The Amazing Grace

Grace was sitting by herself on a white plastic chair, her back to a long canvas tent. In this cramped refugee camp of nearly 4000 people a few kilometres inside the Ugandan border, it was highly unusual to find anyone sitting by themselves, let alone a teenage girl.

The afternoon sun was angled such that a thin corridor of shade rested on the eastern side of the camp’s 41 residential tents. Nearby a group of children played cards, snapping down dog-eared rectangles with the same flourishes as the men who were playing the same game nearby.

I asked if I could sit with Grace and as there was only one chair, placed myself on the ground next to her. My legs were tired and while we had been advised not to sit on the muddy ground for hygiene reasons, I needed a break.

Grace told me she was from Juba, South Sudan’s capital, some 280km away.

“I drove from there in June,” I said.

“I walked from there in July,” she said.

“Walked?” I asked, before trying to cover myself by using the local term for the days spent walking and added: “How many days footing was it?”

“Four days, five sleeps” she said matter-of-factly about a trek that might have slayed the man who rested at her feet.

“Tell me, where are your parents?” I asked.

“My mother is dead. And my father was killed too. I came here alone.”

Her English was crisp and her voice clear, or at least it was until she spoke the word “alone”.

“When the fighting broke out I was in school. I ran home but found my mother was down, the soldiers had already been there. I ran to the shop where my father worked but when I got there the soldiers had already been there, too. He was sitting in a seat but he was dead. So I ran, I ran and I ran.”

I was still reasonably new to this, at least compared to my wife Alissa Everett, a photographer who has documented enough stories like Grace’s to last a lifetime.

After a few decades in business, and perhaps being best remembered for co-owning the Rabbitohs back home, I’ve spent the past two years travelling with Alissa to document the personal stories of refugees.

My first trip to this camp was in June following a family, the Lowanas, who were fleeing hunger in South Sudan. We had returned two months later to follow their progress and see how they were doing under Uganda’s innovative refugee resettlement program.

Just days after we left, South Sudan erupted into its latest chapter of violence, forcing the under-resourced foreign peacekeeping force to stand aside.

Civilians were in the firing line and they had again started fleeing in great numbers over the border.

In its brief history South Sudan has been plagued by political violence and food shortages. The ongoing civil war has killed at least 50,000 people. Across the country 4.9 million people are in urgent need of food. Famine has now been officially declared in one state and it is estimated 200,000 children are at risk of malnutrition.

These conditions have forced 3.6 million people to leave their homes. About two-thirds have remained in South Sudan, internally displaced. The rest have flooded into surrounding countries like Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia seeking safety.

South Sudanese women carry their belongings to find a place to sleep with their families in the UNHCR Transit Center, Adjumani, Uganda

The Lowana family was escaping starvation. They had left reluctantly; leaving their home only after their eldest daughter had died from complications due to malnutrition. We managed to locate the family but found they had moved a day’s drive south, pushed deeper into Uganda by the waves of people who had flowed in.

Grace was fleeing violence. As she headed south from Juba she joined up with other orphan escapees, a sad and largely silent convoy, walking with only the clothes they had on when the soldiers started firing. They, too, left reluctantly, torn between staying to mourn their family and running for their lives.

The walk from Juba follows the main road but her trek was constantly interrupted by dashing into the bushes each time a vehicle approached. Bandits and soldiers from all sides were a constant threat. Nights were spent sleeping on the ground, groups of girls and women clumping together for security.

At the time of Grace’s arrival at the border the local authorities and the UNHCR were attempting to process — evaluate, feed, biometrically register — 5000 people a day. Food stockpiles were quickly depleted and emergency rations rapidly consumed.

For four days she and the other girls she arrived with were given one dry biscuit a day without enough water to help eat it. She wasn’t complaining, she made that clear, as during the walk from Juba the girls had not tasted any food and the only water they had was lapped from stagnant surface ponds.

Grace had poise like her name, but she was keen to move on from questions of the past. Her regret was that she couldn’t continue her education at the camp.

“To have a bright future I must finish school,” she said.

The camp schooling options were limited to trying to get as many small children into classrooms. Save The Children had taken Grace into a program and they were doing what they could, but for girls like her who are so close to finishing school there are sadly limited options.

Grace told me that she had been head girl of her school back home and planned to be a lawyer. She added that she wanted to be a judge, as the judges often made decisions that she said are not in the interests of the people.

“I want to do a better job than those judges do,” she said.

Uganda has arguably the most welcoming policies towards refugees of any nation in the world, yet Grace was caught in a blockage that kept her in the resource-stretched camp for three months.

Under Uganda’s policies refugees are accepted regardless of their reason for fleeing. They are immediately given the right to work, something that many countries never allow.

Each refugee family receives a small plot of land and the materials to build a small house. Under the Ugandan “Self-Reliance Strategy” they are given food rations, seeds to sow vegetables, allocated a case worker and taught how to farm in the local conditions.

Towards the end of our conversation Grace asked for my help. Not with food or land, but to get back to school. Education was the “bright future” she held on to amid the dark times. She had been so stoic, shared so openly, but our talking wore her down.

When tears did finally fall from her eyes they came long after mine had wet my shirt-front. Hers ran down dusty cheeks. And I watched one dangle from her nose for the longest time, like a droplet that wanted to prove to the earth that Africans don’t cry.

But they do, and so they should, because no girl of her age should see what she has seen.

Peter Holmes a Court and Alissa Everett travelled to South Sudan and Uganda with the help of UNICEF, Save The Children and Exposing Hope. They met Grace filming a story for 60 Minutes. To learn more about their work, visit www. ExposingHope.org

Originally published as Girl’s tale of death in South Sudan

https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/a-girls-tale-of-death-and-escape-from-south-sudan/news-story/4457dd0fe34fd606c9daf22bf478daa5