Beyond the Vapour Trail

by Brett Pierce

  Juba - The airport reminds me of an outer shed for livestock at the showgrounds. It’s a little basic. The visa process took nearly two hours with only really a handful of passengers. Even after the two hours we’re still supposed to go into town later to get the visa approved. You can tell when a country doesn’t focus on tourists – the visa process is like this.

  I stepped outside and it was 39C before 10.30 a.m., so it’s probably hotter now. But, well, the hotel food isn’t bad, and I have wireless internet.

  Our role here was quite different to Keith’s relief work in the 1990s. We had to work out the feasibility of long-term programming funded by child sponsorship, which would allow us to develop communities rather than performing constant short-term patching up. We quickly dismissed many parts of South Sudan as too difficult, and began by exploring locations in the state of Central Equatoria.

  My first evening was spent sitting outdoors at the hotel with pizza and beer under the evening sky. I had arranged to meet someone from another international NGO and I asked him about the organisation’s experience with child sponsorship in South Sudan.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘We shouldn’t have come. It’s a very difficult place.’

  Decades of war had disrupted the people’s traditional ways of life. When entire generations are brought up with NGOs supporting them, NGOs can be viewed as service providers, whose role is to bring things. This can easily happen, but here it had become an extreme sport.

  ‘In one place here in Central Equatoria our staff had to flee. A group of people decided to kill them because they didn’t get everything they expected.’

  Local disputes, you know.

  And then he reflected on the sheer complexity of logistics all over South Sudan, and the difficulty in tracking down children or reaching them for most of the year. For instance, he told us, it rains. A lot. It rains for six to eight months. It will rain until the snakes and scorpions are driven out into the open and seek shelter in homes. Bridges and roads flood: staff can leave in the morning and be unable to return by the same road for weeks. And Central Equatoria is one of the easier states. Some of the other states become completely flooded. Everything shuts down and you can’t work. This happens every year in some places.

  My own colleagues at the table told me they once went to the Upper Nile state and it started to rain. It kept raining for two weeks until almost everything was beneath about half a metre of water. So their two-day trip turned into a mindnumbingly boring, sit-around-and-hope-the-rain-stops-soon trip, because the plane couldn’t land to take them back. When it eventually stopped raining, they called on the satellite phone because, well, can you please come pick us up to go home? They waited at the airstrip. After what seemed like an eternity, their hearts lit up as they saw the plane arriving. It did a low reconnaissance pass over the airstrip. OK, the airstrip was quite wet, they may have neglected to mention that. The plane turned around without landing and went back to Juba. There are many reasons that expat staff don’t stay long in South Sudan. This kind of experience might be one of them.

  When it’s not raining, there are dry spells when people have no food. Many people lack food security. ‘Food security’ is almost a euphemism, because running out of food for your children is tough. It’s humiliating. It’s frightening. And then there are also lots of ethnic conflicts – usually related to cattle rustling. Cattle are their livelihoods, so this is theft of their stored wealth. People get hurt and family members disappear. It’s serious business.

  The following day a small group of us visited Rejaf, a town that sits beside the White Nile. It had once been a riverboat terminus, African Queen kind of stuff, the highest navigable port back in the old Congo Free State days in the late 1800s. This was after the locals got rid of the Turks in 1885. Then it was leased to the Belgians by the British in order to thwart the French. Local disputes, you know.

  In a small, full-of-goats-and-chickens-and-children kind of village nearby, with no Turks or Brits or Belgians in sight, we spoke to a small group of men under a large shady mango tree. The women met in a separate group so they could freely express their views. The men considered that just making a living was their chief concern. Most of the people here were farmers – probably three-quarters of them, with a typical farm being about a hectare or so, which they worked with their own hands. But many others didn’t own any land, so they sold things such as firewood, charcoal or tea, or even milled and sold groundnuts. The families without land often struggled to put food on the table all year round. The men also talked about cattle raids, child abductions and quite a bit of crime on the road.

  ‘Tell me more about the child abductions. How many have there been in the last six months?’

  ‘There have been three in the last two weeks, but generally it is not as bad as it used to be.’

  There was a man sitting at the back, listening quietly, holding his toddler on his lap. He wasn’t really part of the focus group, he was just interested and following the conversation. You could see the intensity in his eyes as he spoke.

  ‘How can you ever have peace in your heart after your child is taken? You feel the hurt in your heart always.’

  ‘Who is taking the children? Where do they take them?’

  They said that a tribe from Jonglei state with high levels of infertility due to syphilis was the main perpetrator of abductions. Certainly cattle raiding is widespread throughout South Sudan, and the abduction of women and children is part of that raiding.

  After the focus group, I struck up a conversation with a man who had returned to this area after many years away. He had fled during the war and spent years in a refugee camp in Egypt. Ten years, just powerlessly waiting. He had a sponsor in Australia trying to bring him out, but in the end they didn’t pay his fare, so he couldn’t come. It was just a shallow puddle of a dream until it evaporated. So now he had finally returned to his own village in South Sudan, but he was struggling to fit in and felt deep down that he had lost something. All because he had fled in his youth to save his life during a war in which more than a million people died. There are so many stories when you stop to listen to people. Sadly there would be another civil war here. As I stood there with this gentle, lovely man, neither of us could see that it was coming. It was only four weeks away.

  After our assessment in Central Equatoria, which we thought was challenging but workable, we headed to Western Equatoria, the place we thought was our best chance to commence sponsorship funding.

  So this is Juba. Let’s see what happens in Western Equatoria - which I’m hearing is a fairly stable area. You’ll be glad to hear that as well, I guess.

  From Juba to Western Equatoria only takes an hour by plane. A little plane. Kush Air. A little airline. I mean, I don’t think they run a frequent-flyer program for loyal customers or anything. The woman beside me twice asked for a seatbelt for her infant. Nobody even bothered answering her. She tried again.

  ‘Excuse me, I’m supposed to have a lap belt for my child.’

  Kush Air made no formal response.

  ‘This is not right. I paid for a ticket and you are supposed to provide a lap belt for my child. It is not safe.’

  Finally Kush Air replied.

  ‘Just shut up and stop complaining,’ said the pilot.

  ‘I’m not complaining. I have a right to a belt for my child.’

  ‘Well, we don’t have one…’ End of conversation.

  But not for her. Undismayed, her language showed she was versed in human rights, and he was versed in … well … what is the opposite, which suggests women should shut up and show respect for the men in charge? We were not going anywhere until they finished. Since they didn’t actually have a child’s seatbelt, he was always going to win. No, customer service isn’t really the key selling point on Kush Air. There wasn’t any copilot – just a young guy to open the door and help him put the steps out, I think. I wondered what would happen if the rather generously-fed-looking pilot had a heart attack. An intere
sting discussion about who had ever flown a plane might ensue.

  After take-off we immediately crossed the White Nile and headed west. Within minutes the cultivated land below disappeared, and everything was green and wild. The forest was vast. There were no signs of any agriculture for as far as the eye could see from the air. It does the heart good to know that nature still has such vast untouched spaces to itself.

  About an hour later it looked as though someone had torn the jungle apart to reveal hundreds and hundreds of little wild mushrooms. But the mushrooms were a city, almost entirely made up of traditional round (and a few square) mud huts. The thatched roofs were long – a South Sudanese style of lowhanging roofing I’ve not seen elsewhere. We were arriving at the city of Yambio, the capital of Western Equatoria.

  Leaving the airport, the main street seemed like a movie set for a cheap Western. Cattle and rural scenes were poking through in between the buildings. The shop verandahs leant on their concrete elbows, watching the people walk by on the red dirt road, waiting for nothing much to happen. And nothing much was happening.

  Yambio. Its title track consisted of the sound of the generators that keep it one step ahead of nature.

  Yet the four-year-old hotel we arrived at was comfortable enough. Desperate for caffeine, I discovered instead a Yambio explanation of why they don’t have coffee: they have an espresso machine, they have beans … but they don’t have the teeth on the coffee grinder and they’re waiting for them to arrive. When? Sometime soon. How long has the espresso machine been broken? No, this was not a meaningful question – and it was politely ignored.

  I later pursued this hint of supply chain challenges to see where it led. When you are running a development project in Western Equatoria, parts for motorbikes, printers, computers, anything that you might need to keep going might be held up in the same shipment as the coffee grinder teeth. Arriving sometime soon.

  A couple of days later we drove north-west along the border with the Central African Republic to explore more of the vast territory where we planned to work. I teamed up with Samar, a program officer from Lebanon I had met years before. The landscape was vast and imposing. A group of us drove for hours along the orange-red roads that ran through chokingly thick forests. It looked as though there were psychotic plants tangled in there trying to pull the trees down to strangle them, with only the strongest trees bursting their heads through to breathe. The roads were fringed with grasses, serious grass up to two or three metres high. Swarms of butterflies created movement, and bright green lizards darted across the road, sitting up on two feet as they went as if they had sticks up their bums.

  Hours down the track we spotted a school and decided to stop. About thirty children were sitting quietly on logs under trees in the middle of nowhere, with their teacher. The teacher was welcoming. The children looked up at us, an inexplicable arrival of people in the middle of their lesson. I later learnt that there are fifty-two schools in this district, but only two of them had classrooms. Just in case you think it sounds like a nature-filled idyll, as a former teacher I can assure you that the concentration levels of children sitting outside are low. Try it. Sit yourself on a cut branch for a few hours and try to work. Did I mention it rains for a minimum of six months each year?

  The children were holding a book, learning English. I asked them some basic questions about the text in front of them, but they didn’t really understand any of it. It’s not surprising. And most children from this area wouldn’t even make it to school. It’s too far, or they’re needed for work, or they walk for hours and the teacher doesn’t come that day. And the children who do come, don’t learn effectively.

  Our projects here could spark a revolution inside these enquiring minds. We have to make this work, I told myself.

  Our next stop was in a small place called Ezo. Officially it has a population of about thirty thousand, and I’m sure that’s true, but I’ve no idea where they were all hiding. It didn’t seem anything like that size.

  Some of our project staff lived in Ezo, mostly in tents and temporary structures, cooking on small improvised mud-brick stoves. Rough and ready. ’Twould be an adventure living like that for a few weeks, maybe. A couple of years might wear you down.

  Samar and I visited the primary school in Ezo. They had buildings, and the students welcomed us with song and dance from the girls. It took a few verses before I realised it was in English. The girls stepped rhythmically as they sang, ‘We welcome you to Ezo Primary School …’ It was beautiful. It was also rather long, as though they had organised how to start but hadn’t discussed how to stop. So, hang it, they just kept going.

  As they sang, we began to realise we had a little problem. We had requested a couple of focus groups of about six to ten students. Instead they had told the entire school they would be part of it. I looked at their eager and expectant faces. We didn’t have the heart to send the rest away, so my brain was whirring, thinking about what to do. The welcome finished, so it was over to me. I played a fun game to involve them all and buy myself thinking time – how to get information out of maybe eighty to a hundred children in an inclusive way. So I started to think wiki.

  We asked any child who walked to school in under thirty minutes to stand under the mango tree. A large group, certainly not the majority, moved over to the tree. How many children take thirty minutes to an hour to come to school? Stand over by the classroom. Now we had more than half. But a very big group of children were still left. One to two hours? A big group. But there were still children left over. So we talked to this group. They told us that some of them walk more than three hours to school. Each way. Each day.

  Samar and I continued to use the students and the schoolyard like a giant human graph on a range of topics – interspersed with some games, songs and also getting specific comments from children. It built a small picture of their life.

  It makes you think. Imagine you’re a parent in Western Equatoria. You want your child to get an education, but do you really want your six-year-old to walk three hours each way, every day? It’s not totally safe, either, particularly for girls. Some girls get abducted. You need older children to look after them. You also need extra pairs of hands to work your land to put food on the table. The choices for parents of poor children are not simple. Walk a mile in their shoes? Try a lifetime.

  We met with various community groups and local authorities. When you’re working with communities, you have to frame your questions so they don’t anticipate what the correct answer is supposed to be, because they might say what they think you want to hear. For example, the authorities here often secondguessed our questions and assured us that there was no problem with community passivity.

  But we started to get different responses from a group of parents and teachers near Ezo.

  ‘On the way here, we passed a school under the trees. But it rains so much here. Why don’t parents get together and build some shelters for the children?’

  Silence. Eventually someone spoke up.

  ‘Ah, but there could be a fire and the building would burn down.’

  It’s hard to argue with that, except why build any structure in the world, because it might burn down? But everyone decided that was their official answer.

  Someone at the next meeting was a little more frank.

  ‘This is not our job. The government should build it.’

  ‘But your government is very new. They have many priorities and little money. Do you think if you wait for them to build the classrooms, it may be too late for your children?’

  This was not a meaningful question and was politely ignored.

  The group didn’t shift from their conclusion. It was the government’s responsibility, not theirs. They stubbed my little question out with the finality of someone finishing their cigarette.

  At one point Samar and I met with the social worker in Ezo town. I was impressed that the world’s newest country already had an office for social welfare. But then we discovered a
man sitting in a small office with very few resources, facing the most overwhelming need. This conversation, more than anything else, helped us understand what life was like for children here, just how lost this generation was. More than half of the children in Ezo were living with someone other than their parents. Many children had little to do except fend for themselves each day. This was one of the most stable states of South Sudan, yet so many of these children were highly vulnerable, with so little certainty for their future.

  From: Brett Pierce

  Date: 25/10/13

  To: Kathleen Pierce

  Subject: Re: Hello in passing

  Hello my sweet.

  Up country it finally started to get rough and I slept in a place with no electricity or running water.

  The vulnerability of the children here would break your heart. More than 50 per cent are living with someone other than their parents. AIDS affected some, the war others, some parents fled during the LRA raids and never returned, others are trying to re-establish their farms and are afraid to take their children back … in the north, of 52 schools only two have buildings. Teachers are untrained and paid little, many didn’t finish primary school. They have classes of 120 in the big schools, and they can’t manage so kids wander around or misbehave. Those are the kids whose parents can pay fees and buy uniforms. Usually not all of the siblings attend, parents have to choose. Others, and those without parents wander around or hang around the market trying to make money. Early pregnancy is common, early marriage is common because girls can bring money to their family, sometimes a choice they make themselves, because at thirteen they are moved outside the boma (small clan). Rape is common, mostly from teenagers.

  The children told me yesterday that some children sleep out, either orphans or have left their family because the parents are too poor to care for them.

  The social worker told us that someone convinced a group of about fifty teenage boys from Ezo to go to the Central African Republic and join the fight to overthrow the government there. Most were killed, others captured and tortured. Only a few escaped to tell the story.