Return to South Sudan

Two decades on from her first foreign assignment covering war and hunger in South Sudan, UK Media Manager Sarah Wilson returns and finds that depressingly little has changed.

By Sarah Wilson, Media Relations Strategy Manager, World Vision UK

In one of my first foreign assignments with The Scotsman in 1993, I visited South Sudan to report on the humanitarian crisis caused by the war. Back then I visited a camp dubbed Kotobi.

Returning to South Sudan two decades later with World Vision, I met Abraham Nhial, who had fled to that very same Kotobi camp as a 10-year-old child to escape the fighting.

Abraham’s story is remarkable. Now 31 years old and working for World Vision as a Communications Manager, he spent most of his childhood on the move, just like the Lost Boys portrayed in the recent upcoming feature film. Abraham was born on the 12th May 1983, just four days before the civil war broke out. His family left their home in Bor when Abraham was just four years old, as government troops advanced towards the town.

They settled in Ethiopia where he was able to start primary school for a couple of years until a change in government forced the family to return to Sudan. They arrived in Pakok, just inside the Sudanese border. “People were starving in Pakok, so the community cattle were slaughtered and each family got one kilogram of meat,” remembers Abraham.

The people already there encouraged Abraham’s family: “Don’t go, aid will come.” He vividly remembers the air drops. Along with other children, Abraham collected the sorghum grains that spilled onto the ground and brought them home to supplement his family’s rations.

But then the food assistance abruptly stopped, and “we were totally forgotten.” Abraham’s mother was forced to work in the surrounding fields, being paid in grains and legumes which she used to feed the family. During this time, she stockpiled sim-sim, a legume similar to peanuts that can be ground into butter. But when the harvest finished, the possibility of working for food also dried up.

Pakok was relatively safe, so people feared moving on even though there was not enough food. No one knew what to expect in the next village, as the skirmishes between government and rebel forces were frequent and unpredictable.

“People were dying of hunger all around us. My mother was determined that we were not going to sit there and wait to die. There was a lot of insecurity, but it was better to die trying to approach a safe place where we might find some food that would allow us to survive, than to remain where we were and definitely die,” remembers Abraham.

They heard that there were food drops in a place called Pochalla, so they headed there and ended up reuniting with some relatives in a refugee camp who shared some of their rations. His mother’s decision to move on had paid off.

Now decades later, as Abraham and I visit camps where people displaced from the current round of fighting are sheltering under United Nations protection, he tells me how he feels a deep empathy for the people that World Vision are now helping.

Like myself, Abraham is working as a communicator for World Vision, helping to bring the humanitarian crisis in South Sudan to international attention. But that is where the similarity between our two lives ends.

Like thousands of South Sudanese children today, most of Abraham’s early schooling took place in refugee camps where aid agencies like World Vision had set up makeshift classrooms in tents or under trees. Again and again his family was forced to move from one place to the next, either to escape encroaching fighting, or in search of food, or both. After spending time as a refugee in Ethiopia and Uganda, as well as various part of Sudan, Abraham was finally able to complete his secondary school education in Kenya and eventually gain a college university diploma in mass communications in Nairobi.

He and his wife, who was also a Sudanese refugee, met in Kenya. They married in 2008 and returned to Sudan, where Abraham got a job with World Vision in Juba. But as recently as last December, Abraham and his wife had to flee from their home when fighting broke out in the capital.

Abraham and his family are now safe, at least for the time being. But thousands of his countrymen are not. Repeated outbreaks of fighting in the Upper Nile region of the country have made it impossible for farmers to cultivate their fields, leading to massive food shortages.

When Abraham returned to his hometown of Bor in 1990, he saw dozens of people at the side of the road who had been unable to walk any further in search of food. They had simply perished from hunger.

Today, thousands of people in South Sudan are facing the same stark choice as Abraham’s mother more than two decades ago. With your help they will have a chance of not only surviving, but also of seeing their children receive an education that will sustain them throughout their lives.