by Susan E. Bentley
It was around the year 2000, when the United Nations began relocating Sudanese people from its vast Kakuma Refugee Camp in the desert of Kenya to the United States and other western countries, that I read in the Roanoke Times about “Lost Boys” arriving in Virginia. Hearing in 2009 that South Sudanese Christians were looking for a place to hold indigenous worship services, I offered St. James Episcopal Church in Roanoke, where I was rector. On Trinity Sunday 2009, I began worshiping with the South Sudanese diaspora, in Arabic and English, on Sunday evenings.
Over my years as chaplain to this diaspora in the Roanoke Valley, I have met many other Sudanese. I helped Sudanese citizens get to the polls for the 2011 referendum on separating South Sudan from Sudan. Whenever I meet a so-called Lost Boy, I ask, “Did you know Marc Nikkel?” Everyone has said with a broad smile, “Yes. I did.”
I felt that I was following in the footsteps of Marc Nikkel. They knew him affectionately as Achuor, “bull elephant.” He was tall, big, and quick, with merry, piercing eyes. They remembered him as a painter, peacemaker, and teacher. He was a one-person seminary, teaching hundreds of Sudanese. Some became pastors, evangelists, and eventually bishops. What impressed them most was his learning the Dinka language, and he undertook a Dinka translation of the New Testament. Marc collected and translated inspired songs of lament and hope arising from the hearts of Dinka Christians enduring the war years beginning in 1983.
Marc died September 3, 2000, of stomach cancer at the age of 50. But through the power of Sudanese peoples’ prayer, Marc lived two years longer than doctors in London and Scotland predicted. Ever the peacemaker, this gift of time allowed Marc, true to his Mennonite heritage, to support a grassroots “People to People” peace process between Nuer and Dinka tribes. Marc died at his childhood home in Reedley, California, wrapped in a family quilt, buried in a wooden box crafted by friends. Marc is now an ancestor in the faith, resting in peace with the two million plus martyrs of the Sudan who have gone before him.
I did not know what a path Marc and the Sudanese were putting me on. My faith has been enriched by being in relationship with those who have suffered greatly and yet have a deeply personal and grounded faith in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
The Reverend Susan E. Bentley is the retired rector of St. James Church in Salem, Virginia, and a member of the Board of AFRECS.