After a giddy, four-hour van trip from Western Pennsylvania, six southern Sudanese men on Sunday finally got to make the vote they had been waiting for for five years.

"I have voted for separation," Benedict Killang of Castle Shannon said over the din of celebratory voters in a phone interview from Alexandria, Va., where he voted Sunday in the referendum to split the majority of Sudan into two countries.

"This is a historic moment not only for me, but my countrymen, because we have paid a price for this and we have to make sure it happens," he said.

The voting by expatriates like Mr. Killang was set in motion by the peace accords reached in 2005 between the Islamic, Arab north of Sudan, which includes the capital of Khartoum, and the largely Christian and black African south, which claims the city of Juba as its capital. The vote does not resolve the issue of the western Sudanese region of Darfur.

The voting that began Sunday continues until Friday at eight voting centers around the United States -- which is why Mr. Killang and his friends had to drive four hours to vote.

Mr. Killang, 41, who is from Juba, is an operations specialist at PNC who has lived in the Pittsburgh area for nine years since fleeing southern Sudan after the war between the north and south escalated. He spent several months in refugee camps in Nigeria before being relocated to Western Pennsylvania.

He has since married and has a 7-year-old daughter, to whom he tried to explain the importance of the day before he left Sunday morning.

"Of course she doesn't really understand, but this is an important day for her, too," he said.

At least 15 other former southern Sudanese from the Pittsburgh region also registered to vote weeks ago and traveled to Alexandria to vote on Sunday, part of more than 8,000 south Sudanese expected to vote in the referendum this week.

The line to vote in a vacant office space in the Old Town section of Alexandria began forming before dawn, said Ivy Pendleton, a spokeswoman for the International Organization for Migration, which helped organize the Sudanese expatriate vote this week.

"It's absolutely phenomenal," she said by cell phone from the scene Sunday morning. "The lines haven't stopped, and they wrap around the block."

As they stood in line, the joyous voters sang, cheered and held signs marking the impending independence, she said.

By the time Mr. Killang and his friends arrived after 3 p.m., the line had thinned considerably, but inside the voting room, hundreds of Sudanese continued to mingle, hugging, talking and taking pictures of each other, he said.

"It's all very exciting here," he said.

In all, about 500 Sudanese live the Pittsburgh region, said David Rosenberg, an organizer for the Pittsburgh Darfur Emergency Coalition, which has been trying to draw the Pittsburgh region's attention to the plight of the people in Darfur for six years.

He said he hopes solving the north-south conflict in Sudan might also lead to a solution for Darfur, maybe even its own move to separate.

The few Darfur residents who live in Western Pennsylvania "are both admiring and envious of the south Sudanese," said Mr. Rosenburg, who did not travel to Alexandria. "They would also like to wrest their grip of their country there and build a country of their own."