Seasons in the Sudd

The rains have come early to South Sudan. Before Easter, I was on mission to Mayom County, in the north, a dry plain dotted by trees, easily confused for a desert at this time of the year. On our last night, a hot wind kicked up, and as we looked to the east, we could see a wall of sand fronting dark, rain-heavy clouds.

The monsoon wind battered at our tents as dust and sand swirled into every crack, crevice and orifice imaginable. It was a precursor for a downpour that turned the dust into mud. After two hours, everything we owned was filthy; the dirt had permeated our clothes, our tents, ears, nose, and throats.

No one else could fully appreciate it unless he’d been inside a flimsy tent doing his damnedest to keep the poles from breaking. In Juba, there’d been downpours every night, but they had cement buildings in which to shelter. Either way, it was clear that the eastern wind wasn’t a fluke. Rainy season had come.

It was easy to see as we circled to come in for a landing in the capital. The heavy, dark clouds were again threatening rain, but the landscape was this lush explosion of new green as far as the eye could see. I’d been so used to seeing various shades of brown that I never thought spring could come again.

The rainy season comes with its own challenges. The country will be mostly inaccessible again by July as the floodwaters return, fill the swamps, cut the roads, and generally limit the mobility of an entire nation. The up side is that the fighting will begin to subside as the two armies spend more time battling their environment that one another.

It’s difficult to think that only six months ago, on one of my many flyovers of Greater Upper Nile, I could see the waters receding across the country. Like a sponge soaking up excess moisture, the rivers seemed to pull the color from the surrounding land. It was possible, in some places, to literally see the topography of the country unfolding before my eyes – dark green river valleys fading to yellow-brown hilltops. In six more months, I’ll see a similar drawing down, the earth going into hibernation.

The last year has been a blur. Days, weeks, months are compressed into single moments of heat and light. I mark time by the two weeks of R&R that come every quarter. “Did that happen before I went to Kenya? No, it was definitely sometime in January because it was shortly after I came back from the UK.”

Part of the reason that the year seems so bound up is that we’re living through a war, and war seems to change how we mark time. Everything is focused on the national conflict, one in which little seems to have happened while everything seems to change.

In Juba, there is no war. The city has an ongoing construction boom, the Chinese have installed streetlights, and the days of government-imposed curfew have receded to what seems a distant past. The economy may be on a long, downward slide, but how can we measure that against a war that hasn’t threatened the city in over a year?

As someone who travels between the capital and various opposition-controlled territories, however, the difference is jarring. Here, the war is theoretical. We hear about attacks, forced recruitment, hundreds or thousands displaced, and yet it just becomes so many numbers in a conflict that doesn’t affect us between the after-work drinks and the parties on the weekend.

In the war-affected states, the conflict just seems frozen. I see troops move back and forth, boys carrying Kalashnikovs, hospitals and schools that are nothing more than empty shells. I hear rumors about the White Army or about a new weapons system that has recently been acquired and will change the military calculus, but then nothing ever happens. A few shells are shot over Bentiu, some skirmishes break out around Ayod, the tensions seem to build and build without any release.

I want to draw a distinction between this war and so many others, but in truth, there aren’t many. Our idea of war as this epic characterized by decisive battles and brilliant maneuvers is constructed by poets and historians. We forget that Afghanistan and Iraq were decade-long affairs that some would argue never really ended. The American Civil War lasted five years, but the knock-on effects lingered into the Civil Rights Movement and our current debate over police brutality. Hell, by the time the Hundred Years’ War ended, anyone who’d been alive when it started had long ago died.

I hope I’m wrong, but in my most pessimistic (or realistic) moments, I realize that both sides are in this fight for the long haul. The commanders in charge today are the same ones who lived in the bush for over two decades during the Second Sudanese Civil War. A few of them are old enough to remember the first Civil War.

Whenever I start to read about psychosocial support for South Sudanese who have known decades of violent conflict, I begin to wonder if many of those in charge are simply more comfortable in war. There are children and even adults who know nothing else. Independence was hailed as an end to war, but for the states of Unity, Jonglei, and Upper Nile, the war never really ended, as armed groups and violent disarmament campaigns continued the fight in another form.  

With the horrors of this conflict’s early days, the bodies in the streets, women raped, civilians targeted based on their ethnicity, and a complete lack of justice or accountability for these crimes, this war could continue for several years more. When I speak to communities, one of my constant refrains is that we hope and pray that this conflict will end soon. The sad reality, however, is that there is no reason that it needs to. Wars are costly, time-consuming affairs, and unfortunately, the people suffering the most are the ones who aren’t fighting.

So the seasons change. The waters flood the plains and recede, the grasses grow and wither, the winds bring rain and take it away again, and yet things remain the same. On my best days, that thought comforts me because I realize that people have always lived here, they’ve remained resilient, they’ve survived. On the worst days, however, I question when or if this war will ever end, when or if children will be able to return to schools, when or if there will be a harvest. And the sad reality is that much like the rain, no one can predict when conflict will come, when war will end. 

Write, Just Write - It's All You Have

Months have passed since I wrote anything more than a briefing paper or an assessment of protection concerns in some far-flung region of South Sudan that few have ever heard of, fewer still have ever been to.

I don’t mean that to sound romantic. In the past several months, I’ve been to villages named Mading, Buaw, Gorwai, Pulturuk, Waat, Mathiang, Koch – each one different in so many ways and yet so similar. In nearly every one, markets are shadows of their former selves or gone altogether. Families crowd into ever more fully-packed shelters as they welcome distant relatives or complete strangers who have fled conflict in a neighboring county or village, their condition ranging from dire to “normal for South Sudan,” a state that is rarely normal for anywhere else in the world.

And yet many cope. They continue to get by, as millions of humans who have lived and loved and lost, survived and died, for thousands of years. What choice does one have, in the end? Give up or keep going. We’ll all die eventually, and the only choice that many have in such hard circumstances is to wake up with the resolve to say, “Not today.”

One would think it would be easy to write in such conditions – to record the stories of those who have said, “I’m still here, and I plan to remain as long as I can.” To speak of one of Sudan’s top marathoners, a man who, though old now, told me of finishing 60^th out of 1000 in a race outside Addis Ababa thirty or more years ago. I, amazed, had to smile a bit, incredulous at his disappointment. In the swamps and the desert heat of Sudan, he was unbeatable, but take him to the mountaintop, where the air ran cold and thin, and suddenly, his career was over.

My mother was the first to notice the long stretch where I was no longer writing. It worried her, but I brushed off her concerns like so many others she’s raised throughout the years. Not because she was wrong, but because I was afraid of all that was right in her worry. I’ve seen so many of my friends and colleagues take up habits that signal an unhealthy amount of stress. Juba is full of them. Those who drink too much, smoke too much, work too much, fuck too much – the city is a seedy hive of empty relations and forced joviality. All to keep darker emotions at arm’s length.

I don’t go in for that, and for most of my time here, I thought I was immune. Everyone likes to think that they’re stronger than they actually are. All of these vices are an avoidance trick, a way to keep from looking in the mirror. You dance and turn circles, faster and faster, hoping that the momentum can keep the world blurred until you break the cycle with R&R, or until you break down.

I don’t smoke. I haven’t taken up drinking. My avoidance trick was just to never look inwards, and to do that, I had to give up writing.

Because writing, for me, takes strength. It takes an ability to live alongside my inner self and communicate freely with those emotions that are hidden from the everyday. That act can be profoundly spiritual, in a way, but it’s also profoundly vulnerable.

In our work, especially amongst protection actors, we have to cultivate empathy. Without it, it is impossible to cultivate the trust and relationships necessary to speak openly and candidly about where an individual or community’s concerns, fears, and hopes lie.

But it’s a razor’s edge, both for me and the person I’m interviewing, and it’s often one that I’m walking blindfolded. Think of it like this – a person has been displaced from her home. She has no idea if or when she will go back. She is, more often than not, missing a child, probably more than one, or a sister, brother, husband. By opening myself up, I may open her up, and she may relive darker moments – a grandchild murdered while she watched, his throat slit. Rape. A friend who died of thirst in the bush, unburied.

That’s what I’m avoiding when I don’t write. I’ve been maintaining my distance from some of the darkest stories I’ve ever encountered. They’re not the same as those written up in a report from Amnesty or Human Rights Watch or the UN. Those are words on paper, able to move someone, but ultimately unable to truly reflect the pain in an old woman’s voice or the vacant look in a teenager’s eyes.

Even now, I want to push this away, close the computer, and delete this file. I don’t want anyone to know that in hearing these stories, I’ve absorbed some of the darkness. However much I’ve tried to protect myself, I still need to empathize, and that means leaving the door unlocked for a whole range of emotions, not least trauma and loss. Even if it’s not my own, I as a human being can picture my own family, my own friends, those I’ve lost and those who are safe at home, unaware of all these…these things.

But if I close myself off to the bad, I also shut out the good. I shut out the amazing men and women of South Sudan who have acted as translators, facilitators, and friends in this last year. People who have lived through horror and yet are full to bursting with energy and humor. People whose lives have been full of tragedy but also full of adventure and life – like the marathoner whose legs took him from a rural village to the regional capital, from secondary school to university, and let him see places many here can’t even imagine. Or the school teacher, who chooses to remain in a small town with his family rather than move to a city several hours away for the safety and security of an NGO job. To him, the presence of his family in an emergency outweighs any monetary gain.

I don’t know about others, but for me, writing, especially when I can evoke feelings that are true and pure and deep and real to me, can carve me out and make me feel like I’m bleeding from a thousand emotional cuts. But the hope that it brings, the hope that soothes the pain, sets me on a stronger foundation.

                

I have to write again, and I want this to be the start.