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South Sudan: Nearly Home

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Staff
July 27, 2012 (Added)
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See how your donations are helping: Watch the joy of South Sudanese refugees as they embark on an em...

See how your donations are helping: Watch the joy of South Sudanese refugees as they embark on an emotional journey to return home.

The returnees board two dozen buses bound for their ancestral home -- which today is a village called Torit. They are for the most part women and children. Some are jubilant. Others are apprehensive. Some sing as their vehicles depart while others sit in resigned silence afraid for what the future would hold.

The bus ride from Juba is the last movement of a return journey from Khartoum that 12,000 returnees began a year ago. For months, they stayed in a way station on the banks of the White Nile River near a village called Kosti. Between 14 May and 10 June, they were flown to South Sudan. At the Juba transit center they await the final leg of their trek.

Returning home is not as easy. The journey is long and homecoming is fraught with uncertainty. And UNHCR continues to work vigorously to ensure that all --- especially the most vulnerable -- are protected."We have elderly household's single parents with children, unaccompanied minors, separated children you name it they are all here," says Jovich Zaric a UNHCR camp manager at the transit center.

As the buses depart, Zanaab Fani, 68 years of age lay in a tent trying unsuccessfully to breast feed her 2-year-old grandchild. Fani's daughter is dead and the father is nowhere to be found. The youngest girl is 2 years old and there is an older boy age 5. She is old and a multitude of ailments plague her. She is too weak to walk.

If things go badly, returning to the ancestral home may mean being sold into marriage by an uncaring relative. It may mean arriving to a village with seven children and nowhere to live. It may mean being forgotten by the village elders. Zaric's job is to work with the Government of South Sudan and other UNHCR partners to ensure that doesn't happen.

In many ways for these returnees a sense of home can be found not in a place but in a feeling of mutual fate that thrives among them. Their journey has taken long enough for social bonds to develop and flourish. One group of returnees of various ethnic and geographical backgrounds petitioned the Government of South Sudan to grant them an area of land so that they could return as a single village. The bonds created out of survival and common company, are stronger than promises of ancestral home.

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Organisation / Community / Charity

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