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They called the children night commuters. You used to find this strange, writing fundraising copy at your desk in Sydney, trying to squeeze emotion from dry UN reports. For you, the term conjured up Dickensian images of children going to work, children as young as four or five boarding suburban trains and dozing to the comforting clickety-clack of wheels in the whistling darkness. But these children were not going to work. They were running for their lives. Travelling on foot over dusty plains, they crept into the camps at night, seeking safety in numbers. Hundreds of children curled like puppies on the floor. They slept with their arms around each other and by morning they were gone, back to their family villages in the surrounding hills.

You hadn’t come here to write about them. In fact, it was only now that you put two and two together, standing under a violet sky in the yard of the UN compound, close to the border of Uganda and Sudan. Those frightened children and these refugees, adults now with children of their own. Fifteen years had passed. The Lord’s Resistance Army had retreated west, and there was a peace accord and hopes for a new and independent nation. A refugee return operation, families going home. A rare good news story for your donors, one with a happy ending: the ideal subject for your Christmas appeal. As someone on your team noted during a planning meeting, it even had the biblical overtones of going home for a census, like Mary and Joseph making the journey back to Bethlehem. Every one of the thousands of refugees from the camps in Uganda and Kenya would be registered as they crossed the border into southern Sudan in preparation for the impending vote on independence.

The field mission, your first, included eight fundraisers from six different charities. Each of you was to follow a family over the next three days as they travelled as part of a convoy to their villages of origin in the south of Sudan.

You had gone with Ginny, your boss, to meet your family that afternoon. You watched as they packed up their tukul—their home of more than a decade—and boarded a truck for the short trip to the repatriation centre. It was agreed that no interviews would be done that afternoon, but Pam the photographer, an American stringer from Reuters, was there to film and photograph the family as they went about their work. Everything they owned was piled outside the hut when you arrived: bed rolls, jerry cans, a battered bicycle, two chickens in a woven basket, a goat on a length of rope and some of those red and blue laundry bags, the same square nylon ones with the crappy zips that you used in Sydney to store your winter clothes. Even the tukul’s windows and doors had been carefully removed and stacked with their luggage, ready for the truck. Returning families were being advised to take these fixtures with them, given the possible scarcity of wood inside Sudan. Coming into the camp, you passed the empty tukuls of those who had already gone: dozens of huts, round and squat, like skulls on the windswept plain with their empty eye sockets and dark gaping mouths.

Your family was perfect for your purposes. Simon, the father, spoke English and had worked in the camp as a translator for some of the aid agencies. His young wife, Rose, had a soft, pretty face and there were five appealing children, including a tiny baby named Charity—too good! When Ginny asked Pam to take a family portrait in front of the tukul, they quickly assembled themselves into a perfect tableau as if they’d done this many times before. Simon sat proudly, holding the goat on its rope. Rose nursed with the baby on her knee. A toddler stood among her skirts sucking on her thumb, while the older children crouched in front, solemn as little owls.

‘Hold it!’ Ginny shouted.

‘What?’

‘He’s got to change his shirt. It says “Save the Children.” He can’t be wearing that.’

‘He probably translates for them,’ you said stupidly.

Ginny looked at you, exasperated. ‘Yes, he probably does but sorry, Fundraising 101! We don’t want their logo in our photos.’

‘Can he wear one of ours?’

‘No! He’s supposed to look like a refugee, not a field worker.’

‘I can fix it up on Photoshop,’ Pam said in her weary Southern drawl. ‘For Christ’s sake, the poor man. All his clothes are packed.’

‘Go and ask him,’ Ginny hissed at you. ‘And hurry, the truck’ll be here any tick of the clock.’

You spoke to Simon. He looked perplexed but turned and whispered to Rose. She stood up and handed him the baby. After rummaging in the laundry bags, she eventually returned with a t-shirt emblazoned with the sultry face of Britney Spears blowing a pink bubble of gum.

You looked at Ginny. Pam smirked into her hand. It wasn’t ideal but the truck was here. It would have to do.

---

Pam and Ginny didn’t speak on the way back to the compound. You sat wedged between them in the back seat of the SUV, feeling the bristling hostility on both sides. Ginny had been too pushy perhaps, a bit blunt and rude, but you understood where she was coming from. She was as caring as the next person, but she was also an experienced fundraiser and an excellent one at that. She’d done a lot of these missions and knew exactly what she needed to bring home. The messaging had to be simple and clear. There wasn’t room for nuance. She knew what your donors responded to and she was determined to get it. After all, what was the point if you didn’t bring in the donations? There was nothing altruistic about running an appeal that failed to meet its income targets.

Ginny said she had a headache and didn’t want dinner that night, so you went with Pam to the canteen down the road. It appeared to be a favourite with the international field staff but, looking at the watery curry and posho on your plate, you concluded that they mustn’t have much choice.

‘I like this stuff,’ Pam insisted, shovelling a huge forkful of the starchy pap into her mouth. ‘I don’t know what this meat is though.’ She poked at a piece with her spoon. ‘They always say it’s goat, but you never know for sure.’

‘You’ve eaten here before?’

‘Quite a few times. For a while there, I was doing a lot of work on child soldiers, on The Lord’s Resistance Army. You’ve heard of them, I guess.’

You swallowed and nodded. Yes, of course you had. Fresh out of your marketing course in the mid-1990s, you’d taken your first fundraising job with The Red Cross. All those horrible stories of children being abducted and being made to fight, of being forced to murder their own parents with machetes. And those haunting images of the night commuters, the hundreds of children who left their villages every night to sleep inside schoolhouses, churches, in the refugee camps, places where they might be safe from LRA attack. 

‘You know that guy Sam Farmar?’ Pam took a slow swig of beer. ‘He tracked down Joseph Kony, did that famous interview.’

‘I’ve seen it on YouTube.’

‘That’s the one. A million views that clip has had, unbelievable! Anyway—’ she said, with a flap of her hand, ‘I was meant to shoot it. Sam wanted me to go with him and I turned him down. I said I had too much work on but, frankly, I didn’t believe him. I never thought he was going to find the mythical Joseph Kony, let alone get him to speak on camera. Man, I was pissed when I found out! But there you go, I blew it.’

‘It would’ve been scary.’

‘Yeah, perhaps, but it would’ve been fucking great!’

A group of young men carried their trays towards you, then veered towards a table on the other side of the terrace. 

Pam chuckled. ‘Look at that. They know fundraisers when they see them.’

You felt defensive but then again, you recognised them too. You’d seen dozens of men just like them over the years, trawling through hours of video footage from the field. The cowboys of the aid world—cavalier young men who worked in fields like logistics and comms, and appeared to thrive on the sense of urgency and danger. 

‘Don’t worry,’ Pam said. ‘They don’t like us media either. They don’t have time for anyone who doesn’t want to talk for hours on end about WatSan implementation plans and strategic non-food storage facilities. Look at them all on their laptops; they don’t even stop to eat.’

You smiled but felt that same twinge of humiliation you experienced at the camp that afternoon. As if you were as simple and naïve as your fundraising messages were. The feeling persisted when you returned to the compound after dinner and fetched your laptop from the office where you’d left it to be charged. Walking to your dormitory, across the dusty yard, you paused to gaze through the chain link fence topped with razor wire. The sky was darkening now, the stars incredible. The tukuls in the surrounding fields were almost lost in shadow. You thought of the night commuters and a chill ran down your spine, one map overlaying another in your mind. But that was all in the past now. The dwindling Lord’s Resistance Army had retreated west and disappeared into the jungles of the DRC and CAR. This was a time of hope for these families in Uganda, for the locals and the thousands of Sudanese refugees. It was time for you to look over your questions for Simon, in preparation for your interview with him the following day. You would only have twenty minutes with him and you had to get it right. Propped up in your bunk bed with your laptop on your knees, you forced yourself to look through a fundraising lens again and focus on what you needed him to say. 

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The repatriation centre was a twenty-minute drive from the compound. You were scheduled to spend the whole day there with the three hundred refugees as they went through the laborious business of being processed for return. They seemed accustomed, or at least resigned, to all this queuing and waiting. Families stood in long lines outside the registration hall. Women fanned their faces with their children’s yellow health cards while jigging babies on their hips on the porch of the clinic. There were heads to count, papers to check, luggage to be loaded. Hundreds of goats had been labelled and pegged in the field beside the complex. Their tremulous bleating filled the air, along with the clucking of crated hens and the sudden wails of babies receiving their jabs inside the clinic. Watching the men load the trucks, you were reminded of your father and his mates on family camping trips: those very male debates on the best way to pack a ute. Standing amongst the orderly piles of bicycles, doors and window frames, the men put stuff in and pulled stuff out and sounded like they were squabbling.

The bus convoy was due to leave early the following day, setting off on a journey many months in the making. For more than a year, UNHCR had been consulting with these families, reassuring them that it was safe and encouraging them to register for ‘supported return.’ They even ran excursions, taking refugee leaders back to their places of birth as part of a process known as Go and See, Come and Tell. Once registered, families waited months for their names to be called, so what was a little more waiting now in the scheme of things?

The midday sun belted down on the quadrangle of swept dirt, leaving only a few family groups clustered in the middle, sitting like picnickers on straw mats, surrounded by their bundles of belongings. You sat in a rhombus of shade, perched like a preschooler on a little wooden stool in front of Simon’s family. They had just finished their lunch, a hot meal of posho and beans, and their tin plates lay on the ground beside them.

The interview wasn’t going well. Simon seemed even more glum and distracted than he’d been the previous day, making you sound excessively bright and chirpy. He introduced Rose and the children, which was nice. He obligingly told the story of how he fled to Uganda as a teenager, recounting the shocking facts in that same impassive tone common to so many of the testimonies you’d edited over the years. Just the bare bones of memory, stripped of all emotion. ‘The men came to our village at night. They killed my parents and took my brothers away. Me and my cousin, we hid in the bush and then we started walking. We walked for three days to the border and then they brought us to the camp.’

You could feel Ginny at your back. She was urging you to switch things up, to get Simon to smile and say something optimistic about his decision to go.

‘So tomorrow’s the big day,’ you chirruped. ‘How are you feeling?’

Simon raised his eyes to yours. ‘Worried,’ he said. ‘I worry about my children, that they won’t go to school like they do here because there is not much schools where we are going. And there’s no doctor if they are sick. This one,’ he said, pointing to the baby. ‘This one is special. She is not strong. Here, we have the clinic but there, I don’t know. Not in my village. My cousin says a nurse comes once a week, that’s all.’

 ‘That’s why we’re here,’ you told him. ‘We’re here to find out what you need so we can ask Australians to help. When they hear your story, they will give money to get you the things you need. Is there anything you’d like to say to them?’

Simon frowned. ‘We need a tent. They’ve told us that we won’t get one.’

This was true: tents were not part of the standard return package. The UN Head of Mission had explained this to you on your first evening at the compound. They didn’t want the returnees living in tent cities. They weren’t refugees anymore; they had to rebuild their lives starting with a traditional family shelter. Hence the doors and windows, and the sooner they did it, the better. These men, they’ve grown lazy. They’ve grown up in a welfare state. Give them a tent and they won’t bother building a house for themselves.

‘We can’t give you a tent,’ you mumbled. ‘We don’t do that. But your cousin—you mentioned your cousin.’

‘Yes. He already went.’

‘Will he be surprised to see you?’

‘No.’ Simon pulled a cell phone from his pocket. ‘I talk to him a lot.’

Behind you, Ginny groaned. The donors didn’t expect refugees to have phones.

‘Still, that’s something to look forward to, seeing him again. Do you have other family members there? Does Rose?’

Simon looked uncertain. The heat was getting worse. In her mother’s arms, the baby began to kick and fuss.

‘Perhaps we should wind this up. We’ll talk again tomorrow.’

‘I do have other family there,’ Simon began slowly, and then all hell broke loose.

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Back at the compound, you struggled to make sense of it, playing Pam’s rushes on your laptop over and over again. It was almost cartoonish, how the woman came barrelling out of nowhere, sending up a cloud of dust and scattering the kids. Her teeth were strong and prominent in her narrow jaw and her eyes blazed under the brim of her floppy crocheted hat. Clutching her skirt were two little girls in flouncy nylon dresses. They clung to her and stared at you, their fingers in their mouths. Simon spoke to her sharply. She shouted back at him, raised her hand and—whack!—slapped him clean across the face.

You stumbled to your feet and Ginny pulled you back.

‘Simon!’ she shouted. ‘What the hell is going on?’

But he didn’t seem to hear her. He’d forgotten you were there. He skulked away and the woman followed, going at him hammer and tongs. Rose and the children stood and watched as Pam kept the camera running, their faces curiously impassive.

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There was a knock on your dormitory door. In burst Ginny.

‘She’s his wife!’ she cried. ‘His other wife! Simon’s got another family.’

You stared at each other, and then burst into fits of laughter.

‘What’ll we do?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ginny sighed, collapsing onto the bed. ‘So much for relatable, heh? Mum, Dad and the kids. Just imagine what our donors would make of polygamy.’

‘Are the little girls Simon’s children?’

‘It doesn’t look like it. They only appear on her papers; she registered them for return. They think she might have been married before and widowed.’

You opened your laptop and flicked through Pam’s photos from the day. There she was in shot after shot, Wife #2, conspicuous in her fuzzy woollen hat. Her name was Lily. She looked older than Simon and much older than Rose. Perhaps she resented that and the attention they were receiving. Up came a photograph of one of her little girls in her flouncy dress and cheap Mickey Mouse scuffs several sizes too big for her. Dangling against her chest was an ugly vinyl handbag, like something pulled from a dress-up box. It was meant to be carried by its handles but she’d slung them around her neck. Cute as a button, eyes to camera, packed and ready to go: the perfect hero shot for a campaign on refugee returns.

Ginny conceded that the child was very cute. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘We can always use her somewhere else. Perhaps on the donor Christmas card, wouldn’t that be nice?’

---

You returned to the repatriation centre just after sunrise. The buses were already there—ten of them plus seven trucks and four white United Nations SUVs. The livestock had been loaded. Breakfast had been served. You located Simon’s family in the crowd but left them in peace; you would check in with them again at the Loa Boma way station where the convoy was due to stop for lunch.

Finally, there was a frisson of excitement in the air, and it built as the refugees began to board the buses. Pam climbed in to photograph the family in their seats. You looked around for Lily but there was no sign of her. She could be on a different bus, bound for a different village. Deep down, you were hoping this was true.

Suddenly, a woman with a clipboard was calling Simon’s name. He was taken off the bus, leaving Rose and the children. You hurried after him to the registration hall where something was happening on the far side of the room. Lily was there with her children and three UNHCR officers, two of them at the computers and one on his cell phone. He was calling Kampala. There was a problem with Lily’s papers. She had registered two older children for return who weren’t with her now, and she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say where they were. The staff were hoping Simon could help but he wanted nothing to do with it, or so it appeared to you. He tried to leave but they called him back. Lily’s daughters were crying. It was now almost eight o’clock and the buses were due to leave. Simon was allowed to go but Lily would remain behind until the mystery of her missing kids was solved. The last thing you saw from your SUV as the convoy drew away was the little girl in her flouncy dress standing with her luggage, a nylon laundry bag with Paris! New York! London! printed on the side.

---

The convoy travelled north towards the border, following the silver ribbon of the Nile. There were cheers from the people in the buses behind you as you crossed the invisible line marking their return to a homeland that many had never known. The guards at the border station checked everyone’s documents and disregarded your elaborate visa stickers issued from Khartoum. Instead, you received a rubber stamp for a country called New Sudan, for which you were charged an additional twenty dollars.

The way station at Loa Boma was an old monastery where a small group of monks lived in a cloister behind thick mudbrick walls, pocked with bullet holes. They greeted you warmly and served a hot lunch to three hundred and fifty-eight people. There were more trucks waiting for you here, more packing and repacking, as the buses prepared to separate and radiate out across East Equatoria state, returning families to their nominated villages and towns. This was also where they received their relief supplies for the next three months: a food ration, mosquito nets, hygiene kits and the like. You watched as Rose and Charity received a baby care package, one of the items you planned to list as a suggested gift in your direct mail pack. A soft blanket, cloth nappies, nighties, socks and soap: the kind of things your donors loved to give. 

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You travelled with the buses and trucks headed for Moli village, a slow and boring drive on deeply rutted roads. Moli was a sparsely settled town. You wouldn’t know that you’d arrived but for the large metal sign announcing that you had and displaying the colourful logos of seven aid organisations. Many of the huts were still in ruins and the place felt deserted, baking in the afternoon sun. Then, an old woman appeared and, throwing back her head, broke into a high-pitched ululation. People came running from every direction, from the tukuls and the fields. The returnees stepped from the buses into a jubilant throng of clapping and dancing and pounding feet and the shucka-shucka of gourd maracas. Ay-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya and the thud of a buffalo drum. A young man burst through the crowd and threw his arms around Simon, who dropped his bags and returned the embrace with an ecstatic grin. The children smiled uncertainly as a woman rushed to greet them, scooping the baby from Rose’s arms and holding her high in the air. As the dust kicked up, the cacophony settled into a rhythmic groove and a single repetitive melody line that would play in your head for days. You stood to the side with your voice recorder, overwhelmed with emotion and pride to be a small part of this huge operation bringing thousands of people back to their homeland at the dawn of its brand new day.

You held out the recorder and asked Simon how he was feeling.

‘I am so happy!’ he cried. ‘This is a happy day! I see my cousin.’ He wiped his cheeks. ‘Everyone so happy!’

Here, at last, was your happy ending and Pam got it all on film, along with an iconic shot of Simon hugging his cousin that would be featured on the cover of your donor magazine.

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You and the other fundraisers spent the night in the town of Nimule, in a small church compound for foreign missionaries. You were all in a festive mood after the joyous events of the day. You rang your team in Sydney and uploaded the footage and photos before joining the others for drinks in the hall. Declaring mission accomplished, Ginny opened the bottle of whiskey she’d brought from Kampala and you all drank it straight and grew flushed and loquacious. Tomorrow, you would be travelling in convoy to Juba, stopping at Moli village on the way. You would say goodbye to your families and see how they were faring after their first night at home.

Going to the bathroom to wash before bed, you found nothing but a jerrycan of cold water standing on a concrete slab. It was unbelievably heavy, or perhaps you were just tired, but all week, you’d been watching children carrying these things on their heads and here you were, barely able to lift it off the ground. The sleeping quarters were similarly modest, a row of freestanding shacks spaced around the courtyard. For the first time, you realised that the compound had no fence and instead was being patrolled by armed guards. You lay in the narrow bed, listening to the slow crunch of their boots in the gravel outside. Geckos scuffled in the thatch above your head, sending grit raining down on your mosquito net. The roar of a motorbike, the howl of a distant dog. And then, as you drifted into sleep, the rush of heavy rain.

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It was still raining as you drove into Moli village in the morning. The road was now a quagmire of slimy orange mud and, again, the place felt dreary and deserted. You eventually found Simon in a state of obvious distress. The family had spent the night in a half-ruined tukul and the rain had soaked their belongings. Their bedrolls and blankets lay in a sodden heap and the children looked cold and miserable. Worse still, Simon said, the baby was running a fever. Why couldn’t we get them a tent? They should have been given a tent! His shouting brought two UN field staff to the door. He should have stayed with his cousin, they told him. His cousin had no room! He should have used the plastic sheeting that was in his kit. Outside, you were told that the men had spent the evening drinking instead of preparing their shelters for the rain. You flinched with guilt, your eyes on baby Charity lying listless on a sleeping mat in a neighbour’s hut. The baby was fine, they said. Simon was just making a fuss. You wanted to check for yourself, to see if she felt hot, but you simply followed the others back to the SUV.

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The three of you barely spoke on the drive to Juba. You looked out the mud-spattered windows at a silent, scrubby landscape and, all of a sudden, saw the detritus of twenty years of war. The bombed-out shells of churches rising black against the sky, the rusting bodies of Russian tanks, the trees swathed in orange tape, indicating landmines. Suddenly your driver stopped and talked on the radio, giving your vehicle’s location.

‘We have to do that,’ he told you. ‘Just on this stretch of road. In the past month, two UN cars have been attacked by bandits.’

‘Not the LRA?’

The driver shook his head. ‘But they’re all the same, these roaming gangs. We have to play it safe.’

You listened in alarm, thinking of the family you’d just left in Moli village. You pictured them out there, in the middle of nowhere, sleeping under a flimsy sheet of plastic. You thought of the night commuters and of Simon’s little boys. Then you shook your head and watched the spindly trees pass by, wrapped in swathes of sickly orange tape.

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On the plane the next day, you sat next to a large Sudanese businessman on his way to a meeting in Kampala. Thinking you looked nervous, he smiled and patted your hand.

‘Don’t worry madam,’ he said. ‘These little Saab planes don’t crash all that often.’

The plane taxied past a billboard featuring a quote from John Garang, the hero of the South Sudanese Liberation Movement who negotiated the peace accord with Khartoum in 2005 and then died in a fiery air crash on his way to Kampala.

The business man continued to enthuse about his country’s future. ‘It will not be called New Sudan. It will be called South Sudan and it will be a very fine nation. Really madam, it will!’ he said, nodding vehemently. ‘I am very optimistic.’

You smiled and nodded, but you knew your story of South Sudan would end in Moli village, in that joyous cacophony of song. The donors were going to love it. The money would roll in. And while you would quietly celebrate the vote for independence, you would watch in trepidation for years to come. You would recall the quote from John Garang on that billboard at the airport: I have sworn this oath for peace. Treasure it. It’s yours.

 

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ALISON GIBBS lives in Sydney, Australia, where she runs a writing consultancy, producing content and copy for the not-for-profit sector. Her short stories have been published and broadcast in Australia and the UK, and have received numerous awards, including the prestigious 2021 Griffith Review Emerging Voices Prize. Alison has a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Technology, Sydney. Her debut novel Repentance was published by Scribe in Australia and the US in 2021. She is currently working on a second novel and a short story collection. Find her on Facebook @aligibbsauthor. 

 

Featured image by Julie Ricard, courtesy of Unsplash.