30 Days in South Sudan

Writer’s block is one of the most maddening, helpless experiences. Its causes are always tough to put one’s finger on, and there doesn’t seem to be any cure-all to kickstart the creative juices, to give the writing process a helpful nudge in the right direction, or simply to get your fingers to find the adequate combination of our 26 letters to sufficiently convey what one wants to say. I have sat in front of my laptop for the past month trying to write this post, but each day nothing came, just another order of frustration with a side dish of disappointment served with a dollop of rage on top for good measure. In short, it’s a bit of a nightmare.

I returned from South Sudan nearly 5 weeks ago, after having spent nearly a month in-country for work. Unfortunately, the nature of the work is a bit too sensitive to go into too great of detail, but it involved working with children in extremely precarious positions healthwise, and in some pretty remote villages near the country’s northern border. Whilst there, I wrote over 50 typed pages in my journal; the words couldn’t stop coming. Since I’ve returned to India, though, the well has run dry.

Instead of sitting down and sharing the experience, I’ve toiled in thinking about why I’ve found it so difficult to do so. The only real conclusions that I’ve been able to come to are the:

• The emotionally-charged nature of the experience and work. It was no small thing seeing kids in life-or-death situations day-in and day-out, in a place far removed from anything I’d seen before, with the threat of conflict and danger ever-present, surrounded by desolation and famine conditions, and in a space of such abject isolation that we may as well have been on the moon.
• An inherent selfishness. Despite the outward bravado expressed in accepting the responsibility of heading to one of the world’s most unstable and dangerous countries, I was scared out of my wits. It was no easy thing boarding a plane knowing that we were walking into a whole lot of uncertainty, and in a place where most governments, including the United States’, were warning their citizens to stay away due to the threat of violence. I’m proud of myself for doing so, and it seems unfair to share the experience with those unwilling to do the same; sometimes there are things that just don’t want to be let out or shared.
• A fundamental unwillingness to reflect. I’ve never been good at looking back on past events and giving them the mental and emotional space they deserve, especially negative experiences or ones that are difficult to remember. My time in South Sudan was amazing in many ways, and very positive too, but it also left a feeling of hopelessness both in my own abilities to help others and in the state of the world around me. I find myself thinking about some of the kids that we spent time with, and knowing that their reality is at best unchanged, or at worst deteriorating, is overwhelming.
• There’s no way that a simple blog post, or any written word, could ever do justice to what is happening over there. It seems a besmirchment to the people of South Sudan to have some stranger who, for all intents and purposes, only dipped his toes into their experience to even attempt to capture what their daily experience, their reality, is like.

Obviously, by virtue of the fact that you are reading this, the last point was overcome, and in so doing I’ll attempt to do so with the other points as well. Call it a need for catharsis, or in the very least an attempt to get the experience out of my head and into a place and space that facilitates some reflection. Though I spent less than a month in-country, it was had an indelible effect, both positive and negative, and remains something to be grappled with. So without further ado…

Arrival in Juba

We arrived in the capital city Juba midday on a Monday. It was oppressively hot, and the sun was punishing. At the airport, you offload directly onto the tarmac and then walk to the arrival hall, stopping at a World Health Organization tent along the way for various screenings. The walk down the tarmac gives you the first indication at the state of affairs in the country: there are very few commercial planes flying in, but a whole air force of aid transports ranging from massive C-130 cargo planes bearing the World Food Programme logo, down to small-sized helicopters from organizations like Medicins San Frontieres, Unicef, and the like. I got my first taste of the sensitive nature of the state of affairs there when I was caught taking a picture of the WFP plane and a thankfully good-natured soldier stopped me and, smiling, pointed at my camera, shook his head ‘no’, and pantomimed handcuffing me. Welcome to South Sudan indeed.

The arrival hall was little more than an open room, and one that lacked fans let alone air-conditioning. We had to wait in line about 45-minutes to get our visas and were sweat-soaked by the end of it. Following this, everyone had to wait while each individual piece of luggage was unloaded, opened and searched, then marked with a sticker indicating it was okay to take. I had met a bunch of folks on the flight from Dubai to Juba, all seemingly from one aid organization or another, so was able to while away the time in pleasant conversation. After a good hour, we finally got our luggage and away we went.

Juba itself seems half-decent. There’s some infrastructure in terms of roads and electricity, and you see plenty of stores and restaurants. What strikes you the most, though, are the vehicles on the road. They are either military transports, cars adorned with this aid agency or that’s logo, or luxury SUVs and sedans. The latter of which almost certainly belonging to the politicians and generals living the high life off of the country’s oil revenue while their countrymen and women starve to death.

We stayed in one of the city’s hotels that was approved by our client’s security personnel. It was about 300 meters from their office and yet we were given an escort to and from. Evidently, the biggest concern is petty theft, but there’s always the fear of armed conflict breaking out. One of our colleagues told us how two years prior they were trapped on the office compound grounds for 3 days while fighting raged outside. When they were finally able to leave, there were bodies as far as the eye could see.

At the hotel, it was just downright surreal. The food was delicious and served in ample portions. They had beer and alcohol from around the world, and a patio that was packed with people every night. Inside the hotel grounds, you could’ve been anywhere in the world, in any cosmopolitan city. But then you’d walk to the gate and be stopped by guards armed with AK-47s and you’d see the other side, the poverty and desperation, the need.

We had planned to visit the city to document daily life and interact with locals to get a sense of the place. While we ultimately were able to visit a few of the local markets, much of this was curtailed due to security concerns. Pictures and video are strictly forbidden, so we limited taking such to when police and military personnel were nowhere in sight. I did have a quite unsettling experience when caught taking a photo by a group of men, who surrounded me and demanded I delete the image. (One thing I should note is that people in South Sudan are inordinately tall. I’m around 6’2” and was downright lilliputian next to most; it seemed like the average height for people there was about 6’5”, and most were taller).

Before heading to South Sudan, my brother Daniel, who spent over a year in Iraq, gave me some frank advice. He said that I should view this trip as a deployment, and that in any deployment 23 hours and 59 minutes of each day are boring, and that my lone thoughts should be centered around the one minute when it’s not. I often found myself reflecting on that, and there were many times sitting in the hotel’s restaurant when I pictured a bomb going off or armed gunmen seizing the place, as morbid and paranoid as that may sound. You’d find yourself getting lulled into a false sense of security, and it would only take reminding yourself where you are to snap out of it. After all, if anything should go sideways, there should really be no surprise; the quintessential “well, duh” moment.

Transitioning to “the field”

I was happy, then, to get the hell out of Juba after a few days, even though heading into the field carried with it a different, even greater set of anxiety. It was oddly reminiscent of heading into the slums in India for the first time, fraught with that equal sense of dread and excitement; like cresting to the top of a rollercoaster, there’s no turning back, and a big part of you doesn’t want to anyways.

We took a UN Humanitarian Air Services jet, which stopped at several towns along the way. We flew relatively low for a plane trip, only going about 12,000 feet above the ground. This afforded us great views of the countryside, which were an incredible reminder of where we are and the challenges the country is facing: there is virtually nothing out there. Mile after mile, all you’d see, at most, were a few villages here and there, maybe a dirt track acting as a road, and scorched Earth, which I hoped then, and still do now, stemmed from farmers employing the slash-and-burn technique and not something far more nefarious.

The flying time all-in was less than a few hours. We’d fly for 20–30 minutes before landing again, and each location was more and more remote along the way. Unfortunately, we’re not at liberty to divulge the names of the places, but the first was a reasonably-sized town, and the airport had a tarmac runway. Each stop thereafter would feture a dirt or laterite runway carved into the countryside with huts visible on the periphery and not much else. There were wrecked planes on the sides of the runways in every stop. Folks would just drag them to the side with tractors or whatever other machinery was available to allow additional aircraft continued use of the runway. As distressing as this was, it paled in comparison to the stories we’d hear about how, in years prior, one would be greeted with dead bodies instead of airplane carcasses.

When we reached our final destination, there was no airport per se, just a dirt-floored building of sorts constructed out of tin sheer typically used for roofing. SUVs from various NGOs waited less than a hundred meters from where our plane came to a stop, and less than 15 minutes later we were off. We stopped in town briefly to have lunch at a UN compound, which featured military personnel armed to the teeth and crow’s nests of high-caliber machine guns. There we ate a basic lunch whilst watching Nigerian soap operas (a regular occurrence over the course of the trip), while the gravity of the situation slowly set in.

Following lunch, we stopped briefly at our client’s field office to exchange pleasantries with the staff there and pick up some goods for the outpost we’d be staying at. From there, we set off on the 25-mile drive to the compound we’d be calling home for the next few weeks, a commute that would take us over 2 hours.

The roads in this part of the country were little more than elevated dirt paths, and are in terrible shape. The rainy season wreaks havoc on them with huge divots carved across and throughout them, leading to our driver slaloming from one side to the other, and often off the road altogether for long stretches. Apart from farmers with their herds of domesticated animals (i.e., cows and goats), kids at play, and huts called tukuls, there’s really nothing to see other than long stretches of parched Earth and some magnificent trees. Thankfully, there was not much talking going on, though the peace and quiet we all seemed to crave was denied by the driver’s love of the radio, with musical offerings wavering between 1990s rap and bluegrass, both from the United States. It was a bit surreal hearing a bluegrass cover of John Denver’s “Country Roads”, but it reminded me of home providing the conflicting sensation of both being comforted and having the already setting in homesickness exacerbated.

Arrival at home base in rural South Sudan

When we finally arrived, everyone was thrilled to be out of the truck and ready to settle in. We met the field staff and got a tour of the compound, which didn’t take too long. There’s only about 10 people that are permanently working there, with a local support staff (e.g., drivers, cooks, maids) of about 20 more people. The permanent staff spends 2–3 months on-site before getting a week’s break to return to their homes in Uganda, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and other countries. Some of these folks have been living there for years, having seen some of the worst of the conflicts and resultant crises. That’s important to keep in mind, as there’s really no way to adequately express how difficult that life is. These people are incredibly committed.

We each had our own room on the compound, and these had private showers. There was an outhouse of sorts with gender-segregated stalls and were of the squat toilet variety, with just a hole above a deep septic tank that smelled, well, one can imagine what it smelled like. In the center of the compound was a chicken coop, from which our daily meals emerged. There were a few buildings that housed offices, and one that was a dining hall-cum-recreation room. In the latter most evenings were spent, as they had a TV and satellite dish powered by a solar panel in order to allow the residents to watch football (soccer) and the beloved Nigerian soap operas. Electricity was provided by a diesel generator, and for only 5 or 6 hours a day. The entire compound was surrounded by a chain link fence but the security this offered was virtually nil. They had weaved long grasses through the fence to afford some level of privacy, but even this was more psychological than physical.

The compound was situated within a village, and word quickly spread at the arrival of strangers. Along the fence near our rooms, kids from the village could be frequently found, peeking though and giggling. Early on I whispered “hi” to a few of them, not wanting to be too loud since the guards would chase the kids off if they knew of their presence. For the rest of the time there, these same kids would greet me with the hushed “hi” and we’d spend a lot of time just smiling at each other, lacking the language skills to communicate otherwise. One day a little boy reached his fingers through the fence, so I held them for a bit while we smiled at each other. Afterwards, and for whatever reason, I had to lock myself in my room to hide the tears that wouldn’t seem to stop flowing.

At first, we were a little nervous to go out into the village, and would initially only do so with a chaperone that spoke the Dinka language. We also had a strict curfew (6p) that limited our opportunities. After a while though, we grew more and more bold and would spend as much time as we could out amongst the villagers. Thanks to the cameras we had, we became quite popular with people young and old stopping us to request a photograph. This was great while it lasted, but came to a head at the end of our trip when local leaders complained that we were documenting too much of their village.

Field Work

The work we did required spending time in the village housing us, as well as two neighboring ones. We could easily walk to the “hospital” (read: tin shack) in our village, but visiting the same facilities in the other two villages required taking an SUV into the bush. This same SUV was used as an ambulance, which led to a few return trips riding alongside children in really bad shape. One particular trip featured a mother with twins, a boy and a girl. The girl was bad off, but engaged: she held my pointer finger the whole ride, and eventually we got some smiles out of her. The boy just stared blankly, totally disengaged. I have a niece and nephew that are twins, so it was hard not to think of them and how only through sheer luck and circumstance they were able to avoid a fate as heinous as this, while reflecting on the grotesque disparity that exists in the world today.

Our project required us to be in and around these hospitals every day for a few weeks. In that time we saw dozens of children in really brutal shape, and got a sense for how dire and seemingly hopeless the situation is there. Food is virtually nonexistent, drought and famine a reality, and the plight of the people there all but ignored. It’s easy to get lost in the numbers when you’re talking about millions of people at risk, not so much so when seeing a representative sample of such on a regular basis. At first, you just want to run away, to get away from such an awful reality and pray that somehow and in some way you’ll be able to forget what you’ve seen and pretend this isn’t happening in the world. The next stage is some level of acceptance and a belief, irrespective of how na?ve it may be, that perhaps the work you’re doing can help make a difference, help save a life. Towards the end, the physical and emotional exhaustion of the prolonged exposure takes over and, as sickening as it is, you just pray that these babies will stop crying so that you can have at least one nightmare-free night’s sleep.

We worked long hours, every day, for weeks on end both because we had to and because we wanted to. You find that you need to fill your time with anything in order to keep your mind occupied. Perhaps it’s born from an immature need to avoid a heartbreaking reality, or an acceptance that some things are just too large, too daunting to wrap your head around, an indication that your emotional maturity is not yet to a place where real understanding is possible, or maybe it’s just denial; whatever the case, you just feel the need to keep moving along so that this misery does not envelop you, and you feel a great disappointment for seeing learning this about yourself.

Reflections

When I first heard about going to South Sudan, and this is truly shameful, I remember looking forward to it, to being able to tell friends and family and have this “look at me” moment in which I could make another notch in the belt of experiences that other people can’t lay claim to; to have that moment, no matter how fleeting, of validation that I am somehow “more than”. My thoughts were totally self-centered and I was completely unprepared for what this experience was like, but I am thankful that it happened. I thought a lot about many things, but one random thought that kept re-emerging was of the Jim Carrey movie “The Truman Show” and its premise of returning to a context or reality that has been shown to be false or fundamentally different from your perception of it. It’s something I’ve reflected on regarding my time in India too: what will it be like to transition back to the United States after seeing what the rest of the world is like? How do you return to a place once it is exposed as an impossible ideal for billions of others? Am I so selfish to ignore the plight of others to find ease of life for myself?

The people I met in South Sudan are some of the most gracious, positive, and welcoming people I’ve ever met. Wandering through those villages, walking with children, shaking hands with adults, and even going on long runs through the bush, was transformative, life-changing. That time was full of moments in which I’d sit back and think about how far I’ve come personally and professionally, and yet how far I still need to go, that we need to go as a species. I’ve never seen suffering like that I witnessed in South Sudan, but ,as is the case in many of the challenging contexts I’ve been fortunate enough to visit, I’ve also never seen such optimism and hope. Following the ride with those sickly twins, one of our colleagues saw how concerned and upset we were, and told us that if we come back in a few years, we’ll be amazed at how well they’ll be doing. One can only hope that that is the case for those kiddies, the entirety of South Sudan, and the world at large.