South Sudan: Round 2

Like a bad penny, I turn up in South Sudan again. I was fortunate enough to be given a job in an monitoring and evaluation department for an NGO in Juba. As I shall be posted around the country on various missions, I can happily say that the Guerilla Researcher has been resurrected!

Things have changed in my new position, and I wonder how I will match up to this task? I manage more people, do more paperwork, and will have to take a step back from most field operations. I will be doing enough grunt work to deserve the title of this blog still, but will have try damn hard to get to the stories worth writing about.

This resurrection is a welcome one for me. Leaving my last job put me in a position of freedom, but after about a month I got really bored. I am very glad to be back here, but my journey was preceded by three reminders that I believe affect any and all expat aid workers. In this work, I have come into contact with many more people in a short space of time than I feel I would have done if I had a job that kept me stationary, and close to the friends of home. Social circles, although not to close, expand very fast. I have mixed with people that like to, or are forced to live in dangerous places. Higher morality rates abound.

And I have lost three people.

I don’t want to claim sympathy, or play on the heart strings. I know that there are others out there that have a much greater right to grief than I do for these souls. But let me tell you a little about them:

I worked with a translator, that I shall call Dom, on one long project in South Sudan. He was a person who was not just a translator, but also an intermediary, guide and fixer while he worked with me. We had to spend a lot of time together, sleeping in the same tukuls for weeks. He was a clever man. A talented translator, able to speak several languages. A man who contributed greatly to the success of the aid programmes in his homeland. There was trouble though, in his life and habits. The trouble came in the form of regular consumption moonshine.  After spending several days in Camp 15, the closest thing you will ever see to a wildwest town, the local brew got to him. No family or friends were around to take him to the far distant clinic when he started being sick from the home-brewed alcohol. I hear it took a few days.

Rafe, another translator, is a really cool guy. He is the only South Sudanese man I have met here with dreds plaited into his hair. We took a long journey to a remote village, a journey which took us through his home town. When we got to his town we were forced to stay for a few days while the local authorities checked us out. People in this part of the world are suspicious. We stayed with his family, and his father became one of my interviews. An elderly man, cane, dusty had, suit jacket. Knowledgeable guy. The town held a small barracks for troops. A couple of months after I stayed in the Rafe’s home some kind of gunfight erupted in the street, and the thin wood and tin walls offered no protection for his father.

You won’t have had a chance to hear about Dom, or Rafe’s father. They are people that were too far away. However, there is a chance you heard about my next loss. Unusually for this column, I can provide her real name. Camille LePage was a young photojournalist. Born in France, educated in England, a fierce and fearless advocate for action and change. She worked in South Sudan, travelling independently to the furthest and most dangerous areas, looking for under reported stories to tell of struggle and conflict. The youths that raided for cattle. The tribesmen and women who hid from artillery shelling in caves. She traveled a lot in the short time that I had known her, going from hotspot to hotspot in search of stories, then flying to New York and Paris to tell them. I have not been able to find out what killed her, but it happened when she had to go off the radar, searching for people in CAR who had been the target of a militia raid. Her body was found by peacekeeping troops, in a car being driven by rival militia members. She was usually laughing at something. Often worried about the success of her pictures. Always overcoming fear of danger. Somehow, the danger caught her.

Others were much more deeply involved with these remarkable people than I, but I feel I am going to have to watch out for loss over the course of this career I am still only just beginning.