“Universal language” raises funds for fresh water in Sudan

Nick Bonadies

Spectrum Editor

The Capital Ale House this Sunday played host to a group of artists hoping to bring clean water to a Sudanese village.

“Band Together for the Well” – a combination art exhibit, music concert and spoken word performance – was organized by United Families for Sudan, a nonprofit organization co-founded by VCU graduate and native Sudanese Awer Bul.

Bul, one of the tens of thousands of the “Lost Boys of Sudan” driven from their homes and families in the Second Sudanese Civil War, emigrated to the United States at age seventeen. Since earning his degree in Kinetic Imaging with a minor in Painting & Printmaking from VCUarts in 2009, Bul has endeavored to give back to his homeland through the proceeds of his artwork and the fundraising efforts of United Families for Sudan, co-founded with his former American host family.

Besides a freshwater well for Bul’s village of Wangulei, United Families for Sudan hopes to build an adequate schoolhouse and provide training for teachers. “Each night thousands of young girls and boys go to sleep without any foreseeable future, without clean water and without food or parents,” says Bul on his website, awerbul.net. “The children need hope and I […] have made it my mission to improve the lives of these children.”

The exhibit this Sunday stood against a musical backdrop ranging from local singer-songwriters to traditional middle eastern belly dancers. Vivid earth tones flanked Capital Ale House’s exposed brick walls, playing against hauntingly expressive faces rendered in deep woodblock-like lines. Bul’s work, with its focus on narrative and dreamlike pastel execution, possessed an almost storybook quality.

Bul commented in an interview with the Commonwealth Times that his art had centered on storytelling from the very beginning. At the refugee camp in Kakuma, he said, an American aid worker would often try to talk to Bul and his friends as they played football. “Being that I didn’t know much English, I could not communicate real well,” Bul said. “So I started to draw things in the ground. He [the aid worker] asked me if I could do more.

“He gave me art supplies, and told me that if I could illustrate the life of the ‘Lost Boys,’ and what we had encountered, that would be great.” This first work in a “traditional” medium was a canvas divided into nine panels, recounting Bul’s own torturous journey from Wangulei. After showing Bul’s work to the officials at the United Nations office, the aid worker asked Bul “if I wanted to come to the U.S. – and of course I told him ‘yeah.’ So for me, art really was ‘the way.'”

Bul enrolled in VCUarts immediately after finishing high school. The decision to study and pursue visual art “was immediate, in my mind,” he said. “I knew right away that’s what I would use to communicate. Art was a universal language for me, and for all the communities around the world.”

Every art piece sold the afternoon of “Band Together,” as well as each $10 ticket, would go directly toward bringing the well and other aid efforts to the people of Wangulei. Bul says his mission to give back to his home stems not out of obligation but “thankfulness and compassion,” and the belief that no child should have to suffer “the way of life many Sudanese, even today, still have to endure.”

On his own visits to Sudan, however, Bul says his preferred aid method is more personal: he brings the village’s children art supplies. “I want to let them deliver the messages over the canvas, as I did,” he says – “and also to deliver a reality that has not been recorded.”

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United Families for Sudan is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization “dedicated to promoting education, health care and economic development in Southern Sudan.” For more information on Awer Bul and United Families for Sudan, visit their websites at www.awerbul.net and www.unitedfamiliesforsudan.org.