war continued until 2005.

Without knowing what became of his family, Awolich crossed the river, but, “That town was also attacked.”

He joined others heading toward Ethiopia. Spending three months in the jungle, often hot and hungry, they walked at night and rested by day, to avoid detection by planes. He was sickened from drinking dirty water.

“I started to hear people betting on me. They were saying, ‘He might die in the next two hours.’”

But the thought of seeing his family again kept him going. He spent some three years in an Ethiopian refugee camp, before war broke out in that country.

He eventually arrived in Kenya where he would spend nine years in a camp. By then, it was 11 years since he’d heard from his family.

A glimmer of hope finally came to Awolich’s life when in 2001 he was able to go live with a family in Vermont.

“I came on Valentine’s Day and I had not known anything about snow,” he said. Awolich eventually got a job, proudly recalling how for the first time he was able to buy food.

When peace came to Sudan four years later, Awolich returned home.

“Of course, my whole family was not there.” His mother and four of his siblings survived; his father and older brother did not.

To help his homeland, Awolich and others built a school in the outskirts of Yei, the same Sudanese town which NRECA International and its volunteers helped to electrify.

“Electricity,” Awolich said, “is a sign of hope.”