MARK WAITE / PVT Valley Electric Association supervisor Dave Valdes and lineman Bobby Ball stand in front of a home-painted flag of the southern Sudan given to Valdes on a previous trip in 2005. Special to the PVT Dave Valdes helps a Sudanese man install power lines in Yei. Advertisement

Valley Electric Association lineman Bobby Ball has never been out of the country before.

The three-year VEA employee, however, has a truly exotic but potentially satisfactory experience ahead of him when he departs Saturday to take part in a project extending power lines to a small village in the southernmost part of the Sudan.

Ball departs by plane from Las Vegas to Minneapolis across the Atlantic Ocean to Amsterdam, then down to Entebbe Airport in Uganda, in central Africa. There won't be any immigration formalities after flying on a three-hour missionary flight from Uganda into the Sudan. They'll travel via the back door after clearing customs and immigration in Uganda.

Ball follows the example set by Dave Valdes, VEA superintendent of operations, who spent 34 days in Yei, training a six-man local crew while stringing up a primary distribution line in January 2005.

"When you leave Uganda you've vanished into the world. There's no customs, there's no check-in. You land at the little dirt airport outside of Yei. They pick you up in a pickup and away you go," Valdes said.

The very mention of the Sudan may lead some Americans to shudder. There is the disastrous famine and war in Darfur province.

Valdes said the Sudan is a huge country, the largest in area in Africa, and Darfur is about as far away from Yei (pronounced like "Yay") as Alabama is from Pahrump. But Yei is located in Equatoria province, a black African, Christian region where the Sudan People's Liberation Army had fought a lengthy civil war with the mostly Moslem north, until a peace treaty was signed in 2003.

Ball will work with five other members of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association from other parts of the country, helping to rebuild the region's infrastructure, ravaged by war and poverty. He returns to the U.S. Feb. 3. His travel expenses are being paid by the NRECA.

Ball's crew will build a primary and secondary phase line that will bring power to a village of about 200 people, just outside Yei. They will install about a mile and a half of line, make service drops and install meter connections to about 30 homes. They may have the joy of seeing people with power for the first time.

"I was fortunate enough to see the pictures Dave had. So I knew when I had seen those, I'd probably never have the opportunity to help somebody like that," Ball said.

The upcoming trip required Ball to get a whole pile of shots: inoculations against yellow fever, typhoid, hepatitis A and B, meningitis. Ball received a last minute email with a list of tools he needs to bring.

Valdes was able to give Ball plenty of advice about the trip. The crew that worked before Valdes arrived in Yei in 2005 installed a distribution line to power street lights in the main part of town. Locals had a party to celebrate that event.

"Since I left, they've since built a substation and energized the distribution system. They've added electrical systems to the stores that grind wheat, the bars, grocery stores, places like that so they can refrigerate," Valdes said.

The experience wasn't too much culture shock for Valdes, who traveled to the Dominican Republic once before after a hurricane.

"The (Sudanese) guys we worked with were just sponges, real sponges. They wanted to learn everything that you showed them. Some of them did speak English. So it was all a matter of visuals, showing them how to do something," Valdes said.

There's no mechanization, everything is done by hand, Valdes said -- from digging the post holes, setting the posts to stringing the wire. Mango trees that stood in the way of the power line were cut down by hand.

Valdes said he'd love to go back with Ball, but a back injury keeps him from doing any heavy lifting.

Though it's primitive, Valdes said the work isn't that much different from when he first came to work for VEA 32 years ago when there wasn't a lot of equipment available. He equated it to repairing damage after a storm where it's hard to get to places and everything has to be done by hand.

The city of Juba has now taken over the role of Yei as the main commercial center in the south. Valdes said he traveled with a group delivering a truck to an NRECA member in Juba. It was only 95 miles away but a journey that took all day on dirt roads. They passed an abandoned tank at one point with signs warning of mines just off the road.

"My sister's scared to death. But whatever happens is meant to be. I could be sitting in this room or I could be over there. I don't worry about that kind of stuff," Ball said.

A sizeable group of volunteers from various countries has descended on Yei to help make the community an economic center as it was when the British ruled the Sudan, Valdes said. The locals want to be separate from the north but are tired of the many years of war and want peace, he said.

Volunteers did a little extra work in the community besides their regular duties with the NRECA, like rehabilitating a building they stayed in that had been destroyed in the civil war and extending power to a water pump so residents didn't have to pump water by hand.

Ball will be on the VEA payroll while he's over in the Sudan. The cooperative heartily endorses Ball's humanitarian venture.

"We're very supportive because it's helping another country," VEA spokeswoman Staci Behnke said. "It's community service no matter if it's our community or somebody else's."

"When you're done -- what an amazing feeling of accomplishment," Valdes said.

Valdes said he left just about everything he brought to the Sudan with the villagers, including hand tools, lots of clothes, even his VEA work shirt.

Asked what he learned from the experience, Valdes said, "Every person in the U.S. who has a gripe about everything should go over and spend one week with these people. The poorest people in this country have no complaints."