MURRAY Ky.
Gabriel Akech Kwai was 7 years old when his father was murdered in Northern Sudan. His home country was then divided during a civil war that eventually forced him to travel with the 33,000 other Lost Boys of Sudan to Ethiopia and later to a Kenyan refugee camp.
Kwai, who has lived in the United States for six years, considers himself lucky. So lucky that Kwai has established Women’s Educational Empowerment Project for Southern Sudan to help educate and empower women, bringing the educational gap that exists in the northern and southern regions of his homeland.
“This is where my dreams lie,” Kwai, a Murray State senior, said in a recent interview with the Ledger & Times. “… I learned that children learn a lot from their mothers, and if we educate the women of Sudan, then we help her entire family.”
Born in 1979 in Bor, Kwai was the last born in his family, which included his father and his eight wives as well as their children. Then as a civil war ripped his country and family apart, Kwai walked with the group of parentless boys from Sudan to Ethiopia, where life was particularly difficult the first few months without food until the United Nations provided some relief.
Kwai lived in Ethiopia from 1987 until 1991, when that government ordered the refugees to leave the country within 24 hours. Kwai recalled the devastation of the journey to come: While seeking shelter in Kenya, Ethiopian militias attacked the young refugees, killing 5,000 of them in one day.
“I was one of the luckiest who crossed the border,” said Kwai, who will graduate from Murray State in December with a bachelors degree in finance.
