IDP

The land cruisers are sitting low on the suspension. Mattresses and battered suitcases, jerry cans strung together in dusty yellow clumps like so many bunches of grapes, burlap sacks and the oversized, square storage bags you’ll find in every African market, brightly colored with tacky graphics of Obama or New York City, the things you take with you, the things you can’t leave behind piled four feet high, haphazardly lashed to the roof rack with rope, misused ratchet straps, and unfurled gauze bandages. Women and children and the elderly are crammed inside, the men and boys will walk to Diko today. I’ve got 18 people in my vehicle, including myself and James, the relief mobilization coordinator.

We’re going to Diko. We’re taking the people home.

The convoy is composed of my land cruiser, Stewart in the truck, two other vehicles packed with passengers, a truck carrying food and supplies that has gone ahead, and a police escort on which machine gun toting young men in blue camo sit atop furniture and bags of grain. Also with us is the Mundri Commissioner. His car carries no supplies, and only four passengers: the driver, a bodyguard, the commissioner, and a well-dressed Moru man who appears to be the Commissioner’s faithful sidekick. The Commissioner is a portly man (the African “big man” sign of success and wealth), who is along for the ride primarily for the purpose of riding triumphantly into town at our final destination. At stops he buys and distributes glucose biscuits to the drivers. “Food for work,” he explains.

The bodyguard totes an AK-47 and stays close to the commissioner at all times. The magazine pouches on his belt contain several packs of cigarettes, and at one stop along the way I watch as he casually slides a small bottle of vodka into the hip pocket of his army fatigues.

The Lord’s Resistance Army attacked Diko in 2009. All in one day and night the people fled their tukuls and fields burning behind them and made their way through the bush by foot to Mundri, where the garrison would be able to keep them safe. Relatively. But the people had nothing. Displaced and on an Exodus in their own country, an already troubled land. Many of the IDPs (Internally Displaced People) from Diko settled for some time near Mundri. Most were resettled back to Diko in 2010. Others had pressed on farther to a larger resettlement camp two hours down the road to Juba. These were the ones who were returning in a mass migration today. Michael had volunteered two of our cars and drivers to the convoy taking women and children and supplies back.

“Why?” I ask James as we rumble South, “would the LRA attack a South Sudanese village?”

“Well, you see, that is still the question,” says James. The LRA is (in theory, as with seemingly most African rebel and militia groups) a Ugandan resistance army pitted against the Ugandan government. They’ve been involved in conflict and countless atrocities in many surrounding countries, but still, why they would be involved in South Sudan (beyond simple raiding) is a bit confusing.

James explains some of the political complexities. During the war, many South Sudanese refugees fled across the border into Uganda. This alone would have been enough to provoke Khartoum’s ire, but the North also suspected Uganda of providing military training and support to the SPLA in their war effort against Bashir’s regime. Whether or not this last bit was true (James insists that it was not true), Bashir responded by providing support to the LRA, in part in retaliation against the Ugandan government, but also to act as a further destabilizing force on SPLA controlled areas of the South, a continued part of Bashir’s ruthless campaign against the civilian population.

Thus, argues James, the 2009 LRA attack on Diko was one more tiny sideline to the larger political machinations of East and Central African conflict. The LRA attacked Diko because Diko was in SPLA territory. So the people of Diko died and fled their village and lived as refugees for four years as unwitting victims in the larger political game.

The people in my backseat are the faces of those numbers, facts and figures that you and I brush over in passing sentences in BBC News headlines. Buried in the brief summations of stringers and analysts (‘X Number of people are said to have been displaced by the conflict in Northern Uganda and Southern Sudan”) are the brief and terrifying histories of these women and children who fled their homes amid trembling and gunfire. They carry stories, loves, fears, scars on their feet from thorns in the night, callouses on their hands from harvesting dura, excitement in their eyes at the prospect of returning home.

I shake my head. This is the way of Africa. This is the way of the world.

We set off. Not two minutes down the road I hear a scraping and a dull thud behind me, followed by the frenzied cries of alarm from my passengers. A poorly tied bag has fallen from the roof rack. As I get out and retie it I begin to see the poor state of both the lashings and the bags. This becomes a constant for the remainder of the trip. Every 15 minutes or so: scrapethudbangcrash – and then, in case I missed anything, the panicked screeching of the women in the backseat. I and the other drivers repack and retie with little in the way of results. As I tug the worn and unwieldy bags, handles break off in my hands and material crumbles at the seams letting out bursts of maize, shirts, mirrors, shoes. Pots and pans creep through the crevices and bounce on the road behind me.

“Now it is impossible for anything to fall!”  one man declares, admiring his manner of retying the supplies on the roof. I quickly prove him wrong. Multiple times.

And so we make our lumbering way down the potholed road – people and their detritus packed high and tight until they burst at the seams. The sounds of stress scrambling in multiple languages. Crying babies. The lingering smell of vomit seeping from the back seat. Changing flat tires in the mud. Crossing bridges where missing paneling leaves only the cross bars exposed.

The commissioner darts back and forth in his vehicle. Delaying for stops and then sprinting forward  to tailgate the convoy and leaning on the horn when we stop to retie goods to the roof rack or change a punctured tire.

As we move South the terrain changes. We splash through mud puddles and the forest takes on a deeper green. As we enter Diko the expressions on my passengers’ faces transform from weariness to unbridled anticipation. They recognize people along the road and wave and scream excitedly. The children wave back and shout and smile. A man chopping firewood raises his axe in salute. After a long exodus, the IDPs of Diko are coming home.

It is dark now. People and goods are unloaded at the church. Greetings and hugs are given. I shake the hand of a kindly, older gentleman who introduces himself as the chief of Diko, and take my place in a plastic lawn chair to beside him at the fire.

There’s something about a campfire that’s mesmerizing. I stare into the sparks and flames and smile quietly to myself as the chief, the pastor, and the Commissioner make speeches and give prayers in Moru and Arabic.

We drive through the night to reach Mundri on the rough roads of mud and dust. It’s a whole different kind of journey. There are no crying babies or panicked passengers. There are no crumbling suitcases hurtling over the edge and onto my windshield when I tap the brakes. It’s just me and road and the African night stretching before me dark and silent. My mind is still fixed in that campfire – simultaneously quiet and sparking with thoughts of the day – conflict, homecoming, the fragility of life and the anonymity of death and exile, the big picture and the individual, the arrogance of “big men,” the little returns that make a long and problem-filled journey worthwhile, the quiet of a fire and an empty road.