Pulitzer Center Untold Stories

Women’s issues in South Sudan

   

Jen Marlowe, for the Pulitzer Center
South Sudan

Women in South Sudan have faced double oppression—as Southerners, they have faced violence from the North, and they are struggling for equality within their own community as Southerners.

Learn more about this reporting project and Jen's documentary Rebuilding Hope

The Connection Between Darfur and South Sudan

   

Jen Marlowe, for the Pulitzer Center

Rebuilding Hope (www.RebuildingHopeSudan.org) in many ways grew out of my first documentary film and book, Darfur Diaries (www.darfurdiaries.org). The deeper I became engaged in issues related to Darfur, the more I realized that there is no way to understand the crisis in Darfur without understanding its historical, political and geographic contexts—and these contexts very much include South Sudan.

In this segment, people from Darfur and South Sudan explore the connections between the two regions of Sudan, including how people of Darfur were used by the government in Khartoum against Southerners much the way that Janjaweed militia were later used against Darfuris.

In South Sudan, Schools Still Function Under Trees

 

Jen Marlowe is an independent journalist with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. She is currently documenting and writing about education, infrastructure and health care, which remain among the most vital needs in rebuilding South Sudan.

The following is an excerpt from a piece that appeared on World Focus on January 25, 2010.

Tension was under the surface as we negotiated with the contractor, trying to chip away another $10,000 from his bid. The price to build a school in South Sudan, I have learned, is exorbitantly high.

I am here with Gabriel Bol Deng, who is featured in my new documentary film, Rebuilding Hope. Gabriel Bol, one of the “Lost Boys of Sudan” has been raising money for three years to build a school in Ariang, his native village. We were not prepared for just how costly such a venture is.

Sudan...Marriage Saved?

 

David Morse, for the Pulitzer Center

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.

Ironically, the 2011 plebiscite was intended as a safety-valve. The rebels in the South harbored doubts about the North's good faith when it came to wealth-sharing and power-sharing. The central government in Khartoum, in the North, had broken the last such agreement in 1983, when oil was discovered in the South...

Read this full post at The Huffington Post.

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Video: Education and Health Care in South Sudan

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.

But rebuilding health care and education systems after decades of civil war presents one challenge after another…

Learn more about this reporting project.

 

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement and its aftermath

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 the segment below, filmed between 2007-2009, Southern Sudanese share their perspectives on the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and its aftermath. What progress has been made and what have the flashpoints been? Is Sudan on a tenuous path towards peace, and stability, or has the peace agreement fragmented to the point where a return to civil war is inevitable?

Find out more about Jen Marlowe's documentary, Rebuilding Hope

Learn more about this reporting project

Video: Rebuilding Hope - Follow Up 2009

Jen Marlowe, for the Pulitzer Center

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? And—how could they help their communities rebuild after decades of devastating civil war?

What does it take to get closure?

By David Morse, for the Pulitzer Center

This was, for all of us, a big journey. Most blogs written from the saddle like this one just kind of stop. Though I can't provide closure for myself entirely, and expect that may be true for the others - the experience is still running through us - I feel some need to say goodbye or at least "See you later" to those who have followed our journey from afar.

We are all five at Kenyatta airport (as far as I know; I'll know in a few minutes) ready to fly off the continent of Africa. We carry a myriad experiences with us. I want simply to express my gratitude for everyone who helped make this possible.

Thank you for your interest, your faith, your loving concern, and your openness to the possibilities we carry within us for a better world.

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Messages

By Jen Marlowe, for the Pulitzer Center

Achol (not her real name) tried to discreetly wipe her tears away as she stared at the lcd screen on my video camera. As the tears kept flowing, however, it became impossible for her to hide them. We were sitting in a mud hut with iron sheeting roof, typical of the housing in Kakuma camp. Achol was watching a message from her son, Ajak.  Ajak hadn't seen his mother for twenty years, he told me, since he fled Sudan as a young boy. He learned that she arrived in Kakuma camp only after he left, in 2001, to resettle in Tucson, AZ, where I met him at Koor's house before leaving on the trip.

The Curse of Boundaries

By David Morse, for the Pulitzer Center

"I was cursed to be born Sudanese," Pagan Amum once told me wryly "A good friend of mine was born in a village near the Uganda border where they didn't even know exactly where the boundary lay. He was cursed to be born Ugandan."

His irony bears explaining. Pagan Amum is Secretary General of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement. He loves Sudan, and he has fought most of his adult life for a free Sudan that is for all Sudanese, regardless of race and gender and region - not just for the Arab power-brokers who rule from Khartoum. He was referring to the artifice of boundaries that causes some of us to be born as 'Haves' and others of us to be born as 'Have Nots' - some of us to be born into the throes of civil war or starvation; others to be born among the small percentage of the world's inhabitants who enjoy peace and prosperity.

He went on to refer to the Colonial borders that demarcate Africa into the "fictional" entities we call nations. And he voiced the dream of a pan-Africa, in which a democratized Sudan might help democratize the continent.