As part of Welcome to Our Worlds (WOW) week, Dr. Gatluak Thach, President and CEO of the Nashville International Center for Empowerment, was a featured guest speaker in Swang 110 on Tuesday.
The event was sponsored by the Office of Intercultural Development, SGA and the African Student Association. Thach spent his presentation discussing “South Sudan Today” and worked to answer the question “Where are the lost boys of Sudan?”
“Education is important,” he said. “I was a child who fought war at age six. What we do today will change tomorrow.
“Education opens doors. Save yourself and your community; save the country and the world. If I didn’t have the education I have today, I would not be able to do what I am doing.”
South Sudenese by nationality, Thach came to America as a refugee over twenty years ago. As a child, he was kidnapped from a camp by a rebel army and forced to be a child soldier for several years. Eventually he escaped camp, along with his younger brother, and fled the region while becoming members of the “Lost Boys of Sudan.”
“At one point I almost lost my life,” Thach said.
The Lost Boys of Sudan was over 20,000 boys of the Nuer and Dinka ethnic groups who were displaced or orphaned during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005). Over two million were killed and millions were displaced.
The name “Lost Boys of Sudan” was colloquially used by aid workers in the refugee camps where the boys resided in Africa. The term was revived, as children fled the post-independence violence of South Sudan during 2011–2013.
Thach also said that he received no formal education until arriving in the United States, but everyone should take advantage of the education that is offered in America in order to have a better quality of life.
“The education that people here are taking for granted, there are people dying day and night to have just a piece of the chance to obtain,” Thach said. “It was not easy adjusting to life in America and the culture. I enrolled myself in college. I worked two jobs and went to school full-time to support myself and my brother.”
In 2014, Dr. Thach earned a PhD in Organizational Leadership with an emphasis on Strategic Planning from Argosy University in Nashville, Tenn. He eventually started tutoring other refugees and helping them to reunite with lost family members.
“We found out shortly that they [refugees] also wanted see how to navigate the system and access services that they didn’t have,” he said. “In addressing that, we came up with what was originally called Sudanese Community and Women’s Services Center, which is today called Nashville International Center for Empowerment or N.I.C.E.”
According to Thach, the goal of N.I.C.E. is to empower refugees and immigrants, provide vibrant leadership, build strong community relationships, provide sustainable service programs, create a respectful resource center and develop robust networking partnerships in Middle Tennessee and across the country.
“After graduating college, I found myself thinking about how I could help the community that I found myself from,” he said. “It was challenging, because I did not initially have enough resources, but I could not turn my back on them.”
N.I.C.E. Programs include adult refugee education, refugee resettlement programs, reconnecting lost family members of refugees, medical assistance and social services programs.
“We are in one world,” Thach said. “What happens in another part of the world can happen here. We are humans. Any human suffering is our suffering. The world is global. We are connected in many ways.”
Thach will be the featured speaker at the Gathering in Allen Arena on Thursday.
For more information about the NICE program, visit the organization’s website.