From my South Sudan Journal 2026
Travel Journal — South Sudan
South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation, carries the weight of both extraordinary hope and profound hardship. Since gaining independence from Sudan in 2011, the country has struggled through instability, conflict, and deep poverty — challenges that continue to shape everyday life for millions of its citizens. Yet despite these realities, I find myself optimistic about its future.
I came here as part of a water project, expecting difficult conditions and complex logistical problems. Those challenges certainly exist. In many communities, access to clean and reliable water remains uncertain, and the consequences are visible everywhere: long journeys for basic necessities, strained infrastructure, and communities trying to rebuild while carrying the scars of years of conflict.
What I did not expect was the determination of the people.
Over the course of this journey, I have had the privilege of meeting local citizens, engineers, workers, and several leaders who are deeply committed to building a safer and more prosperous future for their country. Conversations that began formally often became deeply personal — discussions not only about development and infrastructure, but about dignity, stability, education, and the determination to create opportunities for the next generation.
There is a seriousness in South Sudan that is impossible to ignore. Progress here is not measured in promises or headlines, but in tangible victories: functioning wells, safe roads, open schools, and peaceful nights in communities that have known too much uncertainty. Every achievement feels hard-earned, built through persistence rather than circumstance.
Working on this water project has shown me that resilience in South Sudan is not abstract optimism; it is visible in the people who continue to build, repair, teach, and lead despite immense challenges. There remains a long road ahead, but there is also a growing sense that this young nation is determined to shape its own future on its own terms.
And yet there is resilience everywhere.
First, a few statistics set the weight of the place before anything else can be understood. South Sudan is roughly the size of Texas, yet has fewer than 100 miles of paved roads. Less than one third of the population has access to clean water. There are fewer than 100 doctors serving a nation of over ten million people. The country also faces one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world — where, in some estimates, a girl is statistically more likely to die in childbirth than to complete primary education. And still, literacy remains out of reach for a large portion of the population, with nearly three-quarters unable to read or write.
This story is not really about statistics. It is about people.
Daniel joined me for dinner one evening at a downtown hotel in Juba, its perimeter sealed behind a ten-foot wall topped with barbed wire. The contrast was difficult to ignore — inside, soft lighting, polished floors, the quiet order of a place built for comfort; outside, a city still negotiating its own sense of stability.
We sat for a long time before speaking about anything meaningful. At first it was small talk: the heat, the roads, the unpredictable power cuts that come and go without warning. But eventually the conversation turned, as it always seems to here, toward the early days of independence and the difficult years that followed.
Daniel spoke carefully, choosing his words as though each one carried weight beyond the room. He described the uncertainty of those years — the hope that came with independence, and how quickly that hope became entangled with conflict, political fragmentation, and the struggle to build institutions from almost nothing. There was no exaggeration in his voice, only fatigue and memory.
At some point, I asked him if I could record his story. He paused, looked at me for a moment longer than expected, and then agreed.
Daniel was born during the war. He does not know the exact day or even the precise year — his family was focused on something far more immediate: survival. In that reality, the arrival of a child was not recorded with ceremony or certainty, but absorbed into the ongoing struggle to endure.
Around 1985, when he was approximately seven years old, he was abducted by a militia that had been moving through villages across what is now South Sudan and parts of the wider region. These groups raided settlements, taking anything of value and leaving destruction in their wake.
He described to me in detail being forced to watch family and neighbors disemboweled, and having their throat cut methodically through the village.
Being only a child, he said, he was beaten during the raid and struck with a machete at the back of the neck. The blow was severe enough that he lost consciousness almost immediately. In the confusion that followed, he was left behind — presumed dead among others who did not survive.
He turned slightly as he spoke, lifting his shirt collar with a quiet, practiced motion to show me the scar. It ran heavy across the base of his skull and down toward his spine, an uneven line that time had never fully softened. There was no emphasis in the gesture, no attempt to draw attention to it — only confirmation.
He added, almost as an afterthought, that they did not cut his throat because he was a child, and because he had already gone limp quickly after the beating. That detail hung in the air longer than anything else.
In the restaurant of that hotel in Juba, surrounded by comfort and security measures that felt almost surreal compared to the story being told, it was difficult to reconcile the calmness of his voice with the violence of what he was describing.
He said that many hours passed after the raiders moved on, leaving behind a burned-out village and bodies scattered in the aftermath. When it was finally quiet enough, those who had fled into the surrounding bush began to return — cautiously at first, then with growing urgency — to search for the dead and begin the work of burial.
There was no order to it, no system. Only recognition and loss.
As they moved through what remained of the village, someone came across Daniel. At first, they believed he was dead like the others. Only when they drew closer did they realize he was still alive. He was pulled from the carnage and carried away from the immediate scene.
But what followed was not a moment of rescue in any simple sense. The village had been devastated. Families were gone or scattered. Resources were gone. Survival itself was uncertain. Daniel was badly injured, and in that moment of collapse and exhaustion, those who found him were forced into an impossible calculation — what could be done, and by whom, and with what means.
He explained it without accusation, only memory: that they had left him to the side, not abandoned in cruelty, but placed where he could be tended to later if there was capacity, if there was still life enough in the village to care for him at all.
Infection set in soon after. The injury to his head and neck had caused severe swelling — so much so that his head was, in his words, “twice its normal size.” The wound had been exposed to mud and dirt during the chaos of the attack and the aftermath. In a grim paradox, that contamination had also slowed the bleeding enough for him to survive the immediate hours after the injury, even as it created a far more dangerous condition in the days that followed.
With no access to medical care, the response came from what was available and known. He was placed on his stomach, and traditional methods were used — boiling water combined with mashed leaves prepared as a rudimentary antiseptic, drawn from practices passed down in the region for generations. Before this could be applied, the wound had to be reopened to allow the infection to drain.
He said this matter-of-factly, without embellishment, but the implication was unmistakable: it was an excruciating process, and he had to be physically restrained while it was done. At some point during the procedure, he lost consciousness again.
Listening to him describe it, I found myself less focused on the clinical sequence of events and more on the conditions surrounding them — a child, critically injured, being held down while community members tried, with almost no resources, to keep him alive.
Several weeks passed, and against every expectation Daniel survived.
He lost his father during those years of violence, a loss that was never revisited in detail during our conversation, only acknowledged as part of what had been taken from his family. With his mother and siblings — those who managed to escape — he moved from village to village, trying to stay ahead of the raids, or sometimes simply a step behind them. Life became a pattern of movement rather than settlement, of endurance rather than stability.
He described his childhood and adolescence as something shaped less by age than by necessity. Education was fragmented and often interrupted, but he insisted on learning anyway — to read, to write, to understand enough of the world beyond survival to imagine something different. Over time, that effort became deliberate: not just to survive, but to use what he had endured toward something constructive. Forgiveness, he said carefully, was part of that process too — not forgetting, but choosing not to be defined entirely by what had been done.
Today, Daniel serves as the Country Director for an organization called Every Village, working to deliver clean water through wells across South Sudan. The work is direct and tangible — communities gaining access to something as fundamental as safe water, often for the first time.
Listening to his story, it became clear that his life had moved through several different versions of the same country: the one marked by war, the one struggling through survival, and the one now trying, unevenly but persistently, to rebuild.
I am looking forward to working with Daniel and his team in the years ahead. There is a cautious hope in that collaboration — not the kind built on idealism, but on the slow accumulation of practical change. Perhaps, in some small way, this work will become part of a newer chapter in South Sudan’s history — one defined less by what was endured, and more by what was made possible afterward.
Jason Miller
Jason Miller (Kyalo) 