(Image Credit: vettimes.co.uk )
Taking myself back to the time, I am sitting under the shade of an enormous mango tree, not far away from the Bahr el Jebel tributary of the River Nile.
Sitting beside me is my humanitarian counterpart from the Relief Association of Southern Sudan. He’s a seasoned pastoralist and a man who has endured more than his fair share of harrowing experiences, as a member of “the lost generation” of South Sudan’s civil war.
We are in a village called Nyal (meaning “rain” in the Nuer language), which forms itself into an island surrounded by flood at times like this during the rainy season. In what has already been a particularly protracted civil war, Nyal today is a haven of peace in the surrounding fire of conflict. But even this village is not safe, because the engulfing fires of war here are as ever changing as the winds that fan them.
Consider my counterpart’s history in a little more detail: it makes for a typical read about people’s lives around these parts. His family dispersed when the fire front of conflict engulfed his region. On return to his village months later, everything about its face had changed. He had lost all his livestock – which still remains among the least of his concerns. Far more serious, his mother and sisters had not returned and, at the time of our working together, he had received no news of their whereabouts for years. Imagine the grief of not knowing what had befallen them – at best they could be holed up in a sprawling refugee camp; at worst they could have perished.
My counterpart was lucky to still be alive, but then again, when you look at the lot of his people in South Sudan, perhaps he wasn’t so lucky after all. In the muggy heat, another mango fruit hits the ground, barely missing the rickety bench on which we sit. Because of the heat, we ignore this “god-given” sweetener of sun-ripened food. Both of our minds, instead, seem to be cast out well beyond this immediate piece of shade as if somehow – miraculously – reason will emerge from out of the haze ahead.
We stare into the heat of the day, wondering why South Sudan’s situation has turned out so bad. Some elements of humanity are dealt such a horrible hand, and that of South Sudan’s populace is among the worst that anyone has ever been dealt.
In the 25 years of my counterpart’s life, only nine of them have seen a semblance of peace. Since we parted company, he would go on to endure 10 more years of civil war. The truth is, I still know not whether he survived. I hope he would forgive me for publicising the tumult of his life, but it does typify the recent history of the country in which he was born.
As a mark of initiation into adulthood, young Nuer men apply ash to encourage scarring of characteristically parallel cut lines to their forehead.
Perpetual curse
Judging by the distant past, it seems like parts of the Sudan have been put under a perpetual curse.
The Nubian people, for example, have been plucked from their homes and enslaved since the days of ancient Egyptian civilisation. Nilotic people were “recruited” in large numbers into the slave-trading industry of the Ottoman Empire. Not much for the outside world to be proud about, even though Samaritans such as David Livingstone did devote their lives to the cause of trying to put a stop to slavery.
Ever since those Ottoman days, South Sudan has been quarrelled over and its people have been victims of the ugly scramble for Africa that took place onwards from the late 19th century. Foreign interests carved the countryside up, annexed pieces, formed enclaves out of it, subjected it to condominium–style foreign governance, exerted protectorate claims over it and – most recently – they have even tried to impose religious law upon its people. In the process, the indigenous people have been treated like nothing other than carcase pickings in such vulture squabbles. Those of southern and western Sudan in particular have had their resources pillaged and plundered, and their villages have repeatedly been bombed and razed to the ground.
Even in times of peace, the peoples of South Sudan have recurrently been betrayed and deceived, and in times of war, they have been raped, subjected to mass genocide and even to slavery in its modern forms. Two all-out civil wars have raged between the people of the south and the Arab north (the first war lasting between 1956 and 1972 and the second between 1983 and 2005). Even today, the government of the new Sudan is engaged in conflict that could once again escalate into all-out war.
In a determined bid to learn more about the lives of the Nilotic people, I worked in humanitarian and livestock health-related capacities in southern Sudan for a substantial period of time, when the country was just more than halfway through its second civil war. In those 12 years since fighting had broken out again, the lives of the people there had descended so far backwards as to be reminiscent of the times before the discovery of metal and modern medicine.
Apart from the lifeline afforded by international relief efforts, there were no hospitals and no local doctors in a land of more than six million people. A whole generation had gone without schooling and almost every road had either been mined or had simply been reclaimed by overgrowing bush. Not even a single building had been left standing. Worst of all, every time people tried to build up a herd of cattle or sheep and goats, or grow sorghum to get them through the leanest times, fresh outbreaks of fighting would force those people to become displaced en masse – leaving them destitute and in danger of starving. Millions of them have indeed succumbed to famine.
Even without the trials of war, South Sudan’s climate is hostile enough, every year delivering the recurrent floods marooning people to little islands, followed by protracted dry periods that scorch the earth, reducing the soil to a fissured clay. The dry heat and desiccating wind is indescribably harsh in the dry season, and in the wet season the combined heat and humidity verge on the unbearable.
To this discomfort, now throw in practically every type of biting insect under the sun in the region. There are literally plagues of little flies – perfect vectors for spreading typhoid, cholera and the like. Of the painful or itchy sort, there are blackflies, horse flies, tsetse flies, camel flies and mosquitoes by the millions – all of which can reduce you to a state of insanity.
Then there are ticks, which latch on as you unknowingly walk through the grass. Retire to bed, only to find that more mosquitoes and bed bugs can make life hell at night.
Most cursed of all, South Sudan is the one place where just about every disease afflicting people seems to have congregated in a single spot. Innocent people by the thousands are eaten alive by the likes of guinea worms, which cause horrendous suffering and disfigurement on their migration path through the human body. Even worse for their intractability are the likes of kala azar (also known as visceral leishmaniasis) and river blindness (otherwise known as systemic onchocerciasis) – two diseases that happen to be vectored by biting insects. Walk through the bush – as I did in certain hotspots of South Sudan – and you will find yourself entering this region’s take on Russian roulette.
Unhealthy animals means unhealthy people
Cattle are very much the mainstay of food security in South Sudan. They provide a vital source of nutrition through milk (particularly for children), trade for grain and, occasionally, from meat and blood.
However, herds were threatened by war, floods and disease – particularly the dreaded virus, rinderpest. This disease has now been eradicated, but at the time, it could kill up to 90% of stock in rapid-moving epidemics. There still remain, however, a plethora of other particularly debilitating livestock diseases which still need to be contended with – particularly peste des petits ruminants (the small stock equivalent of rinderpest), contagious bovine and caprine pneumonia, haemorrhagic septicaemia, anthrax, bluetongue, east coast fever, trypanosomiasis, heartwater (anaplasmosis), foot-and-mouth disease, extreme tick burdens and severe helminthiasis (particularly liver flukes). Pastoralists also contend with debilitating zoonoses such as Q fever, leptospirosis, brucellosis and tuberculosis, all of which can be contracted from cattle. Everyone consuming freshly collected milk and children who bathe themselves in cattle urine (try hand-carting water over enormous distances to see the rationale for this) are at particularly elevated risk of contracting such diseases.
The Nuer and Dinka people of South Sudan are semi-nomadic herds-people, whose cattle and small stock share their dwellings – or “luaks” – during the wet season.
My own work covered an area the size of France. In a nutshell, working with the World Food Programme under the umbrella of a multi-agency response programme (termed Operation Lifeline Sudan, or OLS) I was responsible for appraisal of food security relating to livestock health, agriculture, fishing and traditional food collection. My job involved developing food deficit predictions, facilitating animal health related programmes in all their various guises, and overseeing ensuing food distributions in areas where deficits indicated that relief would be needed to stave off starvation.
Each of these jobs had very different accompanying demands, but each required enormous responsibility to be shouldered, at tremendous personal risk to life. Unfortunately, there simply were not the resources on hand to ensure that every single community could be properly accounted for.
Being a largely pastoral group of tribes who practis e complex livestock transhumance, food deficit prediction demanded a highly mobile, rapid assessment approach with the facility for a wide scope of geographical coverage. It hinged on participatory methods of assimilating information from local informants and demanded an in-depth understanding of all the factors determining food security – particularly an intimate knowledge of the pastoral systems and “food calendars” peculiar to every area, and knowledge of the animal diseases endemic (or epidemic) to each region.
Animal health interventions
By far, the biggest veterinary intervention I had involvement with was working alongside seven other agencies (principally UNICEF and Save the Children, in partnership with the Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association) towards the eradication of rinderpest through vaccination for containment, and to firewall against further spread of the disease.
In the years that I worked in southern Sudan, more than three million cattle were vaccinated against rinderpest through what amounted to a logistically challenging programme of cold chain maintenance and delivery, involving vaccination training programmes and complex participatory outreach to pastoralists and to recruit their cattle into the vaccination programme. This had to be streamlined as part of a cross-sectional, multi-agency response and was done under the coordinated guise of the OLS planning team. Often, the cold chain was done in conjunction with public health efforts to extend the delivery of measles vaccine.
Sometimes, we simply could not get the vaccines to the cattle. Advancing waves of conflict, sudden escalations, floods, damage to vehicles over extreme terrain (there are 40km of paved roads in an area three times the size of Britain) and risks of land mines all interfered with the cold chain delivery process.
Vaccination services were also extended to vaccinate against or treat several of the other major livestock diseases previously mentioned. By far, the biggest extension method employed to do this involved training in attempts to employ the most sustainable methods of development of a service of community health workers and veterinary assistants across the various ethnic regions of southern Sudan. This process continues today, but with better local veterinary oversight. In the relative but fragile peace that prevails, the University of Juba has established a degree programme with the vision of training students to become skilled veterinarians with competencies to be able to answer the needs of pastoralists in disease diagnoses, prevention and control, and to provide knowledge and technological skills needed to enhance innovation for better livelihoods of the South Sudanese people.
Although much progress has been made, enormous extension-related challenges associated with the servicing of pastoral communities continue to be particularly apparent in South Sudan. The dynamic and fragile security situation (which can change so quickly) can hinder access and movement of veterinary personnel, equipment and drugs. This can lead to a decrease in the quality and availability of veterinary care, and make it more difficult to control the spread of animal diseases.
Risks of these increase with the displacement of people and animals, the destruction of infrastructure, and the lack of sanitation to mitigate the transmission of zoonotic diseases.
Epidemics can be propagated as a result, and a case in point is with the management of foot-and-mouth disease. South Sudan harbours four of the five serotypes and several “novel” topotypes of this virus, with the threat of spread of new topotypes within the region. One topotype, formerly restricted to the Equatoria region of South Sudan, has relatively recently spread rapidly with terrible consequence into other parts of the country. To control foot-and-mouth disease requires identifying the strand, conducting regular vaccinations and treatment with antibiotics – an enormous task in a context where veterinary services remain extremely limited.
Another disease, east coast fever (transmitted by ticks), was also once contained in Greater Equatoria, but it has over the past decade spread into livestock populations in Jonglei and Lakes State, causing a particularly devastating number of livestock deaths.
Dovetailing animal health interventions with food security
Great efforts were made to coordinate emergency responses with follow-up “rehabilitative” efforts, and the prediction work was again undertaken as a multi-agency, integrated programme with animal health outreach, health clinics, public health programmes and the input of various forms of agricultural expertise.
One particularly innovative and successful programme that I was particularly impressed with involved enhancement of the ability of “at-risk” pastoralists to look after themselves by distributing fishing and mosquito nets at traditional fishing camps. At these times, the men and boys would leave the herds in attendance of women and children, and use this as a coping mechanism to reduce dependence on the livestock herds.
Food deficit prediction and animal health work both place many thousands of lives in your hands, for food relief and other forms of support can either save or “break” target communities. Give it where it isn’t needed and you may just have been responsible for generating an “aid junkie” type of dependence on help. In so doing, you will be undermining the coping mechanisms of people who may otherwise have managed without philanthropy.
On the other hand, too conservative an estimate of the status of food security (or failure to satisfactorily raise the “system alarms”) may make you responsible for starvation. Indeed, three years after my departure from Sudan, a mass famine struck and a conservative estimate put the loss of life to starvation at more than 70,000 people in a matter of months – largely because the international community developed a sense of “listening fatigue”.
As far as jobs go, the humanitarian and livestock health-related part that I played was the most emotionally charged work that I’ve ever done, for in this case, my work dealt largely with the protection of human life. For once, I could put myself into the shoes of my “subjects” on this occasion and see what life would be like for them without external help. Those who save human life in their line of work will truly understand what I mean.
To put things into their proper perspective, the highs of the work brought absolute elation, but the lows could be particularly difficult to come to terms with, even now. I have memories of children with beaming smiles – children who were once reduced to skin and bone, and who owe their lives to the work of the humanitarian team of which I was a part.
Equally so, though, I still remain harrowed and haunted by images of blanched skeletons covered with flapping rags of cloth, strewn out across sun-cracked soil. There was always the possibility that people may have perished – albeit in the face of dire circumstance – should there have been any oversights in our predictions or responses.
The protracted conflict in southern Sudan forced the “introversion” of its peoples back to their traditional ways of living, purely as a survival mechanism. Each of the tribes effectively had to lean heavily once again on custom and traditional knowledge – both powerful coping mechanisms for surviving in an environment that has missed out entirely on all the developments that most others take for granted. Somewhat paradoxically, due to the war, the cultural identities of the region’s peoples have been better retained than in many other parts of Africa.
To be privy to such an uncorrupted set of cultures, in an area so out of bounds and so isolated from outside influence, was one of the most exceptional privileges I’ve ever been granted.
My own life, working among the Nuer, Dinka, Burun, Murle and Lotuko people, was one lived out of a small tin trunk with food and a change of clothes; it was a life where home was my trusty camp bed, a mosquito net and the luxury of having a sweaty tent in the rainy season. Landing on many of the cleared bush airstrips was unnerving enough, and there is something sobering about being left in the middle of proverbial nowhere, only to see the trail of aircraft exhaust fading into the horizon as the last and disappearing lifeline of contact with the outside world.
In the meantime, we organised the logistics of food distributions and coordinated our pick-ups by radio, sometimes in the face of fresh waves of fighting. I even nearly missed my own wedding after becoming marooned in the Lotuko mountains when the bush airstrip became too muddy for most of the service planes to land – so many thanks to a brave pilot and his Twin Otter aircraft for delivering me to what would otherwise have been a seething spouse-to-be.
Idea of a rewarding job
Food deficit prediction work certainly wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of a rewarding job – especially if you have to sustain more than the occasional scorpion sting in the line of work.
I regularly had scorpions resting up under my camp bed during the rainy season and I was luckily saved, once, from entering my tent when an enormous spitting cobra had just slunk into it. There is nothing gratifying at all about what it took to get the job done, with countless hours spent making sure that food distributions did not surreptitiously go sideways into military hands – especially when there was always the risk of argumentative escalation among the trigger-happy soldiers who milled around.
My kidneys, however, were the parts of me that sustained the most gruelling time, having been so seriously and chronically dehydrated by the fierce sun and having been totally rattled into my backbone by terrain that broke many a chassis of the hardiest of four-wheel drives. To top it all, driving down the Jonglei canal was probably the most nerve-racking experience of my life – especially given that it was done on the mere presumption that our local counterpart knew “roughly” where all the land mines had been laid.
The rewards from this kind of work, however, are to have the ultimate pride-bringing prize in your memories. To have brought people right back from the brink of famine and to have been such an unimposing observer to some of the world’s most uncorrupted of cultures are memories I shall cherish forever, for these are good memories which have come out of this Darfur of yesteryear.
I have done my bit to help people in a war where more than two million people have died, and more than four million have become refugees as a result of the civil war and its war-related impacts. I was once even privy to have been shown one of the Nuer people’s most sacred of sites, the burial mound of the Nuer prophet Ngundeng at Deng Kur.
As a place that had become an important political symbol of resistance to outside imposition, for any foreigner to have been shown it was a privilege that would only have been bestowed upon someone who had gained the trust of the Nuer people.
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