Palmer man travels to Sudan to help establish juvenile justice system

PALMER — David Salmon’s bags are packed. His passport is in-hand and he’s saying farewell to friends and family he won’t see for the next year, or maybe two.

Salmon is leaves Saturday for a yearlong stint in Juba, South Sudan, Africa, where he will help the fledgling government there create a juvenile justice system.

“It is not often you get the chance to help build a system almost from the ground up,” he said Thursday in a phone interview.

His wife, Hope Salmon, said the opportunity fell into his lap in December just as they were leaving on vacation.

“He interviewed while he was on vacation and had accepted the job before he got back to Alaska,” she said.

She said she’s not nervous about their time apart.

“It’s a really good opportunity for him to get in on the ground floor, so to speak, to help develop a country,” Hope Salmon said.

She said the timing also is good for the family since they have one daughter who lives at home still and she will be 18 in March and on her own soon.

Although South Sudan became an independent country by referendum in 2011, following a civil war that raged from 1983 to 2005, the area is still dangerous, David Salmon said. It’s less dangerous now than before the peace agreement was signed, he said, but his housing will be a small cabin at a security controlled camp outside Juba where about 30 other non-governmental organization workers involved in reconstruction and development also live.

“It has been recommended that I don’t bring family at first,” he said.

At some point during the yearlong stay, Hope said she plans to make the more than 7,000-mile journey to visit her husband on the African continent.

David Salmon will work with the U.S. Department of State, which has a contract with Alutiiq, an Alaska Native Corp., to help establish a juvenile justice system.

“Republic of South Sudan asked our government for help,” Salmon said. “We’re helping establish a rule of law.”

Now juvenile prisoners are held with adult offenders, he said. Salmon will be part of a three-person team, which includes two attorneys already working as legal advisers in Juba.

He said the team will assess the current social work and probation systems and capabilities, mentor South Sudanese officials and develop a plan for system improvement for detained juveniles. Salmon said the plan is to take the restorative model of justice that Alaska uses with some juvenile offenses and help the South Sudan government set it up for use there.

Rather than meting out punishment, he said the restorative justice model focuses on repairing the harm to the victim and community, holding the offender accountable and building competency in the offender and his family to prevent future crime.

“One area of focus will be assuring a speedy hearing and diverting juveniles from the adult prison,” Salmon said.

His professional career is long and varied — from 15 years of service with the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services, to work as a social worker, a juvenile probation officer, as executive director of a nonprofit, to working in a residential sex offender treatment and as a certified project manager. But for much of the past decade, he hasn’t worked directly with kids.

“After having worked with data and research related to kids in the Alaska child protection and juvenile justice systems for the past 10 years, this provides a rare opportunity to resume my direct work with kids, which I’ve missed, while making use of my recent training in project management,” Salmon said.

Before heading to Juba Feb. 2, he said he connected with a Sudanese man living in Anchorage who taught him a few words of the language and said his family would be Salmon’s family while he was in Sudan.

Gabriel Manechok was 11 when his village was attacked and destroyed. He spent five years in a United Nations refuge camp before being relocated to the U.S.

During the civil war, planes would bomb the villages, then men on horseback would ride through and set everything on fire. The men would be killed and the women raped, Salmon said.

He said many young boys escaped because they were off tending their family’s livestock when the villages were attacked.

“Thousands of boys couldn’t go back to their villages,” Salmon said.

Manechok is one of those boys. He’s been back to Sudan to visit, Salmon said. But for now, he lives and works in Anchorage. He’s also sending a couple of laptops with Salmon to Sudan.

Tucked in among his luggage also is a supply of duct tape for quick fixes, Alaska mugs to give as gifts, Crayons for the children and his five-string banjo.

“The banjo came from Africa. I’m hoping it will find some additional relevance over there,” he said.

Contact managing editor Heather A. Resz at 352-2268 or heather.resz@frontiersman.com.