THE JOK FAMILY
The Joks are refugees of a long and brutal civil war that has changed the trajectory of their lives, like many Sudanese in Edmonton. The Republic of Sudan has been a place of brutal fighting since it achieved independence on Jan. 1, 1956. The genocide in Darfur, for instance, has been called one of the worst humanitarian crises of this century, and two long civil wars in Southern Sudan have killed an estimated 2.5 million and displaced some 4 million, including the Joks.
After a long, dangerous journey out of the country via Ethiopia, where Jok and his oldest son Benjamin were recruited to train with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the family eventually settled in 1989 in Cuba, where they learned Spanish. In 1997, they came to Canada with the help of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, settling first in Red Deer and then Edmonton, where the Sudanese community has strengthened over the past decade or so.
The younger Joks began school while their parents, Jok (the name the father goes by) and Mary, got settled. After a year, support money from the Canadian government stopped, and Jok, who is trained as a teacher and was a headmaster of a school in Sudan, went on welfare briefly. Then, with Apiu, who was 25, Jok went from one often menial job to another as if they were running a marathon they could never complete. As Jim Gurnett, a social activist who worked with new immigrants when he was executive director at the Mennonite Centre for Newcomers says about the situation of many immigrants, “Our view is that you should always try to get people the highest job you can for them. Never let people settle for what I call ‘dead-end jobs.’”
The family struggled to get by, often taking such dead-end jobs. Jok eventually found a position at Catholic Social Services (CSS) but quickly learned that he couldn’t get a mortgage to buy a house, so he took a permanent but lower-paying position with CSS and then, to boost the chances of a higher salary, signed up for skills training. All the while, he worked overtime to make enough money to cover the mortgage payments. “Sometimes I would sleep there,” he recalls. “I’d do overnights. Sometimes I would work during the day. I put in lots of hours.”
Meanwhile, the children struggled with a new culture, new friends and a new education system. Here is the story of sisters Monica and Nyibol, along with the perspective of their father, Jok. NEXT: Nyibol’s story…
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