Talking Peace

Portraits and interviews with those who’ve fled South Sudan

Interviews by Rachel Lees of the Christian Aid Collective, photographs by Tom Price.

Over a period of 25 years, thousands have fled the violent conflict happening in their home of South Sudan and sought refuge in the UK. Last year, these people organised an important gathering to talk about the current conflict and the road to peace. They met in a London church and we were privileged to be invited along.

They shared their stories of home with each other and debated how to achieve justice, reconciliation, peace and unity for all South Sudanese. Below are some of their thoughts.

Martha Abraham

Atrocities have been done in our country, even now I don’t even know if my family are alive or dead because there is no contact with them.

I try to go to work every day — I go to work in the school as a kitchen assistant — but in the back of my mind think about my family and the way they are living in South Sudan. That’s why I want this peace to come. It doesn’t matter how it is going to come but it has to come because the poorest, they are the ones who are suffering.

Being South Sudanese is a great gift. I am here today living in the UK. I was not born in Britain but they respected me as a citizen. Where I am living now, I’ve got a lot of friends from different ethnic backgrounds, they could be Bangladeshi, British, from the midlands, Yorkshire — anywhere and they are still my friend because we are sharing and living in the same country and we have respect between us. That’s what unites us as human beings. You respect me and I respect you.

For me the peace is very important to come. That’s how I see it. Maybe one day if we come together and unite together as community, the peace will come.

Bona Bal Nyang

My name means adventure in English.

Even after the peace, the independence, very little development has been done there. The roads are bad, there are no schools, no hospitals — it is still as bad as it was before the war.

But it is, it is beautiful. But what is beauty when there is no development?

We pray, we pray, we pray. We are hopeful. The best thing that God has given us is hope — without hope the heart will break — so we are hoping. We are a people who God has given resilience and hopefully, peace will come, God willing, peace will come. Manmade disaster has an end, it is God made things which does not end, so we are hopeful.

Jackson Lokong

My story isn’t really that interesting so to speak, but it’s interesting enough, it’s interesting enough.

From a young age I have been by myself, I’m a self-made man. I made me.

This is the problem: in South Sudan people don’t want to let go. It’s not that hard to talk it out, it’s not that hard. It’s actually harder to go to war — it would cost you a lot more money to go to war. A lot more bodies, a lot more youths dying.

Youths are dying.

What’s the future if the youths are dying and the best jobs that are paying you is the army and there is a war going on? What are you gonna do? You are going to join the army to feed your family. And you join the army and that might be you gone. And from you gone, whose feeding your family? No one. Before you know it there will be no one left.

Amanda Paul & Kabung Lomodong

Amanda

South Sudan from our birth coloured our life pattern because we were exiles. It wasn’t that our parents chose to come here as economic immigrants — we were forced to come here because they were refugees. It took a while to be proud of being South Sudanese. It took a long time even to be proud to be African before even being South Sudanese because being African is being South Sudanese for me.

Kabung

To come to a point where now we can say, you know what I am South Sudanese and we are standing for peace and unity and justice — everything like that — I think it is an amazing thing to come so far and I’m proud. I have come to a point where I have accepted that this has happened, it doesn’t have to be the future but we can actually make a difference from this generation.

Linda Paul

It’s not impossible. It’s a journey but it’s not impossible.

There is hope.

Opiny Kwawang

My story? I’m a refugee and a dual citizen.

I’m a human. I want every passport. I don’t get the division — like even looking at history, the world split up and the oceans opened and everything like that. I’m a bit of a physicist at heart, time space and continuum, you know what I mean. Being a human is what we are. That is our identity. It’s not South Sudanese, it’s not English, it’s not British or whatever. It’s just human. There is nothing else.

War is bad, end of story.

Gina Abbe

I was taken as a child as a refugee. Then I grew up and came back and it started again. The war started again.

Everybody was so happy and then suddenly this happens. You can’t even lift your head, you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t even want to hear about it because they’ve really let us down, and you know what it is? It’s just greed and power.

You cannot reconcile without having remorse. Without accepting that you’ve done something wrong, without accepting that you’ve killed a human, that you’ve taken a human life — and not even one or two but in abundance.

I’ve got 100% hope for the country. Peace is going to come there. But the only way of how the peace will come is that it has to come from within us.

Aru Muortat

My family came here initially because of my grandfather who was a political refugee.

My Dad married here, my Mum’s an English woman. However, growing up we’ve always been connected to South Sudan.

South Sudanese are not really immigrants; they are refugees, so they have a strong connection to their home. They have such a sense of pride and (when politicians aren’t dividing them) they are joined as one.

Young people are really the future. A lot of us have been raised here in the west, we’ve been raised as one, the way we see each other is different to how our parents see each other, because we don’t see any differences between ourselves. If we can keep that between our youth, we’re the leaders of tomorrow. It’s a golden opportunity, a fresh start, so really we’re the future.

Georgette Roro

A bit of my story? Actually I’ve been living here in London for nearly 20 years. I went back home to the new capital of South Sudan, Juba. I spent five years over there and it was one of my nightmare experiences.

I of course wanted to go and contribute to the nation building over there, so I went there and was so excited. I took everything.

I lived in one of the worst conditions ever, you won’t believe it. My toilet was a bucket because I moved to a place where people are really struggling to make ends meet, to the extent where children would just go outside and ‘do their needs’. I had a very painful experience in South Sudan and when the conflict and the crisis of 2013 took place I was still there… but I couldn’t carry on so I had to come back.

The good news about me having that negative experience is that I really get to feel for the poor and I took it as a really spiritual experience, thinking ‘maybe God wants me to see it so I can try and do something.’ So I take it as a negative experience but in the meantime I think sometimes it is good to live in the condition of such people so that you can really know.

Elizabeth Ajith

We say — Ok, human beings they can make mistakes, but if you have faith in God, God has the ultimate power and he can change whatever you think is bad into something you never believe one day is going to happen and that is why we just put our faith in God.

And when we meet and pray we will ask God to touch our leader’s heart and to look at the suffering of our people because our leaders are not suffering, they are not affected by this. They have the headache but they don’t feel the suffering. They are eating, they have their houses, they have electricity, the mosquitos are not biting them.

Unfortunately things are wrong but we are still optimistic that as long as we have faith in God, God will change things.

Father Mark Longwa

Going to refugee camps to minister was a blessing because we were once refugees too.

You see, we go and we encourage them and say that war will come to an end one day so let’s keep hope alive — we shall not lose your hope and we shall be like the children of Israel who were in exile. They were in our neighbouring country Egypt and Jesus was there as a refugee too — can you imagine that?

It is 70 years now since the second world war stopped. So I am very optimistic and am sure that the young generation will come and they will see peace. It is just a matter of time and we are going through that and I am sure getting out of this we will be more united than before. You see we have learned from our mistake and we have seen it and it is a manmade disaster. It is not from heaven, it is not from God and it is not from satan either. We made it by ourselves so we shall blame ourselves and we shall ask God to forgive us — he is always there, he is always there.

Aluk Thiep

All my hopes and dreams are about home.

I didn’t know that I’m going to leave my country one day and come and live somewhere else. The diaspora. That’s never been my dream. So my dream has actually been stolen from me, I feel like it’s been stolen from me.

I worked with the UN since I was 16, so I want to go back there and become ambassador. I want to go and be a UN member and work with children.

After becoming independent we should start to reconcile, start to have peace, love, rebuilding, and then we start to teach our children. Because the children are the future at the moment.

Amal Ajang

In Malakal there is a park. People go there and dance there. All the communities together, Shilluk, Nuer, and Dinka, they danced.

But now they turn against each other. And that’s really the saddest story.

During the war I came to this country. At that time I was young and it’s a long time that I stayed here. I want to go back, if you could undo what happened and return to normal life as it was before. Unified. People dancing together. Bathing together in the Nile.

But these days these things cannot happen because if women are going to the river by themselves they will be raped.

We don’t want anything, we just want to go to our places, we want normality, we want the war to end.

Miri Samuec

I am very passionate and I love my country of South Sudan.

I want to use the experience that I have learnt here, the great opportunity to be in a developed country, to take this experience and our expertise back home to work with youths. To help them develop and get to a position where they are doing well for themselves so they gain that voice in South Sudan and in society and hopefully then grow in to new leaders and make a difference and continue the great chain.

You are young but you also bring something to the table, you also bring an experience that is going to help us all move together because I believe that the women, the men and even the youth are all part of a greater vision and that if we work together we are able to learn from each other.

The same way that adults have great experience that they are able to pass down to us, of the war that we weren’t part of, and personal experiences that we never had, the young people have a perspective, with the development of new technologies, in how we saw our parents being affected, and by mixing with different cultures — giving us an outside experience that we can bring in.