Living in a place of war...part 8.

Living in a place of war...part 8.

As the early morning light of dawn creaked its way through the crevice under my door, I breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, darkness gone and light has come. A huge sense of relief.

Brown was the first one to move as he made his way to the door. As Thomas and I peered on, Brown slowly, methodically pulled back the door, not daring to reveal more than a centimeter at a time, with each progression allowing another ray of hope to enter into the room.

Then we heard gunshots, again. BUT, this time they were very far away and there were only two of them. Nothing out of the normal in Mundri, South Sudan. NOTHING even close in comparison to what we heard less than twelve hours earlier.

As Brown scanned the scene outside and Thomas and I looked on, Brown decided to head to his own home, which is only ten feet from mine. It was apparent that a few people were moving on the main street in front of my home, but sparse in number.

Often times life in Mundri does not really get going until 9:00 am or so. People in Mundri are not wake-up-at-the-butt-crack-of-dawn type of people. I love that about the culture. In five years I’ve only had to set an alarm for an early morning wake-up twice. So the seen outside my door was not unusual, especially since it was only 6:25 am. Sure enough, as expected, closer to 7:15 am more people were moving about. No doubt everyone was trying to gather information and assess the casualties. “WHAT HAPPENED?” could likely be heard all over town.

As soon as Brown left, Thomas looked at me, his face instantly revealing that he too had not slept at all, and then said, “Oh my god, Brown snores so loud. Like an angry lion. You should never let him stay here again! Make him sleep outside next time!”

After I finished laughing at Thomas, I made several phone calls to people all over Mundri, trying to assess what happened. As has become normal in South Sudan over the past year, rumors FLY when gunshots are fired. First this story. Then that story. Then another story that is somehow related to the first two but the details are different. And then another story that the teller of the tale is sure is the real story, but it does not compute with the three previous stories I’ve heard. Welcome to life in a country at war. Rumors. Rumors. EVERYWHERE. It is almost impossible to know exactly what happened, when it happened, how it happened.

I quickly learned in the early morning after the night of fighting that yes, indeed, the fighting was very close to my house – as in my house was probably one of the closest houses to the epicenter. A man was dead. His body was STILL lying on the ground, 75 meters from my house. Bullet wounds, blood splattered, the crimson stains soaking into the red dust of the land – a dust that has been sprinkled too often with the blood of men, women, boys, girls, young and old. This is a place that has known war, intimately. The twenty-two years of civil war that ended in 2005 have not been forgotten, the blood of the two million killed during the fighting calls out from the ground, crying for justice.

...to be continued...