Sudan

Sudan, the largest country in Africa, is a time-bomb set to go off next year.

2011 was the date specified under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (widely referred to as the CPA) signed five years ago by the warring North and South. On that date, the South can vote to secede from a confederation that everyone acknowledges is a marriage of convenience, at best.

As our white Toyota land cruiser drove on the freshly laid road from the market town of Akon towards Ariang village, we noticed something far on the horizon. Maybe…cows? Trees in the distance?

As we got closer, we saw it was a huge crowd of people. It was difficult to ascertain just how many with the dust cloud they were kicking up, their feet (either bare or shod in plastic sandals) pounding the red-dirt road as they ran, singing and dancing, toward our vehicle.

Jen Marlowe, for the Pulitzer Center

As Gabriel Bol says in Rebuilding Hope, "Peace means development, peace means people go to school, peace means when you are sick you get treatment. Health and education go hand in hand, they are not really separate things."

Health care and education were among the two most vital needs in South Sudan, according to almost everyone that we spoke to, from villagers to Southern Sudanese government officials.

Jen Marlowe, for the Pulitzer Center

Tomorrow is the five-year anniversary of the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, ending the longest-running civil war in Africa, a conflict that killed two million people and displaced four million other. Most of the commentary we hear about the peace agreement comes from Western analysts, people who have been studying and/or working in the Sudan for years. I believe it is also vital to hear the voices of those for whom peace and war in Sudan has the greatest impact—Southern Sudanese themselves.

In June, 2007, I accompanied Gabriel Bol Deng, Garang Mayuol and Koor Garang on their first trip back home to South Sudan after having fled brutal civil war twenty years earlier, as small children. They had been living in the U.S. since 2001, part of a group known as "The Lost Boys of Sudan." In addition to searching for their families and villages, there were several questions they were investigating: had the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed on January 9, 2005, led to greater peace and stability? Or was South Sudan on a slow slide back towards civil war?

In Africa's refugee camps, having access to basic health care isn't easy. Resources are limited, safety is uncertain, and aid agencies have to work harder to save lives. Ernest Waititu spent an evening riding along in the only ambulance serving Kenya's sprawling Kakuma Refugee Camp. The camp is home to more than 40,000 refugees from more than 10 countries in Eastern Africa.

A woman was being carried down the road in a bed.

I have encountered some strange things in South Sudan—seen malnourished children; nearly stepped on a large opalescent snake—but nothing more compelling than this.

What impressed me as I struggled to catch up was the speed at which the four men carrying the women were moving, each supporting a leg of a bed constructed of rough-cut wood and a lattice of rope.

In Sudan, we've heard this story before. Marginalization of the country's peripheries has led to armed rebellions in the south, the west (Darfur), and the east of the country. Many believe the north could be next.

Northern Sudan – while mostly Arab, like the government – has gained little from Khartoum. The government now makes billions of dollars in oil revenue annually, but many northerners still live without clean drinking water, electricity, proper education or health care.

At the crack of dawn when women and children in other parts of the world wake up to take warm showers and sit down to breakfast, women and children of Kakuma in Turkana Region of Kenya wake up to a different exercise: to walk for miles in the hunt for water. Upon their arrival at the "water source" the real work begins, as they dig the ground for water in the essentially dry gulch that goes by the name of Tarach River.

At the crack of dawn when women and children in other parts of the world wake up to take warm showers and sit down to breakfast, women and children of Kakuma in Turkana Region of Kenya wake up to a different exercise: to walk for miles in the hunt for water.