I read an article a few weeks ago celebrating that New Zealand had been named the 4th safest country in the world. Not really surprising in my biased view. However, the article also listed the 5 most dangerous countries. South Sudan came in at number two, surrounded by Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. Surely not this country where I wake up in the morning to the sound of the chickens scratching in the dirt, the children singing in the distance and the neighbours calling out greetings as they walk to their plots of land. Surely not in this place where I walk into town, stopping a dozen times to shake hands with the kids who run out to greet me, where I haggle about the price of cloth I want to buy and laugh at the marriage proposals and greet some ex-patient whom I cannot remember but who knows my name. This place, my home: more dangerous than Afghanistan and Iraq and Somalia? Countries that are synonymous in my mind with security escorts and bombs and terror and anarchy and fear. Surely not!
Ok, so we have not been able to travel by road recently to Uganda due to bandits along the road. And a good proportion of our staff members have lost a family member in fighting over the last couple of years. And a teammate has not been able go to his farm 30 miles down the road due to insecurity there. And we did receive patients that had fled into the bush from fighting 50 miles away in the other direction.
But still –worse than Iraq?
But, then it was the 5th independence day of South Sudan. And troops in Juba started fighting each other. Again. And a small skirmish became hundreds of people dead. And staff members on leave in Juba were ringing us telling about being unable to get food or water while the bullets and bigger killing instruments flew around them.
And though the bullets arching through Juba’s skies did not reach the 100 miles to here, the fear has. The paths have become full with people walking with their possessions bundled into plastic basins on their heads. Heading to the bush. Heading to the village. Heading to Uganda. Searching for safety, for where the fear will not hold them.
Hate has broken out as well. Fighting elsewhere has provided the excuse to take out that neighbour from that tribe, who did such and such last year. Or at least to keep the shop shut so that that tribe cannot buy any food and hunger will bite even harder than before.
And the despair starts reaching in, even to those who do not flee. What hope is there for this country? Will this baby taking their first gasp in my hands today ever get to live in a place where they know peace? Or will they too grow up knowing what it means to run to the bush as the rumours fly and people with guns loot and the rumble in the distance could be a bomb instead of thunder.
Yet, as I sit and ponder, butterflies dance in the breeze as my passionfruit ripens on the vine to the sound of children playing in the dirt. Is this just a mirage?
How do I describe this country of my heart? What reality, the butterflies or the bullets, do I let be my story? Or is reality not one or the other, but both. The intricate pattern of a butterfly wing can exist in the midst of brokenness. Fear can empty a town and yet there is one who says “Do not fear”. There is evil, and oh such evil, but there is still an 810 gram baby blinking out from under the blankets in our ward.
And the darkness will not triumph in the end.
Life Down the Rutted Red Road 