From the Frontlines: South Sudan
In a dining hall in a newly-constructed dormitory at the Juba College of Nursing & Midwifery in South Sudan, Suzi Nyathil eats her lunch a few paces away from a group of fellow students immersed deep into meal-time banter. She and other students may share classes, and the pink-and-white college uniform, but not the deep pain that befell her two years ago and made her choose nursing as a career.
The day was 25 May 2011. She was working in a health facility in the Abyei – a war-ravaged region disputed by Sudan and South Sudan – when a group of South Sudanese soldiers who worked with her husband were wheeled in with severe injuries sustained in an attack. Nyathil was a subordinate at the health facility but was involved in receiving the injured soldiers, including her husband’s best friend. The friend couldn’t gather the courage to talk about Nyathil’s husband “until he felt he was dying,” she says. It is then that he told her that her husband had been killed in the attack. As the friend lay there in the hospital bed, he bid her farewell, saying that he too was dying. Despite the shock, Nyathil controlled herself and wanted to do her best to save her husband’s friend.
But she was not a trained health care worker. The health facility was badly understaffed. “I watched him die,” she says. “Helplessly.” That day, as she mourned her husband and friends, she made a decision to study nursing, hoping to “gain skills that would help save my people.” A month later, she left Abyei and travelled south to Kampala in Uganda, where she knew people she could stay with as she pursued her studies in nursing. Unfortunately, she could not get a place in Uganda’s medical colleges. She decided to go back to South Sudan.
In Juba, hundreds of kilometers south of her village in Abyei, she was admitted to the college of nursing and midwifery. The school, which admitted its first students in May 2010, is funded by a number of donor organizations, including the Global Fund. The college is scheduled to graduate its first group of nurses and midwives this month. Repent Khamis, the Acting Principal of the school, says that only with the support of many partners can the college train these health workers. Nyathil is determined to gain as much knowledge as she can and return to Abyei. She believes it to be the best way to honor her husband, his slain friends and her son, who asks endless questions about his father. “If God helps me to finish,” she says, teary-eyed, “I will return home to help my people.”