The war in South Sudan

Uganda 🇺🇬 “I went from earning a living in South Sudan in a white collar job in the bank to being a hawker in the streets of Gulu, Uganda, selling pancakes and tea. I was selling tea from the streets for a year until 2017. In the process of selling my tea, I sold a pancake to a gentleman, who was driving this pick-up. So he loved it. So he called for more. So I came to sell more. That’s how I got to know him and I discovered that he is a spouse to a friend of mine. So when he discovered that connection, he started enquiring more from the friend. He asked her what is her career? He arranged for me to help with data entry at a Japanese organisation called Jeita. When they saw that my work was good. They enrolled me to do the same work at Terra Renaissance, NGO established in Japan to support the self-reliance of conflict victims in six countries in Africa and Asia.

It had all started in the area where we lived in Centre 107 in Juba, South Sudan. War broke out during the night. There were gunshots throughout the night. At the time, I was working in Equity Bank in Juba town. I left in the morning to go to work and I was stopped on the way. There were so many soldiers, government soldiers of course and soldiers from the Sudan People's Liberation Army. There were so many on the roads and they stopped the taxi that carried the passengers, of which I was one. So I came back home and many things were not fine. My spouse was about to be killed. This war in South Sudan is an ethnic war. It’s about Nuer and Dinka. My husband is from the Nuer tribe and that is the side of Riek Machar. Most of the government soldiers that were fighting were Dinkas. They took him and they were about to kill him. I ran to someone who was also a soldier, who was passing by. I talked to him. He is from another tribe, a government soldier, but neither Nuer nor Dinka. The tribe is called Bari. He came to our rescue. He picked my spouse up and took him to his residence. He was kept indoors for about a week, shut in the house. The soldiers were hunting for him. He is a lawyer by profession and they knew him. So they were looking for him to kill him. So through friends he escaped and he was sent to Nairobi. I left in 2013 in December and came back to Uganda, to my mother’s land. A few months later, I travelled to Nairobi where he was and we stayed there for 2 years. Then I came back to Uganda. I left him in Nairobi and began my life in Uganda.”