By David Harry

Staff Writer

Helping build a school in a war-ravaged country is a story that can tug at heartstrings.

Next Thursday at 7 p.m., 10 Scarborough High School students will provide music to the story with a benefit concert at Winslow Homer Auditorium to benefit Village Help for South Sudan.

The $5 admission price (additional donations are welcomed) will help Sudanese refugees Franco Majok and Bol Riiny build a school in Riiny’s native village of Theou.

Majok, founder of Village Help for South Sudan, said the village is so tiny it doesn’t appear on maps and is quite similar to his native village of Wanlung, where the struggle to survive can be all-consuming.

He helped organize the nonprofit in 2005 to help his southern Sudanese compatriots overcome three decades of war.

Children in Theou attend classes outdoors – not uncommon in Sudan, Majok said. In Wanlung, children can attend school indoors, because Majok raised money to help build a school. 

Majok arrived in America in 1998 when Lutheran Community Services helped bring him to Lynn, Mass. He credits his education with keeping him alive.

Knowing how to read maps helped him escape southern Sudan when civil war broke out more than 25 years ago, he said. Majok took night classes to finish high school while he worked in the capital of Khartoum in the north, and he eventually fled to Egypt. Knowing how to fill out a visa application allowed him to get to America.

“Education is the big piece, it is how I saved myself,” Majok said.

After arriving in Massachusetts, Majok became a caseworker for Lutheran Community Services, and met Riiny when he arrived in 2000.

Riiny had spent about 13 years in refugee camps before coming to America as an unaccompanied minor. He graduated high school in 2004 and college in 2008. Scarborough High School gifted and talented program teacher Elizabeth Spaulding said his visit last year provided the impetus for next week’s concert.

“Bol personalized the experience when he talked last year,” Spaulding said, and his plea for help to build a school resonated with her students. She said Majok and Riiny will both attend the concert and speak more about conditions in southern Sudan.

Aileen Andrews, who will sing two Broadway songs and “Over the Rainbow” from “The Wizard of Oz,” said she is aware of the disparity of conditions between here and Sudan.

“Here we sit in this massive climate-controlled building,” she said. “I think we overlook a lot of things.”

Andrews, who starred in the fall production of the musical “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” is one of the few concert performers who has played on the stage of Winslow Homer Auditorium.

Others, including classically trained cellist Harim Park, pianist Jiachang Xiang and violinist Kevin Cai, will make Scarborough High School stage debuts at the concert. They’ve also performed in student orchestra productions at Merrill Auditorium in Portland.

The musicians have chosen favored classical pieces to play, most as solo performances.

Xiang said the cause he is supporting next week heightens his desire to play at school.

“I want to put on an impressive show,” he said.

The struggle for basic subsistence in southern Sudan stands out for Cai.

“They struggle just to get water and have no time or energy to get anything else,” he said.

Majok said the primitive conditions can and have been improved in his native country.

“It is hard to explain, these are remote villages like the 1600s or 1700s. But now there is a school, market and a source of water,” he said of his home village of Wanlung. “There is hope and change.”

Staff writer David Harry can be reached at 282-4337, ext. 219