South Sudan’s lost generation comes home
On the first anniversary of South Sudan’s independence, we are supporting people who have returned to the country as they slowly rebuild their lives.
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“There was bombing and shelling, soldiers. My children kept saying, ‘What’s happening?’” Nyanareng, a 28-year-old mother of four, didn’t have time for long explanations when violence struck Abyei, a disputed border town between Sudan and South Sudan. She just told her children to run.
“We walked five days on foot. We’d dig in the ground for water,” she said. It was May 2011, and hot in the bush. Her children survived. But her mother died of exhaustion.
“We weren’t allowed to bury my mother in Touralei, so we came here, to Agok.”
Returning to the south
South Sudanese have often been the people nobody wants. Sometimes they’re shuffled from refugee camps to way-stations to transit areas. Or they’re targets, running from bombs and bullets, trying not to get separated from their children or wives or husbands.
After a decades-long civil war, South Sudan is now its own country, a nation getting its people back. A huge fraction of the population are “returnees,” people sent back from camps in neighbouring countries or those who voluntarily came back to their homeland, tired of being second-class citizens elsewhere because of race or religion.
But right now, many returnees have nowhere to go and no way to earn a living. In Agok, where most of Abyei’s citizens fled, more than 120,000 people live in small thatched huts on dusty, sunbaked bushland. In the capital, Juba, 8000 people wait in a transit camp, not sure if they can find relatives who will take them in.
Working with a local priest
In places where returnees have nothing, we are working with our local partners to distribute emergency items and shelter materials. “Everyone scattered” when the violence in Abyei began, remembers Maria Maluke, who now lives in Agok. “My husband and two men ran in one direction. The children and I ran in another.” Maria saw her older sister and three-year-old niece die as the family tried to escape, and searched eight days for her own husband before learning he was killed.
As thousands of families slept outside, our partners worked with a local priest, Father Biong Kwol, providing aid. “Father Biong gave us plastic sheeting, kangas [cloth], soap, and mosquito nets,” says Maria.
Volunteers
At the Juba transit camp, our partner provides shelter in other ways. “The International Organisation for Migration [IOM] called us up and said, ‘We need volunteers, how many can you get?’” says Ilse Simma, coordinator for our partner Caritas Juba.
Caritas Juba reached out to local churches and, within an hour, mobilised volunteers to construct large tents for busloads of returnees that IOM flew to Juba from Khartoum.
“Our brothers and sisters in Khartoum have been suffering a lot,” said Caritas volunteer Gismala Gift. “When they came here, we sang to them. They feel they are welcome. Some of them cried because they are seeing South Sudan.”
Many returnees draw strength from their faith. “It was difficult,” said Nyanareng, remembering both her mother’s death and then the near-famine her family survived last fall. “But we trust in God.”
“If not for God I don’t know how we would have made it here,” said Bernadette Wani. She and her family reached the Juba transit camp in May 2012 after enduring a year at a waystation for Sudan’s unwanted. “We’re rejected by these people, but God won’t reject us.”
A longer version of this article, by Laura Sheahen, first appeared on the Caritas International website.
