By Lindsay Carter, CARE International
While southern Sudan voted on whether or not to become independent, a baby girl was born. Her mother, Martha, had strong doubts about making the four-day trip from Khartoum, northern Sudan to Bentiu, Unity State, southern Sudan, with her four children. She was nearly nine months pregnant, anemic, suffering from malaria and travelling alone.
As she boarded the bus early in the morning on Jan. 6, many worries flooded through her head for her husband and parents remaining in Khartoum and what she would find in the south since she had no memory of the place, having left there as a child more than 20 years before. She worried about when the baby would come and what she would do, how her other children would go to school, in what language they would study and from where the money would come. She worried about the journey as there were whispers of insecurity along the 1,080-kilometre route.
Martha’s family is a small part of larger migration of both organized and spontaneous returns from north to south centered on the registration and voting in the referendum on self-determination of southern Sudan. This referendum is mandated in the Sudan Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed on Jan. 9, 2005, which brought to an end a 22-year conflict that cost two million lives. In October 2010, the Government of South Sudan launched a program of organized returns to help bring back southerners who were displaced to northern states during the war years.
Unity State, Martha’s destination, has reported the highest number of returnees out of all 10 southern Sudanese states, with a total to date of almost 50,000 people coming back. Overall, 182,446 people have returned to southern Sudan since October 2010. Returnees are arriving at the rate of 2,000 a day to the south.
Martha and her family arrived in Naivasha Square, downtown Bentiu, the capital of Unity State, on Jan. 10. They were dusty and tired. The last 250 kilometres is travelled on dirt roads and it’s now the height of the dry season with temperatures up to 35C. Martha had started to feel pain on the trip and believed her delivery was fast approaching.
The strain of the journey to the south has aggravated the already poor health status of many of the returnees. Common ailments are respiratory infection, malaria and dehydration. Three short days after unloading in Bentiu, Martha arrived at the “Khartoum Clinic”, as the CARE Mobile Heath Team is locally known, ready to give birth. Every day the CARE Mobile Team – made up a clinical officer, nurse, midwife, nutritionist, and health educator – visit locations that have received recent returnees to administer health care.
At 26, Martha had been through four births but this would be her first baby born in southern Sudan. Her eldest daughter, 11, accompanied her to the clinic and both were quite relieved it was within walking distance of their camp. The midwife and clinical officer, realizing that Martha’s delivery was imminent, transported her to Bentiu Hospital Maternity Ward where she delivered a healthy girl. After seven days, according to local custom, she will be named. When everyone is feeling better the family will move to Mayom Country where they will start a new life in southern Sudan and await the reunion with family members from Khartoum.
Despite the challenges ahead, Martha knows her return home will always be marked by joy – the joy of the healthy birth of her daughter with the help of CARE, and the joy that her child was born in her homeland at a time when southern Sudanese were involved in an historic vote on self-determination.