This is a story of incredible endurance by South Sudanese who are
returning to South Sudan from (north) Sudan. I met a group of them
at Juba port waiting for their luggage to be offloaded from a
sky-high pile of wooden beds, chairs, broken furniture, bicycles,
motorcycles, mopeds…an endless mountain of assorted
possessions.

'I left Khartoum in March last year and I am still on the road,'
John Juma told me in perfect northern accented Arabic. 'A word went
around the South Sudanese community in the camp that those who
wanted to leave would be assisted to get home in the South. In the
end, I was stranded at Kosti way-station for seven months. I
disembarked at Juba port a week ago, but still I cannot go
home.'

Juma's story one of extraordinary human suffering and endurance.
He fled the war in the South in 1983, at the age of twenty-three.
He arrived in Khartoum penniless and with nobody to go to. At the
bus station he met a fellow southerner from his tribe who lent him
a bus fare. He used the fare to reach Jabaroona, a sprawling camp
for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) outside Khartoum, inhabited
by mainly the Southern Sudanese.

Alone, he started life by taking up odd jobs as a builder,
building semi-permanent structures used as shelters in the camp. 'I
had to do what I had to do to survive because the government would
not employ me, a southerner, though I had studied engineering,' he
says.

For the next 24 years Juma eked out a living in Khartoum. 'The
worst moment was when the South voted for independence from the
North (in January 2011),' he says. “Suddenly the northerners
became increasingly hostile. Police started raiding the houses of
the Southerners demanding that they pack and go,” he
recalls.

'Though I am happy to be back to an independent South Sudan, I
would have rather left the north gradually in a way that my three
children would not have suffered what we endured along the road,'
he adds.

The journey he started with his wife, three children and a group
of fellow Southerners turned into a nightmare the moment they
reached Kosti, half-way between Khartoum and the South.

In Kosti they had to live in a makeshift shelter for seven
months waiting for a transport to take them to the South. The
family slept rough in one 'room' of made of plastic sheeting.

Midday was the worst time, says Juma. The sun was so hot that
even people used to the heat felt that they were being boiled
alive. The children suffered the most and the whole family had to
find work in the camp to supplement their meagre savings and
rations provided by the UN World Food Programme.

Juma feels the government and the humanitarian organizations
abandoned them to their fate once they finally reached Juba, but
has good words for IOM. 'I see their staff working here at the port
every day receiving newcomers, offloading the barges and loading
trucks to final destinations,' he says.

But for people like himself whose final destination is Juba, it
is a different story. Once they reach Juba port they are told that
they have reached home and have to fend for themselves. This
includes paying to transport their possessions to the place that
they have found to live. They are also no longer receiving any food
rations, though they have been at the port for over a week, he
adds.

According to Juma, traders are also preying on the returnees.
Realizing that most of them have no money, they overcharge families
for transporting their possessions. If one cannot pay the full
amount, they offer to barter transport for the returnees'
belongings at ridiculously low prices.

'They asked me for six hundred South Sudanese Pounds (roughly
USD 200) for transporting my luggage to Malakia, which is three km
away, and I have no penny in my pocket,' says Juma.

Having been away for more than twenty years, Juma says he has now
no ties left with his former homeland he is now a stranger. The
plot of land left to him by his father has now been appropriated by
newcomers.

Juma wants the government to intervene and offer all newcomers a
new start by giving them a piece of communal land 'even in the bush
far away from Juba'. "If the government does that, the returnees
are resourceful enough to restart their lives by building their own
houses, clinics and schools, as we did in the north when the
government gave us land around Khartoum and nothing else," he
says.