Buey Ray Tut's early years were spent in a deadly civil war and in a mud house with no running water or electricity.
Never did the Sudanese boy who could claim no book of his own imagine that someday he'd be on a government board overseeing 12 public libraries with a million books and other learning materials.
But at age 23, Tut, who came to the U.S. with his family when he was about 10, is the newest member of the Omaha Public Library Board.
With Tut's library position came another distinction: He's the first among Omaha's Sudanese refugees to be appointed to a city government board.
“He is a role model that says ‘can do, can do, can do,' ” said Mayor Jim Suttle, who invited the recent college graduate to serve in the unpaid library post through mid-2012.
Sudanese community leader Malakal Goak said the mayor's selection will go far in showing the refugee population that “we are accepted and therefore part of this good community.”
From Africa to Omaha, Tut's ascent is not only a testament to hard work and role models, it reflects the evolution of one of the state's newest populations and is an example of how Sudanese refugees are becoming ingrained in the city.
When Tut came to Omaha in the late 1990s, his family was part of a wave that would make this city home to one of the largest Sudanese populations in the country.
The Tuts originally were resettled by the federal government in Tennessee but soon moved to Minnesota. The cold proved too much for Tut's dad, though, so John R. Tut again relocated his wife, Workenish Admasu, and their five sons to Omaha, where a newer and fast-growing Sudanese population was settling.
Work was plentiful then. Omaha even had a community center that catered to the needs of the southern Sudanese.
The Tuts landed at the now-demolished Wintergreen Park Apartments. To a youth like Buey, however, the 213-unit, crime-plagued complex in north Omaha seemed a little like its own war zone.
“It was rough,” Tut recalled.
Not many weeks passed without someone picking a fight with him. He and other Sudanese kids who had moved there looked different. They spoke a different language, ate different food.
Tut was once threatened with a knife. Once with a gun. His dad was nearly struck by wayward gunfire from a drug dealer aiming for someone else.
Reflecting back, Tut still thinks his newcomer status made him a target but knows now the violence and social ills were fueled by deeper issues.
“It was the environment.”
Despair enveloped the high-crime pocket where role models were scarce and violence and truancy ran rampant. (The Tuts moved around 2005, when Buey went to college; the city demolished the complex in 2006.)
While they lived there, though, Tut found refuge and motivation in his mom and dad as they doted on their sons. Dad loaded trucks; mom bused tables at a restaurant.
“We never felt at-risk or poor.”
Tut found an escape in the Boy Scouts. Lyn Graves, scoutmaster of Troop 33, would take him and other Sudanese youngsters, including good buddy Jacob Khol, to meetings.
Scouting put Tut on a whole new trajectory.
He got to go to Thailand for a World Scout Jamboree. He became an Eagle Scout, then an assistant scoutmaster helping inner-city youths.
A church friend, Don Royer, helped Tut fill out paperwork that opened the door to college. He ran track at Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa, before transferring to the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Tut graduated in December with a political science degree. He also was student body vice president, captain of the debate team and worked a summer as an intern for Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb.
Now he gets paid as a district executive for the Boys Scouts to raise funds and recruit.
While Tut loves and appreciates Omaha, he thinks often of the war-torn homeland he escaped as a child. His family fled to neighboring Ethiopia from southern Sudan.
Indeed, it was a relief project idea that Tut developed for Africa that put him in the path of Mayor Suttle.
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Suttle was in the audience last December when Tut was honored by the Midlands Business Journal as an outstanding entrepreneur under age 40.
The mayor was impressed with Tut's initiative in starting Aqua-Africa Inc.
Co-founded with Khol in 2006, the project aims to provide safe drinking water to impoverished villages of Sudan and eastern Africa.
Tut and Khol have made two planning trips to Africa. Next year, Aqua-Africa plans to start drilling five drinking wells in the city of Langabu. Tut and his board will educate natives about how to maintain the safe water supply.
Eventually, in 10 or 15 years, Tut wants to move back to where his life began. Peace accords have been signed in Sudan. The country is trying to rebuild.
Tut, who has spent more years in America than in Africa, said he feels an “obligation to give back.”
“I don't want Sudan to be thought of as ‘that place,' with a negative connotation,” said Tut, who envisions helping Sudan grow its transportation and communications systems.
Until then, he hopes to hone his leadership and business skills. He serves on Omaha's Southern Sudan Community Association board and performs other volunteer work to help integrate his community members into their adopted city.
Many economic and social challenges face the local Sudanese. Their population numbers here have dropped since the peak period, said both Tut and Goak. Today, Goak estimates the Nebraska population to be as many as 12,000 to 15,000, with most living in Omaha.
Several families have moved to Alaska and states in the Northwest, attracted to better-paying fishing jobs and social benefits.
But compared with African counterparts, Tut said, the local Sudanese people are moving forward.
Tut's brothers are examples. The oldest opened a restaurant in Lincoln. Another attends Wayne State. His 16-year-old twin brothers are active in high school and in Scouting.
Some in the Sudanese community are buying homes. More are professionals, and more are graduating from Omaha Public Schools, playing varsity sports and serving as student leaders, said Susan Mayberger, an administrator who has watched the population mature.
There is a slight upward trend, school officials say, in the number of Sudanese kids getting scholarships to college. Today, half the number of Sudanese kids need English-language assistance as in the early 2000s.
Now that most Sudanese dads and many moms speak English, Mayberger said, the OPS Sudanese liaison's job has evolved from solely interpreting in 1998 to setting up college visits and plugging families into services used by all populations.
More Sudanese leaders are becoming ordained ministers — a big sign, Goak said, that roots here are extending.
Tut said the library board can be a vehicle to further integration.
Already, Tut has had a hand in shaping a video set to come out soon for populations that have not been traditional library users, said Library Director Gary Wasdin. The marketing tool will come in eight languages and introduce concepts like checking out and borrowing books.
Though Tut still is trying to grasp the inner workings of the library system, which last year recorded 2.2 million visits and 990,000 computer sessions, he said a basic understanding guides him:
Public libraries are critical, especially to newcomer and poor populations, and many are not accessing the services.
“If people have to jump through two or three hoops to get information, the vast majority won't do it,” Tut said. “We have to make it as easy as possible.”
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The trilingual Tut doesn't mind being known as the “first” Sudanese appointment to a city board. But he credits role models with extending him opportunities.
“You either take them or you don't.”
(Tut speaks Nuer, the language of his southern Sudan tribe; Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia; and English. Fluency in all three has helped him build bridges to Africa, as well as among groups in Omaha.)
If his role with the Scouts, Aqua-Africa and the library board are signs that the Sudanese community is gaining better position to influence the city, then Tut said he is glad.
“People have been good to us and now it's time for us to take that step — put an imprint.”
Contact the writer:
444-1224, cindy.gonzalez@owh.com
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