Seed of South Sudan (28 page)

Several years later, in 1991, “We left Ethiopia; we were told we were going to Kenya for education, but it wasn't true.” Eritrean rebels were fighting Ethiopia for independence, and Ethiopia had fallen, deposing John Garang's protector, Mengistu, and the SPLA camps had to move, just as Majok's camp at Pinyudo collapsed and emptied.

“We went to Kapoeta, and it was then when Riek Machar began fighting John Garang and splitting the SPLA. Those siding with Machar deserted the SPLA, so there were fewer soldiers to fight the war with northern Sudan.”
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“John Garang had created the training camps to have soldiers when they became adults, but now he had to deploy them. I helped build a bunker for the assault on the Sudan Armed Forces landing field at Kapoeta,” Ngor said. “These bunkers were made by digging a hole deep into the ground. The Northern Sudan bunkers were made of several layers of reinforcement—trees, dirt, steel roof—they could protect them from anything—except bombs. The SPLA bombed them with BOM30 long-range artillery and the bunkers were destroyed.
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“There were two rows of soldiers ringed around the inside of the circular bunker. I was in the second row. When the attack came
,
people died 10 feet from me. I was estimated to be 13 to 15 years old.”

During the time Ngor was in the camps in Ethiopia, “John Garang came many times to talk to us.

“‘You are the seed of South Sudan,'” he said. ‘You are the engineers, the road builders, the teachers and more.' I was John Garang's bodyguard from 1994 to 1996. We people who knew him personally, it's something we will not forget. He was like George Washington to us.”

Ngor said those in the training camps were allowed to leave periodically and go to school and then come back.

“The way it [training camps] were portrayed in
Emma's War
, children abused and all, it was not like that. You were given a choice,” Ngor said.

While in the training camp in Kapoeta, Ngor and the others were told they were deploying to Bahr el Ghazal, but plans changed when one of the SPLA leaders who had rebelled against Garang returned to the SPLA. Later, in 1996, Ngor acquired travel documents and left and went south to Kenya, to Kakuma Refugee Camp, his first long-term opportunity for going to school and not being in the SPLA.

He found while at Kakuma that both his step-brothers had died in the war, on the same day, in 1990. When his father back in Aliap found out, he had a heart attack and died. His mother died the next year. He has surviving siblings, but has not located his younger brother, believed to be in Khartoum.

Part of the resettlement to Atlanta and Clarkston, Ngor attended high school in DeKalb County and began working for Publix Super Markets, Inc., where he's been employed for 10 years. In 2007, after his first return to southern Sudan in 2006, he and Karen Puckett founded the nonprofit Sudan Rowan, named for her home county in North Carolina. They associated with Mothering Across Continents on a project to build two schools in his home county, the one in the village of Nyarweng, Lubo's home, and a second in Aliap, Ngor's home.

Heavy on his mind is the elders' directive, “Don't forget your people,” and Garang's “You are the seed of South Sudan,” as well as the sacrifice of the lives of his four family members on account of the war. Ngor has worked both in Georgia, keeping his job with Publix, and in North Carolina, helping raise funds there, as well as in his Georgia home for building the schools. In the past year, he has worked as well in Ruweng County, in Unity State, while construction was under way on the first school.

“There were many challenges. The school was started when the border was open,” but now because of both Sudan and South Sudan positioning themselves and engaging in attacks over the control of oil fields not too far away, the border has been closed, so materials could not be brought from the north. Fuel from contractors also became very expensive. But now materials are coming from Uganda (400 miles south) and a road, the first ever in the area, is being built. The UN is building a hard-surfaced road to connect two refugee camps, Yida and Ajuonthok. Yida is a major refugee camp for northern Sudanese from the Nuba Mountains. They fled from Southern Kordofan state in Sudan because of attacks going on from the Bashir regime, continuing to kill its own people. Thousands are being cared for at Yida; there is also a school there, built by UNHCR.

Lubo and Ngor's school, Nyarweng Primary School, was started in 2011; the work slowed in 2012, and the school was constructed finally between February and May of 2013. The school actually began operation in 2012, occupying a building that was not quite finished. For a community that had no school previously, this was a small compromise to make. Finally, the Nyarweng Model School, the first of its kind, is open.

“There are two teachers paid by the state; three are volunteers. There were over 300 students, and they have moved back from Bentiu, the state capital, and other places in Payam district where they had to go to in order to have school,” Ngor said, obviously proud of his and Lubo's work. “Mom and Dad can attend, too!”

The next phase, the school in Aliap, awaits more funding. Mothering Across Continents, Raising South Sudan from Atlanta, and Sudan Rowan will all be involved, as will other volunteers and contributors in the Atlanta and Charlotte communities and around the world.
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What does South Sudan need, and what are its resources to achieve it? In the warm afterglow of independence, many ideas about the new nation and its future have emerged. Everyone is glad to be independent; after a 21-year war, and a six-year transition to independence, northern Sudan no long dictates all affairs in the world's newest country. Now, depending on who is speaking, it is the beginning of a bright new era, or a daunting task. It certainly is both. There are a great many needs, and a tremendous number of new opportunities.

The country is mostly composed of rural villages, with subsistence farming and cattle raising providing the economic activity, although cattle are rarely sold off, unless there are extreme weather conditions resulting in no grain.
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As outlined in the discussion of John Garang's ideas of development for South Sudan, there are many approaches that can be utilized to create an economy based on the rural village and town model, but it will need to be done carefully. Looking at the country as it is, with large swaths of unadulterated land, some cultivated for crops and most for cattle grazing—it has to be remembered that there is no outright land ownership, but only a government-recognized right to use land.

Looking at the situation of South Sudan, with its eons-old traditions of a pastoralist society, now attempting to come of age and develop, next to a relatively advanced country, Sudan, it is possible to compare it to the point when European settlers first came to North America and found Native Americans. At that time, once depredations on either side occurred, the reaction was to conquer and destroy as a way of dealing with the intense differences in the societies. What if, instead of that approach, more advanced social systems for cooperation were used to help bridge the wide differences in capacities for industry, agriculture, commerce and education? What if the conquering groups had done things differently then? What can be done now to help a similar transition among pastoralist communities in South Sudan as they face the challenges of the future?

Conflict within Sudan at the time of this writing, just past the second year of independence for South Sudan, is increasing. Salva Kiir, the president of the Government of South Sudan (GofSS), on July 22, 2013, dismissed a top vice president and former leader of a Civil War revolt against SPLM head John Garang, Riek Machar, and dissolved the government.
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(Garang was Dinka; Kiir is Dinka; Machar is Nuer, the other largest ethnic group in South Sudan.) Meanwhile, articles in the
Sudan Tribune
indicate peaceful efforts to resolve differences.
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Then there are charges from the Sudan government that South Sudan's SPLA are supporting rebel groups in Darfur and in Blue Nile areas of Sudan where groups are organizing and fighting the Sudanese Army to bring about a secularized Sudan. That is the line that Khartoum is using to hold up the talks about dividing revenues from the only oil that either Sudan or South Sudan can currently pump, that lying in the disputed South Kordofan state. These oil fields, at Heglig (Arabic) or Panthou (Dinka) are actually in Ruweng County and are part of South Sudan. Abyei, an area nearby, does not yet have oil drilling, but has oil underground.
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This area was to have its own referendum at the time of the South Sudan independence referendum in 2011, but mapping to define the referendum area was delayed over charges from the Sudan government that Misseriya tribesmen who grazed their livestock there should be included in the electorate. This objection has stopped implementation of referendum guidelines that had been agreed to after extensive mediated negotiations by Khartoum and the SPLM.
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All this points to the biggest, most important issue in South Sudan's economic life: the oil that lay in what was deemed southern Sudan lands was historically pumped north and the revenues supported development in northern Sudan. Now those revenues are needed for schools, government operations, security and the many other needs of a new government for a people totaling an estimated 8 million. But matters are at a stalemate as the Bashir government halted the oil production in April of 2013 and, as of this writing, oil pumping was coming to a total stop.

Control of oil so that South Sudan could support itself was one of the main reasons for the Second Civil War. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement hammered out between Sudan and the SPLA after lengthy negotiations and signed in 2005 left the borders between the two countries subject to further discussions, and those talks have not resulted in a solution, as noted above. Without oil, the new country has no revenues. They have to resolve the issues of sharing revenues and the status of the lands themselves before World Bank loans or any other consistent form of funding government operations can be realized.

In the meantime, the efforts to educate young people, a hope of all who worked for conclusion of the war, is greatly affected by the stalemate. For the new model school that Lubo and Ngor worked on, there is the achievement of a large facility with four classrooms and housing for teachers to be proud of, together with a rebored well and latrines, offering a great improvement in village sanitation. This was paid for by individual donor and grant contributions to the Raising South Sudan project of MAC and partner nonprofit Sudan Rowan, based in Salisbury, North Carolina. Yet the teachers are still often volunteers. For a new school, the GofSS commits to pay the salary of the headmaster and at most one or two other teachers. As the government struggles to generate revenues, these are not the most secure incomes.
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Salaries are 300 South Sudanese pounds, or about $75 U.S. a month.
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Numbers of people in the United States have raised the question, why don't the Lost Boys go back to South Sudan and help the country? In many cases, they have, but in others, the lack of infrastructure and jobs that will pay consistently and well keep them from doing this. They are able to send significant parts of their U.S. salaries back to South Sudan, and that has resulted in more cash being available in the local economy. Lost Boys pay for medical care and some of the conveniences mentioned in Majok's story of his family and his marriage and child. According to Mothering Across Continents Executive Director Patricia Shafer, there are project manager jobs available due to the building of a new pipeline from South Sudan to an Indian Ocean outlet either in Kenya or Ethiopia. Lubo, for instance, is employed in Unity State as a community development project manager by a Chinese oil firm.

But like much in South Sudan, things change rapidly from the original announced plans. Seeking to maintain job security, many Lost Boys stay on in the United States believing they can do more good for their families from overseas.
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Schools, water wells, clinics, scholarships to send South Sudanese students of promise to advanced education for the country's needs—all these are either delayed or just barely being provided in South Sudan today while the resolution of oil revenues disputes are being attempted. Still down the road are plans John Garang outlined and others have suggested to reform and improve the way farmers produce crops. Getting to a crop surplus situation where excess can become a major product for markets is still a way off. Creating a tourism industry that will take advantage of the wildlife in the vast areas of the countryside and the traditional ceremonial life in villages is still to come.