[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 98 (Thursday, June 18, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4304-S4306]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           WORLD REFUGEE DAY

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, the United States has long been a safe and 
welcoming home for those fleeing persecution around the world. The 
refugees and asylum seekers who join our communities help to create new 
businesses, build more vibrant neighborhoods, and enrich us all. They 
are also a reminder of our history as a nation of immigrants and our 
American values of generosity and compassion. Saturday marks World 
Refugee Day, and to honor it we must renew our commitment to the ideal 
of America as a beacon of hope for so many who face human rights abuses 
abroad.
  Millions of refugees remain displaced and warehoused in refugee camps 
in Eastern Africa, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world. 
Ongoing political struggles and military conflicts in the Middle East 
and North Africa are dislocating large populations. Too many are 
without their families or safe places to find refuge. Some, though far 
too few, have been able to flee and rebuild their lives.
  Peter Keny, one of the ``Lost Boys'' of South Sudan, is one of those 
inspiring refugees who escaped a civil war in his home country and has 
rebuilt his life in my home State of Vermont. He is just one of 
thousands of refugees Vermonters have welcomed over the years. Peter 
was 19 when he came to Burlington in 2001, and in the years since he 
has learned English, completed high school, and is earning a college 
degree. In describing his voyage to the United States and ultimately to 
Vermont, Peter told ``The Burlington Free Press'' that arriving here 
``was like a dream come true.'' I ask unanimous consent to have printed 
in the Record the article, ``A Found Man Returns to South Sudan.''
  I am proud of Vermont's long history of supporting refugees by 
opening its communities, schools, and homes to those in need. It is not 
always easy, but it is a powerful example of our belief in the most 
basic ideals of human dignity and hope, and our commitment to 
responding to the suffering of others. We are fortunate to have 
remarkable organizations like the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program 
leading the effort with its decades of experience and award-winning 
volunteer program, and the tremendous legal advocacy provided by the 
Vermont Immigration and Asylum Advocates. The hard work of these and 
other organizations and the daily welcoming gestures of Vermonters all 
over the State have made Vermont a role model for the rest of the 
country.
  On this year's World Refugee Day, it is also important to acknowledge 
that there is more that we as a country can and must do. I remain 
deeply concerned about the administration's expanded family detention 
policy. The women and children it is placing in prolonged detention 
have fled extreme violence and persecution in Central America. They 
come seeking refuge from three of the most dangerous countries in the 
world, countries where women and girls face shocking rates of domestic 
and sexual violence and murder. Here in the United States, we recently 
celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act, a 
law we hold out as an example of our commitment to take these crimes 
seriously and to protect all victims. The ongoing detention of asylum-
seeking mothers and children who have made credible claims that they 
have been victims of these very same crimes is unacceptable. I again 
urge the administration to end the misguided policy of family 
detention.
  We must also do more to address the humanitarian crisis in Syria. 
Almost 4 million Syrians are officially recognized as refugees by the 
UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The vast majority of these 
are women and children, including hundreds of thousands of children 
under the age of 5. The United States traditionally accepts at least 50 
percent of resettlement cases from UNHCR. However, we

[[Page S4305]]

have accepted only approximately 700 refugees since the beginning of 
the Syrian conflict, an unacceptably low number.
  Congress also plays an important role. Soon I will reintroduce the 
Refugee Protection Act to improve protections for refugees and asylum 
seekers and provide additional support and improvement to the national 
resettlement program and groups such as the Vermont Refugee 
Resettlement Program. This bill, which I have long championed with 
Representative Zoe Lofgren, reaffirms the commitments made in ratifying 
the 1951 Refugee Convention, and will help to restore the United States 
to its rightful role as a safe and welcoming home for those suffering 
from persecution around the world.
  As we pause to take stock on World Refugee Day, let each of us 
reflect on what this great country means to those escaping persecution. 
Let us now and always live by and burnish the light of Lady Liberty's 
torch, our eternal beacon of hope to those struggling to breathe free.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

             [From the Burlington Free Press, June 7, 2015]

                   A Found Man Returns to South Sudan

                           (By Zach Despart)

       Peter Keny sat on the side of the road in late December as 
     the sun disappeared behind the acacia trees. He had traveled 
     more than 7,000 miles from Burlington, only to be stranded 
     just north of the South Sudanese capital of Juba.
       The taxi he hired an hour earlier had broken down, and he 
     was still 50 miles south of his destination, his native 
     village of Kalthok. The driver walked back to Juba five hours 
     earlier and had yet to return.
       Keny took another delay in stride, as he had waited to 
     return home since fleeing his country's civil war 25 years 
     earlier. That decade-long journey, forged in tragedy and 
     perseverance, took Keny on a dangerous trek through the 
     Sudanese bush to a series of refugee camps and, finally, to a 
     new start in America.
       For most of his life, Keny has straddled two worlds. Each 
     day he reconciles his life of opportunity in the United 
     States with a longing for his war-torn homeland. For years, 
     Keny balanced work to put himself through school and to save 
     for a trip to Kalthok, the village of his brief childhood and 
     keeper of the only memories of his parents.
       Exhausted from two flights and a 12-hour bus ride from 
     Uganda, Keny tried to imagine what the reunion would be like. 
     As he peered through darkness toward Kalthok, he wondered if 
     anyone would remember him.


                             A child of war

       Keny was born in Kalthok in 1982, the youngest of four 
     sons. He lived with his mother and father, who like many in 
     the village were sorghum farmers. The Kenys belonged to the 
     Dinka tribe, the largest ethnic group in southern Sudan.
       In November 1989, farmers had finished the annual harvest 
     as the wet season came to a close. One afternoon, 6-year-old 
     Keny and a group of boys played on the banks of the White 
     Nile north of Kalthok, as they often did when little else 
     occupied their time. Around five o'clock, the boys heard 
     gunfire and saw smoke in the village's direction. They rushed 
     toward home but were intercepted by a villager who told them 
     returning was unsafe. The boys, some of whom were Keny's 
     cousins, hid along a riverbank that night. Keny would never 
     again see his parents.
       For most of the past 60 years, Sudan has been engulfed in 
     civil war. By 1989, the Second Sudanese Civil War already had 
     raged for six years. When war ended in 2005, 1 million to 2 
     million people were dead and another 2 million were 
     displaced. Many of those killed or displaced were from the 
     Dinka tribe.
       As a child Keny knew about the war, but until that day in 
     1989, fighting had never come to Kalthok.
       ``We were all the way to the south of the country, and the 
     government militia did not have a problem with the local 
     people,'' Keny recalled in a recent interview in Burlington. 
     ``There was no tension.''
       Unable to return to their village, Keny and his friends 
     faced a harrowing journey. The morning after the attack on 
     Kalthok, the boys crossed the river and joined a larger group 
     of refugees who were walking east, away from the fighting. 
     They walked each day until their legs could carry them no 
     farther. Each time the boys stopped to rest, they feared lion 
     attacks and roaming militias, which abducted children to use 
     as soldiers. Keny was shoeless and without a change of 
     clothing. He thought only of how to survive another day.
       ``The worry was, `Are you going to make it to the next 
     town?' '' he recalled. ``You focused on living to the next 
     day, and that's all. There was nothing else you could do.''
       The Sudanese government was able to distribute grain to 
     fleeing refugees. Keny and others received two cups each, 
     which they made last as long as they could. Keny had nowhere 
     to put the grain, so he wrapped it carefully in his shirt. 
     When the grain ran out, the boys foraged for wild fruit and 
     berries whenever they stopped to rest.
       Keny said he was among an estimated 20,000 ``Lost Boys of 
     Sudan''--children separated from their parents during the 
     war. As many as half died of disease and starvation during 
     the journey to refugee camps.
       After traveling several hundred miles over three months, 
     Keny crossed from Sudan into Ethiopia and settled with others 
     at Dimma, a refugee camp established by the Ethiopian 
     government in 1986 to handle an enormous influx of Sudanese 
     refugees.
       Keny remained at Dimma for about a year, until spring 1991, 
     when rebels overthrew Ethiopia's government in a coup. The 
     boys fled back across the border and camped near the Sudanese 
     community of Pakok until 1992, when the United Nations moved 
     thousands of refugees to the newly opened Kakuma refugee camp 
     in Kenya. Keny would live there for nine years.
       At the Kakuma camp, Keny learned English and went to school 
     daily. He said U.N. staff members encouraged the boys to 
     settle into a routine. But he could not stop thinking about 
     his family. Keny said some of the Lost Boys tried to find 
     their way back to their villages, but he judged the trip back 
     to Kalthok too dangerous. Refugees at Kakuma relied on new 
     arrivals and wounded soldiers seeking care at the U.N. 
     hospital for news about the war.
       ``The hope was that I would see someone from my village, so 
     I might ask the situation of my family,'' Keny said. ``But no 
     one ever showed up. It was very difficult for me. I never 
     knew whether someone was still there or not.''
       Keny received a surprise in 1998, when his oldest brother, 
     Riak, found him at the Kakuma camp. Riak had joined the 
     Sudanese army and had been granted a one-month leave. The 
     brothers had not seen each other in nine years.
       ``It was one of the best days of my life, after going all 
     that time without seeing my family,'' Keny said.
       But the reunion was bittersweet. Riak brought news Keny had 
     long feared: Their parents and brother were killed in the 
     war, and remaining brother had died of disease. Keny was 
     devastated, but relieved finally to know the fate of his 
     family. Riak tried to lift his spirits.
       ``He was like, `Look, this is what it is. Someone has to 
     die for someone to live. If we all had to die, and you lived, 
     that's the best we can do,' '' Keny recalled his brother 
     saying.
       Riak and Peter spent several weeks together, until the 
     soldier's leave expired and he returned to war. Keny never 
     again saw his brother. Riak died in 2006 after he succumbed 
     to injuries received years earlier.


                         A new life in America

       In 2001, when he was 19, Keny moved to the U.S. through the 
     federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. He had several cities 
     to choose among, but he picked Burlington because his cousin 
     Abraham Awolich already had settled there. Five others from 
     the Kakuma camp came with him.
       For the first time in his life, Keny thought about his 
     future.
       ``It was like a dream that had come true,'' he said. ``I 
     felt like this is the moment, if I don't have my parents, 
     maybe in the future I'll be able to meet my extended family. 
     Maybe I would be able to do something that my family would 
     remember me.''
       In the U.S., Keny became proficient in English, earned a 
     high school degree and dreamed of attending college.
       Now 32, Keny lives in a small apartment on Front Street in 
     Burlington with three other Lost Boys who immigrated to the 
     U.S. He works as a janitor for the University of Vermont, 
     where he cleans the athletic complex from 10 p.m. to 6:30 
     a.m., five days a week. When school is in session, he attends 
     classes during the day, where he is a decade older than his 
     peers. In the next year and a half, he hopes to complete a 
     degree in community development and applied economics.
       Keny is able to cram in only a few hours of sleep before 
     walking uphill to class, but he said he must work to afford 
     tuition if he ever hopes to find a better-paying job.
       ``It's about being willing,'' he said, sitting on the front 
     porch of his home. ``If I don't do it, I will be stuck here. 
     I just tell myself I have to do it. Otherwise I don't have 
     options.''
       Ever since moving to the U.S., Keny always hoped return to 
     visit Kalthok. He was able to contact several uncles by 
     telephone in 2002 and remained in touch with relatives 
     regularly. He secured a travel visa in 2006 but was unable to 
     use it, because a trip would have interrupted his studies at 
     community college.
       ``The biggest fact was that I was struggling with my 
     education,'' Keny said. ``Every time I'd say, `If I go home 
     while I'm trying to complete this process, I might fall 
     behind.' ''
       While studying, Keny kept abreast of news back home.
       In 2005, civil war ended with a peace agreement that many 
     Sudanese hoped finally would put an end to violence that had 
     torn apart the country for half a century. In 2011, southern 
     Sudanese voted overwhelmingly to break off from the north to 
     form a new nation, South Sudan. The fragile peace collapsed 
     two years later, when South Sudan plunged into civil war. 
     Keny said Kalthok has so far been spared heavy violence, but 
     the community is inundated with refugees again fleeing to the 
     east.

[[Page S4306]]

       Finally, in 2014, Keny acquired a new visa and was able to 
     raise enough money for the costly trip, which required a 
     stopover in Europe.


                         Return to South Sudan

       Even after dusk in December, the air was still humid. 
     Keny's driver returned around 7 p.m. with tools, but couldn't 
     fix the car. Keny planned to spend the night on the side of 
     the road and at dawn walk back to Juba. He lay down in the 
     brush, careful not to wrinkle the dress shirt and slacks he 
     had put on for the reunion.
       Keny was comforted that he at least had company: Some of 
     his cousins, who met him at the bus station in Juba, agreed 
     to wait until another ride could be arranged.
       Around midnight, Keny's fortunes turned. A Somali trader 
     came upon him and agreed to drive him to Kalthok. As he 
     braced himself for potholes that shook the vehicle, Keny 
     tried to piece together fragmented memories of his youth.
       ``Will I remember anyone in the village? Will I remember 
     the places I used to know? Is life still the same as when I 
     left? All those questions were on my mind,'' Keny said.
       Although the trip was only 55 miles, the roads were in such 
     poor condition that Keny arrived in Kalthok at 5 a.m. It was 
     Christmas morning. He was exhausted and hoped to find 
     somewhere to sleep, but he found the entire village had 
     stayed up waiting for him in the church.
       ``They were singing and dancing and praying for us, because 
     they heard we had car trouble,'' Keny said.
       At 8 a.m., Kalthok's villagers held a welcome ceremony. 
     Keny said he recognized only a few faces, his maternal and 
     paternal uncles. But all the village elders remembered him.
       ``They said, `You look just like you did when you left,' '' 
     he recalled. ``There was a lot of emotional reaction. They 
     talked about my family, my mom and my dad.''
       Keny stood at the front of the sanctuary to greet the 
     hundreds of villagers who came to see him. After daybreak 
     they took him around Kalthok, but Keny couldn't pick out any 
     landmarks.
       He asked his cousins to take him to a lake with a waterfall 
     he remembered from childhood. From there he looked back 
     toward the village, and memories came back to him. He was 
     able to point out his uncles' houses.
       ``They said, `Yes, you now know. You recognize this place,' 
     '' Keny said.
       Instead of having Keny stay in one of his uncles' homes, 
     villagers arranged for him to sleep in the church. Each 
     evening for the three weeks he was in Kalthok, villagers set 
     up tents and slept outside the church to be closer to their 
     returned son. Keny said many were surprised he came back 
     after settling into a prosperous life in the U.S.
       ``They thought I would never go back, because I don't have 
     a living parent anymore,'' Keny said. ``But they still 
     believe I belong to the village.''
       Keny had another reason to return to Kalthok, beside 
     visiting relatives. He wanted to ensure success of the local 
     clinic the Sudan Development Foundation, a Burlington 
     nonprofit, helped fund. The clinic is vital to Kalthok, Keny 
     said. In South Sudan, some villages are more than 100 miles 
     from a hospital. South Sudan's infrastructure is so poor this 
     can mean several days of traveling on foot.
       Keny returned to Vermont in mid-January. He said leaving 
     his uncles and cousins was difficult, but his visa expired 
     after 30 days.


                         Straddling two worlds

       The son of Kalthok said he is unsure if he will ever move 
     back to South Sudan. Keny wants to help Kalthok and keep the 
     clinic operational. He worries war will come again to the 
     village.
       ``I see myself living in two worlds, here and South 
     Sudan,'' he said. ``I want to help my people in any form they 
     need. If I ever get married, maybe I would bring my wife 
     over.''
       Keny talks to his uncles regularly. A consequence of war, 
     inflation has made staple goods too expensive for many 
     villagers. A drought has raised the prospect of crop failure.
       ``This month they are supposed to cultivate, but there is 
     no rain,'' he said, referring to May.
       Keny wants to help his countrymen and -women in Vermont. 
     More than 150 Sudanese have resettled in Burlington since the 
     late 1990s, and many have started families here. Keny said 
     the small community rents out local halls and churches to 
     meet and celebrate holidays such as South Sudan's 
     Independence Day.
       Keny hopes to help lease or purchase a permanent home to 
     aid local Sudanese in preserving their culture. He said 
     parents are concerned children will forget tribal languages 
     when they speak English outside the home.
       Keny reflects on what his life would have been like if he 
     never had the opportunity to immigrate to the United States. 
     If he stayed in South Sudan, Keny believes he likely would 
     have been killed in the war or conscripted into the army. He 
     said he feels blessed to have been given the chance to start 
     a new life here, because so many Sudanese never had that 
     option.
       ``It gave me the chance to look at the world differently,'' 
     he said. ``I have people who support me, and even though I do 
     not yet have a college degree, I feel I've learned enough to 
     help myself and help my people.''
       Keny often thinks of his brothers and parents. In their 
     memory, he wants to make the most of opportunities he now 
     has.
       ``You have this feeling that for the rest of your life, 
     you're going to be living knowing that you don't have someone 
     you'd be taking care of,'' he said. ``I just want to make 
     sure I live a better life, and live it in a peaceful way.''

                          ____________________