Thomas Lul, a South Sudanese-Canadian physician who was working in Bor during the initial fighting there in mid December, has been commended for staying behind to save lives even as the town was overrun by defected soldiers.
Lul was one of three Canadian-South Sudanese doctors who initially refused to leave the abandoned hospital even as fighting raged toward them.
They performed an emergency cesarean section to save a pregnant woman’s life, then ran and hid as bullets began hitting the hospital.
“That emergency surgery was the last act of a heroic life. A few days later, on Christmas Day, Thomas Lul was killed in crossfire as he ventured out of a United Nations camp,” reported The Globe and Mail, the national Canadian newspaper.
The 45-year-old was killed outside the UN camp where he had taken shelter with his wife, whom he had married only a week before the war.
“All of us cried,” said Mabior Nyuon Bior, another doctor at the Bor hospital who had known Dr. Lul since their childhood in a refugee camp. “He was our brother, our friend. He was a very good guy, very friendly and easy going.”
As reported by the newspaper, Dr. Bior later returned to the same hospital, where he found dead the woman whose life he had helped save when she needed the cesarean operation.
Samaritan’s Purse Canada, the charity that funded Dr. Lul’s work, described him as a “courageous and self-sacrificing man who gave up a peaceful life in Canada to help the impoverished people of his homeland.”
Lul grew up a refugee and was among a group of about 600 youth sent from a refugee camp to Cuba for education. After graduating from medical school there, he was accepted by Canada as a refugee, where he continued working in the medical field until eventually returning to South Sudan.
Photo: Dr. Thomas Lul (Samaritan’s Purse)