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.