Why it’s Hard to Write about South Sudan

I got a new job a few months ago. I’m a foresight analyst now.

What’s that mean? It means that I use structured analytical techniques to build scenarios that are supposed to model and predict the path a country could take anywhere from six months to fifty years down the line.

No, I’m not an oracle. I’m just a guy who spends way too much of his time looking for trends in political and economic systems.

I’ve spent the last month working on a project for South Sudan. I traveled back to Juba and interviewed friends and former colleagues as well as in-country experts, local government officials, and average citizens to try to get a grasp on the extreme volatility that is South Sudan since independence. Not an easy task when the biggest question of the last two weeks has been a ‘will he, won’t he’ game of speculation around whether the former vice-president would return to the capital to take his place in a transitional government of national unity. 

The whole thing was a farce akin to a Beckett play, and “Waiting for Machar” became my hashtag on Twitter that absolutely no one found interesting (but amused me to no end). It was one of the few things keeping me sane while trying to write a report where one of the key uncertainties in the political situation was evolving right in front of me.

That struggle is only natural for Juba. Keeping my sanity was one of my most troublesome challenges for a year and a half in South Sudan. Now, looking back on two years of experience with the country, I’m surprised I managed it.

And that’s because South Sudan is an excruciating place to love and care about. It’s a place that builds up your love and respect for humanity’s resilience and ability to push through pain and tragedy before it tears you down when you witness the extreme brutality and violence that human beings are capable of raining down on their fellow men and women.

In May 2015, I wrote a brief for the Humanitarian Coordination Team, the top-level organizing body in the country, regarding the ongoing government offensive in Unity State. As a mobile protection actor, I had traveled the length and breadth of Unity State. I had spent weeks in Koch, Buaw, Mayom, Mankien, and Leer.

As a result of my work on both side of the front line, I knew exactly how and where a government offensive could take place due to troop positions and the geographical constraints of warfare in one of the biggest swamps in the world. I later drew a map from memory of the ongoing offensive and how it would unfold for donors and diplomats that looked exactly like an HSBA diagram that would be published months later.

As I wrote that one page brief for the HCT, I cried. I cried and I cried and I cried. Reports from the Bentiu Protection of Civilian site were sounding the alarm—old women and young children pouring into the camp, but no men or women between the ages of ten and thirty-five. No one could understand why they were missing this key demographic, one of the largest in the country and inexplicably absent from the influx.

I knew why. Exactly one year before, I’d been in Leer town, interviewing survivors of the violence that had engulfed the state as government and opposition fighters had stormed back and forth in pitched battles that destroyed anything in their path. The first woman I spoke to individually, a thin, cracked grandmother in her seventies, had been caught at a government check point with her seven grandchildren. The oldest boy, twenty, had been taken by the soldiers, his throat slit in front of her. The oldest girl, seventeen, was taken by the armed men. The old woman, the girl’s grandmother, hadn’t seen her since. She was allowed to continue with five small children, all under the age of ten.

Story after story continued like this, each one with the subtle differences that build credibility, and the core similarities that indicate a campaign of coordinated violence and the deliberate targeting of civilians. A year later, writing that brief through angry and grief-filled tears, I knew that history was repeating itself.

Numerous reports released over the next few months confirmed my fears and indicated that the violence was so much worse than I could ever have imagined.  Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the UN all described scenes of unimaginable brutality: homes looted and burnt, women abducted and raped, civilians of all ages tortured, mutilated, and murdered.

These crimes will likely never go to court; their perpetrators will never see justice. Despite the peace deal’s call for a hybrid court and transitional justice, reconciliation will be one of the first items on the chopping block as international actors and those responsible for violence negotiate an elite bargain as the best hope for a false peace.

That isn’t an opinion based off of foresight or analytical techniques; that’s an opinion based on history. It is a history of compromised promises, a lack of long-term planning, and false expectations generated by a theory of liberal peace.

I recently spent a few hours at Juba airport waiting for my flight back to Kampala. I sat and chatted to a prominent human rights actor who’d spent years working on the Sudans. I was struck, more than anything, by how tired she looked. She knew it as well. Everyone I’ve spoken to who looked like, felt that accumulated stress, knew that it showed.

I knew it after a year and a half of conflict and violence. I knew I had to take a break, knew I had to leave it behind before it broke me.

There’s a certain type of ‘expert’ on Sudan and South Sudan who have followed the country for years from university lecture halls and think tank conference rooms in the US and Europe. I’m convinced their longevity concerning the Sudans is the privileged position of never seeing the day to day in the countries that they know so well. It’s one thing to cite a chart with month-to-month inflation of 200% or more. It’s another to watch the price of bread double and triple over a few short months, to see more and more women and children out begging on the streets, to drive past long lines of cars waiting for petrol, to know that generators in homes and hospitals aren’t running due to a lack of fuel.

Seeing this, you know it could have been different, and that’s what hurts.

What kills you in seeing all of this is the hope, often dashed. The hope that saw the exchange rate drop from 22SSP to the dollar before the peace deal was signed in August 2015 to 10:1 after, only to rise to 44:1 around Easter this year—all false hopes that buoyed a shallow black market.

What kills you is the opportunity, often wasted. The promise of new hospitals, new schools built with profits from the country’s oil revenue, funneled out of South Sudan by corrupt elites who build new houses and buy new cars in Kampala and Nairobi.

It’s the possibility of unity after the 2006 Juba Declaration broken along historic divisions between the SPLA and the SSDF. It’s the fact that, when you think about it, you should have seen it coming, and maybe you would have, if you’d been more cynical.

It’s the long durée, the constant retreat into violence and elite power struggles that makes it so difficult to love this country.

That’s why it’s so hard to write about South Sudan. 

Ebb/Flow

I was a smiley kid. All the time, I was walking around like it was a sunny day, with a big grin on my face. I must have looked like a complete dope.

Then one day, when I was in 7^th grade, some goth/punk burnout noticed the dopey grin on my face and asked me, in front of everyone, “Why are you smiling all the time? Did you just get done masturbating?”

Everyone who heard him laughed. And laughed. I didn’t know what masturbation was (I was a very innocent kid, which probably helped explain the dopey grin), but I could understand intrinsically that being labeled a chronic masturbator was something all the other kids would make fun of me for.

So I stopped smiling.

It’s not that it launched me into a deep depression or that I never laughed. It’s just that from that day forward, I never wore that dopey grin again. It’s come back from time to time, but it’s always been something I’ve kept hidden.

Two years ago, when I first came to South Sudan, I was excited about a new challenge, a new context, and finally achieving something I’d been working towards for years. I was mobile, which suited me well with my love of movement and rapidly changing contexts, learning on the fly, and adapting as best I could.

I naturally turned towards writing, and this blog, to pour that energy out into the world. Three posts in April, two in May, and then “Cowboys,” in June 2014.

Then it drops off. One post in August, and not another one until January 2015, another in April, and this is the first since.

What changed? I submitted “Cowboys” as a comms piece to the organization I worked for. We had a part-time comms officer who never did her job. I didn’t know I’d almost been hired as a full-time comms officer, so the fact that I’d published three pieces for the organization’s blog probably made it look like I was gunning for her position.

So she undercut me. Hard. She launched a campaign of sneering and mockery. A month or so after that piece was published, everyone was talking about it, and none of it was good.

People took to calling the mobile team the ‘cowboys,’ even though the article said that we weren’t doing the real work, the difficult work of helping communities knit themselves back together after a crisis. I could tell that I was quickly becoming an outsider in a place where you couldn’t afford to go it on your own.

So I stopped writing. 

I shut down the part of me that was outward facing. I kept my journal, but I couldn’t bring myself to really push my own boundaries anymore. 

And that was a shame because there were so many stories to tell. Not just mine, but the personal stories from a conflict that's raged now for over two years, displaced millions, and slowly ground down so many who hoped for so much more. 

I'm amazed that people still maintain hope. The Greek legend had it that when Pandora opened her box, she let out all the evils of the world - death, famine, plague, sadness, misery, poverty. She closed the door with one voice crying to be let free. That voice was hope. It always struck me that maybe hope was the worst of all, that hope helped people endure but that it also inured people to the suffering around them and prevented change. 

I don't know if I still believe that. As I get older and the thoughts in my head get more and more nuanced, I'm not sure what I believe anymore.

But if anyone asks me why I return to places like South Sudan (where I am currently), I'm reminded of all the hardship, all the pain, the death, the disease, the loss of a child, a wife, a husband, a home, a family, a community, the loss of dignity, the loss of even the most basic rights - food, shelter, safety, and I see that life goes on. 

No matter how dark things get, there is hope. It's there in brief moments, but it's the only thing that keeps you from breaking, that keeps you committed to life and everything in it, for better or for worse. 

This war, which doesn't get as much coverage as it should and will probably never get as much coverage as it should, will eventually end. Life continues, with or without us.

That doesn't mean we have to like it. That doesn't mean that we have to inure ourselves to the pain and suffering around us. The news calls it a 'migrant crisis' rather than acknowledge the thousands of women and children who are fleeing war and desolation. 

I can't end a war. I certainly can't end this one. But I can work to try to ally myself in others' suffering, to stagger on together in an attempt to demand dignity from a hard world, made harder by people who have doubted themselves, been afraid, lashed out, and taken one step after another down a road that sees another human life as worth less, as lesser, as expendable and exploitable. 

At my worst, like all of us, I have lashed out, I have done wrong, but I must remember to turn inward, heal my own pain, and open myself again. 

South Sudan has taught me many things. It's given me at times an awfully black sense of humor. It has shown me things that I've heard only in news reports, an unimaginable world far away from my own. It's shown me courage, true courage, the ability to carry on when everything around you seems impossible. 

I gave a copy of the Tao Te Ching to a South Sudanese colleague. In a place where books are hard to come by, he's read those simple poems over and over and over again. He's found wisdom there. And even though he lives in a country at war, he can read about peace and about the ebb and flow of life. 

He and his wife had a child a few months ago, their first. It's not an easy thing to do, to bring life into so much suffering. And to know that in South Sudan that no child is safe until the age of five. Child mortality is one of the highest in the world alongside maternal mortality, but child and mother have both made it so far. 

Even in the midst of everything, life goes on. There remains hope. 

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.

Leaving Redemption along the Road to Peace

The car jostled over footpaths and pushed through the encroaching greenery, emerging into a clearing dominated by neem trees, a water pump, and a long, multi-room school. The few women around the pump eyed us warily. Children hid behind their mothers. There were no men to be seen.

Our team leader, Rocky, explained, “You see, these men have fled into the bush, but they are close. Even the others, we asked, ‘how do you protect the women,’ and they said that they are just near.” Sure enough, a short distance on we met five men armed with Kalashnikovs. A small radio pumped music out of tinny speakers. These were the Thiiyic Galweng, the heavily-armed cattle keepers who keep watch over their community’s herds.

They watch not for lions or hyenas, though those beasts are sometimes found here in South Sudan, but for other men who come raiding for the cows that in Dinka and Nuer culture denote wealth, prestige, and power.

Now, however, these men were on heightened alert. One of their Thiiyic (pronounced Teach) kinsmen had killed the paramount chief from the Gony (Goyng) side and gone on the run. The Gony had responded in kind, storming through Thiiyic territory on a campaign of rape and retributive violence that they vowed would last until the murderer was apprehended.

The police officer who traveled with us exited the vehicle cautiously and spoke with the youth, who led us several hundred meters down a path and to another clearing encircled by several dozen additional heavily-armed men. They were here in hiding, they said. They wanted peace, and they knew that if they showed themselves it would lead only to more violence.

Nonviolent Peaceforce has been conducting peacebuilding activities in and around Lakes State for the majority of its existence in South Sudan. This is despite the fact that the state is overwhelmingly Dinka and does not, therefore, fit neatly into the international narrative of an ongoing ethnic civil war between the Dinka and Nuer. If everyone is Dinka, what is there to fight over?

Quite a bit, it seems, as the state is one of the most volatile in the entire country. The Dinka in Lakes belong to clans – the Gak, Agaar, Atuot, Ciec, and Aliab. Within this clan structure are sub-clans, and a multitude of conflicts have arisen over the years, typically related to cattle, grazing land, and women.

In Lakes, still waters run deep. Conflicts can last for years without any violence and suddenly flare up without warning. This latest, between the Thiyiic and the Gony sub-clans of Dinka Agaar, is a perfect example.

In 1997, Thiiyic youth murdered the son of the Gony Paramount Chief. Five years later, in 2002, the Gony struck back and killed the Deputy Paramount Chief of Thiiyic side. A Gony soldier, who is now a high-ranking government official, killed two of his own family in order to appease the Thiiyic, prevent retribution, and end the conflict. However, in early August of this year, seventeen years after the initial killing, the son of the murdered Thiiyic elder, who was only a child at the time of his father’s death, took his revenge by murdering the Gony Paramount Chief and fleeing into the bush.

The heavily-armed men we met deep in the bush were Thiiyic. They were angry and afraid. They had fled to avoid collective retribution, but the Gony had targeted their women, something unprecedented in the inter-clan conflict. Women and children had always been considered off-limits.

Perhaps in the context of the civil war, where an unknown number of women have been raped and where children are regularly abducted and pressed into military service, the rules of war are changing. What was once unthinkable becomes common. The rules have been broken, and one fears they may not be repaired.

In this context as well, when tensions are high, anything can be considered a further affront, and there is no such thing as an individual crime. A woman killed her nine-month pregnant neighbor in a dispute over a goat. Both were Gony, but the dead woman was married to a Thiiyic. In Dinka culture, dominated by patriarchy, a woman upon marriage loses her identity and takes that of her husband. In addition, the crimes of one person can often easily become those of the entire community.

Luckily, in this case, the Thiiyic weren’t seeing it that way. In the team’s meeting with the Thiiyic elders, under a tree in a clearing surrounded by armed men, they recognized the woman’s murder as an individual crime, one that needed to be resolved by the courts. They wanted peace, a chance to return to their homes.

Turning these issues over to the courts is an important extension of trust towards national institutions, and a big step towards reconciliation. That’s what we strive for – local solutions to local problems.

The team meeting with the Gony leadership.

It is unclear whether the Thiiyic feel wholly comfortable petitioning their local government. Without going too much into the intricacies of South Sudanese politics, several high-ranking state officials in Lakes belong to the Gony sub-clan. These officials were already under pressure for the continuing intra-ethnic conflict in the state, and now that the violence is hitting closer to home, they’re under increasing pressure from state and national actors. It is just another reminder of how easily a local grievance can transform into a national issue, and how important it is when two sides can solve their problems peacefully and amicably.

The Thiiyic and Gony are not there yet, but the NP team in Rumbek is used to hard, arduous roads. As we left the clearing and the armed men behind, the team felt that we had made an important first step in reconciliation. The next day, the alleged murderer was turned over to the police.

It is only one step in along a long road to peace, but even the longest journey begins with a single step. 

Cowboys

It’s been a slow couple weeks in Juba. I was supposed to be out on mission earlier in the week, but due to circumstances outside of my control, I was never manifested on the flight and found myself grounded for another week in the capital.

I’m on the mobile protection team – a new approach to protection mainstreaming that is being led by my organization, Nonviolent Peaceforce. The idea is to integrate the protection of civilians into the overall humanitarian response in a sustained, meaningful way.

The problem is that the humanitarian sector is often preoccupied with logistics – how to get food from A to B, how many households need mosquito nets, and how to target vulnerable populations who have fled to the bush, those who are relying on emergency food strategies and sheltering under trees or in disused cattle camps.

My team will be there to make sure these logistics are incorporated in a way that humanizes the populations. Our main concern is to measure the capacities, vulnerabilities, and resiliencies of the host population in order to foster ownership and build long-lasting relationships with influential local actors.

We build the networks. We’re what Malcolm Gladwell calls “Connectors.” Ideally, those of us doing mobile protection are the “first in, last out.” We’ve joked that we’re the cowboys of the organization, flying wherever there’s need and busting our hump to establish a presence.

We don’t, however, just ride off into the sunset. When we hit the ground, we’re establishing relationships, not only with local leadership but with influential actors in the community – religious leaders, doctors, elders, teachers, business people, and women.

When a distribution finishes, we stick around to make sure that the systems serve everyone effectively, especially the most vulnerable – women, children, the elderly, and the infirm.

So you can understand the frustration that for the last week, I’ve been grounded. Insert Top Gun reference here –

I want the clip where they take away Maverick's wings for going below the hard deck, but you take what you can get, I guess. 

In all seriousness, it’s been a bit of a blessing in disguise. We’ve done a lot of the ground work that is necessary when building a team. We’ve been able to meet with others in the protection cluster to establish our mission and our responsibilities. We’ve also been able to outfit the team so that we can hit the ground running.

You’d be surprised how important this ground work is, and how little opportunity you have to do it in an emergency situation.

It’s also allowed me to spend time researching the human rights situation in the country and gain an understanding of what we will be facing in different areas of the country. Amnesty International published their report Nowhere Safe: Civilians underAttack in South Sudan a few weeks ago, around the same time that the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) published their Conflict in South Sudan: A Human Rights Report.

Both make for pretty grim reading. In the nearly six months since the conflict started, both government and opposition forces have committed grave human rights violations including rape, murder, targeted attacks on civilian areas of refuge including churches and medical facilities, attacks on humanitarian actors including the UN mission, and looting. Worse, these violations seem to be institutionalized on a scale and level of organization that represent crimes against humanity.

We can’t forget what that means. These are crimes so deplorable that they actually shock the conscience of humanity. They target civilian populations and serve no military objective other than to terrify and destroy innocent life.

There are, however, some gems of humanity that shine through the horror. Stories of survival buried in the narrative that allow you to believe that this conflict is anything other than madness and carnage.

From the Amnesty report –

“In the afternoon of 16 December 2013, I was at home, in the Mia Saba neighborhood, with my family. My wife and our five children were in our house and I was sitting outside under a tree with seven (male) relatives. We heard shooting nearby and I ran to a neighbour’s house. He is a Dinka soldier and a good friend. I stayed hiding in his house and we saw two Toyota pick-up trucks full of soldiers. We heard them shooting by my house… [After the soldiers left] we found that my seven relatives had been shot dead… We found my wife and children cowering terrified in the house. The soldiers had gone in and taken money, several telephones, a computer, and a TV. My neighbour took us to his home for the night and the following day he drove me, my wife and my children to the UNMISS base; he saved our lives. He knew that his colleagues had come to kill Nuer and he could not stop them but saved us by hiding us in his home” (emphasis mine).

In the midst of complete chaos, a friend helped a friend, a neighbor stood up for a neighbor despite ethnic differences. He did it at great risk to himself. There’s danger in being a ‘collaborator,’ a serious risk to your short-term well-being to preserve your own humanity.

It is ultimately why I have faith that a solution can be found in this conflict. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe that. Sometimes it’s hard to see, but then I think of two of my colleagues, national staff, one Dinka, the other Nuer. Over the course of our training, they became fast friends. We never saw one without the other. Two women who developed a bond that will long outlast the politics of the day.

It’s what gives me hope. It’s what allows me to read reports filled with horror, to suffer abuse from aggravated IDPs in the camps, men and women who have experienced traumas far outside anything I could imagine.

It is what allows me to keep going, even when I’m stuck on the ground, longing to fly.

Bringing West Africa to South Sudan

"No! You don't eat it. You just chew it."

Three of our national staff had each just taken a piece of kola nut, the hard, pink fruit that I thought was ubiquitous across Africa and cut it with a chunk of bubble gum. Three South Sudanese men, all in their late twenties, examining a chunk of kola like it was some new experimental drug.

"But it makes you drunk?" one of them asked.

"No, no. It gives you energy. Like Red Bull."

"Yes, it gives you energy!" the vendor echoed.

"But what do you do with it?"

"You chew it. But it's very bitter. And it turns your teeth orange."

"No," the vendor corrected me. "You see, it turns your teeth orange if you don't brush."

"Spit it out like gum when you're finished."

"When you're feeling it," the vendor added.

"But you don't eat it?" my colleague asked. All three were looking at me with curiosity.

"No! Guys, how am I more African than you?"

They laughed. "We don't have this one. This comes from Congo!"

"Even me," our Kenyan colleague said, "I have never had this one."

"Never?!" I asked, "But this is everywhere in West Africa!"

And suddenly, all of us were reminded of the continent's sprawling size and rich diversity.

Some of us learned that kola nuts are, in fact, disgusting.

Crossing Cultures

West Africa was my entrance to Africa. I spent nearly three years there before going anywhere else. I see similarities across the continent wherever I go. I see similar art - an 'African' aesthetic that is plied mostly to the tourist trade, wear similar fabric - the 'pagnes' that I first encountered in Niger are seen as 'traditional' throughout the continent (despite their manufacture in Hong Kong or Amsterdam), and hear similar music - the rumba rhythms from Kinshasa and hip hop beats from the likes of Nigerian group P-Square - 

The remix of P-Square's 'Chop My Money,' featuring Akon and May-D, is one of the hottest tracks in Juba at the moment. You hear it everywhere.

Despite that, I decided to ask my South Sudanese colleagues, "Do you know what they're singing about?"

They didn't, and why should they? Nigerian pidgin hasn't permeated the rest of the continent, outside the 'Little Nigeria' neighborhoods that you sometimes come across in South Africa.

Chop is a perfect example. In Nigerian (and Ghanaian) pidgin, chop means to eat. In the case of the above video, 'chop my money' means that the woman all these men are interested in excels at spending their money. 

And they don't care, because "It's your seduction that makes sure we stay in line / sexual corruption cuz I'll kill anyone for your time." There's some additional pidgin - "I know dey lie" vs "you no go believe" playing on the homonym (knowledge vs. negation) as well as a Yoruba verse that slides back into slang "Omo ele I get pepper" (Pretty baby, I'll find money).

Expanding Worlds

Let's put it this way - it is over 4000km as the crow flies from Juba to Lagos. For an American, that's roughly the same as walking New York to Los Angeles. For Europeans, imagine driving from London to Syria. Americans will likely be listening to the same music, wearing similar clothes, and eating similar foods (though I've never had California's famous Jack-in-the-Box burgers nor do I understand all the references on Portlandia). For Europeans, the differences in culture, food, history, and politics is like night and day.

For Africans, it's somewhere in the middle, I think. Similar experiences with colonialism, arbitrary borders imposed at independence, but with a few dominant cities churning out pop culture for the rest of the continent - Lagos and Nairobi being the most obvious Anglophone megacities while Abidjan, Dakar, and Kinshasa take care of the Francophone nations.

I've been lucky enough, over the past several years, to travel and explore these various worlds, and now I'm finding myself in the position of a bridge between various cultures. 

I don't by any means think I know even one percent of these various cultures I've visited, but I've picked up a little along the way. Like my wallet, I'm holding cultural currencies with bills from over twenty African nations. On my last assessment, I was equally comfortable speaking Zarma with the Nigerien security professional accompanying the UNICEF mission as I was identifying the Zimbabwean on the same mission as Shona, reminiscing about the beauty of Chimanimani, and laughing at the tragic absurdity of the hyperinflation that collapsed his country's economy.

Jack of All Trades, Master of None

Of course, there are trade-offs. As I learn more and more about the various places I've called home, I've become further disengaged from many of the cultural touchstones of people from my own world. I don't know about the latest Top 40 hit unless it crosses oceans to get played on Turkish radio. I haven't tried the newest pop-up gin bar, nor have I heard about whatever new app is allowing overburdened twenty-something professionals to find love without having to speak to strangers. 

It's alienating, but you know what? I don't think I'd have it any other way.