The jade green mountains of South Sudan tower in the background as the distribution truck pulls into the designated site in Ikotos town center. People have already started to gather under the shade of a nearby tree: women in bright fabrics with babies cradled on their backs; men in rubber sandals and ratty t-shirts printed with messages like “Indiana Hawks League Championship;” and elderly Sudanese with walking sticks as knotted as their own dark skin.

Once a small crowd has collected, staff members from the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) open the back of the lorry and, consulting the list of names that was formed in cooperation with the local government authorities, begin dispensing food, seeds, axes, and hoes to those in attendance. People use whatever they have—buckets, empty sacks, big squares of cloth—to receive their rations. One by one the names are signed off, and people begin their long walks home under the scorching African sun, modest bundles in tow.

For the families here, the displaced and dispossessed of South Sudan, this is the reality of returning home after decades in exile—it is not exotic, or glamorous, or inspirational. The needs are basic; the suffering is acute. The LWF Uganda/Sudan, a non-missionary NGO with the aim of serving the most vulnerable people of Uganda and South Sudan, is working to change that.

The distribution of relief items is just one of the LWF’s activities in the Eastern Equatoria region of South Sudan; the project also encompasses education, health, HIV/AIDS, capacity building, and water and sanitation. The Uganda/Sudan country program is itself only a small part of the LWF’s global endeavors, working through its humanitarian arm, the Department of World Service (DWS), in 24 countries worldwide.

The needs of vulnerable people in South Sudan are particularly great. Millions of people were forced to flee their lands during the twenty-year conflict between the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and the Khartoum government—one of Africa’s longest-running civil wars. In Ikotos county, those who stayed took flight into the nearby mountains; others chose the route into Northern Uganda into crowded refugee camps, where many remained in exile for ten years or more.

“The camps got worse after 1998,” says Martin Lomina Wani, a refugee who spent fifteen years in a camp in Adjumani, North Uganda. He is now a Project Officer for the LWF in Ikotos. “The SPLA was recruiting heavily among the people there. I was lucky to go to secondary school. When food rations were cut, things were very difficult. People had nowhere to farm, and no way of earning any income. But the rebels were occupying our lands—where could we go?”  Read More...