RUMBEK, Sudan -- Wearing a bright orange jersey and baggy jeans, Riang Thian, 27, sauntered into a thatch-roofed bar and made a request in his acquired Tennessee twang.
"Ya'll have high-speed Internet?" the recently returned refugee asked, getting only blank looks in response. "Oh man," he said, "my country needs a lot of work."
With peace in place after a 21-year civil war and the discovery of oil in the region, southern Sudan, one of the poorest places in Africa, suddenly has the potential to become one of the richest. It is luring home people such as Thian and galvanizing veterans of its long guerrilla war. As a new society emerges, roads and schools are being built, and the Internet is not far behind.
Thian left Sudan nine years ago, fleeing across the border to Ethiopia and eventually reaching the United States. There, he finished school and worked as a baggage manager at a Tennessee airport, saving money and hoping to return home.
He made it back this summer, but when he arrived, Thian found a devastated region where land mines blocked him from returning to his childhood village, 200 miles from this regional capital.
Even in Rumbek, desperate people tugged on his trendy clothes, begging for food. The depressing scene seemed far from the optimistic stories of peace he had read in the United States. With a bachelor's degree in aerospace administration from Middle Tennessee State University, Thian was offered a job instantly -- but he found it just as disorienting as his return.
"They asked me to be air traffic controller!" he bellowed, sweating under the pounding sun. "I was like, 'Dang, I don't really know how to do that.' But they will train me, so I was like, 'Okay, whatever.' "
Thian's willingness to take a chance embodies the general mood in postwar southern Sudan, where the stakes for millions of people are as high as their hopes.
More than 2,000 Sudanese professionals have returned from East Africa and the West since the north-south peace accord was signed in January. They include businessmen, college professors and basketball players, as well as recent graduates hoping to land a job. Some have reunited with family members; others, like Thian, have moved into tent-hotels set up by an American firm.
"We're not talking about reconstruction. We are talking about total construction. The U.N. has never undertaken anything like this," said David Gressly, the head of U.N. operations in southern Sudan. "The opportunities here are tremendous. But so are some of the risks."
On July 31, just weeks after Thian returned, John Garang, the leader of the southern rebel movement and key architect of the peace deal, died in a helicopter crash, causing concern that the shaky agreement would collapse.
Thian said he prayed when he heard the news and then unwound in his tent, spinning hip-hop songs on his CD player. But rioting soon broke out in the capital, Khartoum, and in the southern city of Juba, pitting Muslim northerners against Christian and animist southerners.
