Humanitarians on front line of South Sudan’s civil war
May 28, 2017
Gunshots suddenly crackled as Stephanie and her colleagues went about a routine seed distribution in a small farming community in South Sudan’s Upper Nile State.
The moment she heard the bullets zipping through the air, the young aid worker knew the country’s civil war had caught up with her.
“There were bullets everywhere. Rampant shooting and three dead – one was a child, one was a pregnant woman and one was a man,” said Stephanie, whose name has been changed to protect her identity.
SELFLESS: Food donated by USAID is prepared at a transit centre for South Sudanese refugees. The aid workers who help them often risk their lives. Picture: AP
Then, the 26-year-old from the south-central town of Kajo Keji worked for a local aid agency without the means to evacuate employees rapidly.
With the help of other staff, Stephanie had to formulate her own evacuation plan. She used the river to navigate to Ethiopia, rented a car, and drove to the city of Gambella. There she bought a plane ticket to the relative safety of Juba, the South Sudanese capital.
“I think if it was an (international) NGO evacuation, perhaps they would have sent a flight to pick me up but I had to find my (own) way out. At the end of the day, I was reimbursed,” she explained, matter-of-factly.
Danger is by no means a rare experience in the aid world, where agencies provide help in the most difficult of circumstances. But no aid workers risk quite as much as national staff. Eighty percent of the estimated 208 aid workers killed, kidnapped or seriously hurt worldwide last year were local, the Aid Worker Security Database’s most recent records show.
