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Showing posts from June, 2010

Together we walk in sisterhood

I remember that day in October 2007 quite vividly. She held my hands tightly, and her voice became a whisper. I could see her face turn colour, and I felt chills down my spine and felt this was bad news. It seemed like eternity before s finally hang up, and her first words were barely comprehensible, “there is a curfew”. I remember looking at Justa helplessly as I tried to have the words sink in. Here I was barely a month into my work in Southern Sudan, and the idea of a curfew just spelled doom for me. I had never in my lifetime experienced a curfew. I used to hear stories from my mother about the curfews during the Kenyan colonial period but had never quite been able to comprehend what that meant. It was impossible for me to figure out how one can be restricted in movement yet here we were. Justa had received a call from her husband in Kenya wondering if we were ok ‘now that there was curfew’ in Juba. That was news. None of us was conversant with the Arabic language. The announcement