Thirty people from my hometown connected to the Zoom Meet from their remote village of Tuok in Ayod County. Straddling the bank of Jonglei Canal, the village comprises grass-thatched houses and cow pens. A few makeshift iron sheet-roofed shops reveal a taste of modernity in a community dogged by ever-present poverty and trauma from wars. I looked at the people on my screen: most were elderly, in their 60s. They included my parents. I fled amidst the grinding 2013 civil turmoil from the South Sudanese capital, Juba, where I was studying at primary school level. I last bade goodbye to my family from our rural home in January 2011, more than 15 years ago, before the village receded into the water in 2019.
“This is our last home,” an elderly mother said. Her face bears the scars of loss from war, gaunt and parched from hunger due to perennial harvest failures. “To the sunset is a body of water, and to the sunrise is sandy land where nothing grows. We are squeezed in between. But we know no other home.”
The elderly mother was referring to the bank of the Jonglei Canal, a deeply excavated terrain flanked by gigantic earth embankments that have become a refuge for communities displaced by home-gnawing floodwaters. The north-south excavation was a controversial project, conceived to increase the downstream flow of Nile water for the benefit of Sudan and Egypt. Decades later, it became the glue that holds these fractured communities together.
The floodwaters rose menacingly in 2019. Like COVID-19, it was unprecedented and ferocious in its scale of destruction and displacement. It drove my community from its vast lands and confined them to the bank of the canal, which they now call their “Last Home,” a 13-hour walk from the very place where the first flood, Paweer, wrecked their habitat along the Nile.
The eldest of the group, a wizened but lucid seventy-eight-year-old man, relayed a clear view of the past known only to a few. “More than 60 years ago,” he narrated, “in the midst of dry season, the floodwaters within what is now called the Sudd Wetland would dry up, leaving the Nile and its surrounding areas with water. People would swim across the Nile with their cattle. We lived in a world of abundant cattle, rewarding farming, and boundless fishing. We lived in harmonious seasons akin to a perfect world.
“Then the flood assumed a human face. In 1962, the first devastating flood hit and overrun our land. It ravaged crops and livestock. We had to embrace the water and move deeper into the wetland, as the remaining dry land offered nothing for survival. We relied on fish, water lilies and water caltrops. The flood lasted almost eight years and became known as ‘Paweer,’ a name associated with appetite, because people were struggling with severe food shortages.
“In 1972, another major flood, known as ‘Bhap’ for its destructive nature, further displaced us from the places where Paweer had drawn a boundary between water and human habitat. Then began a movement that never stopped: floodwaters progressively taking over the places where we had previously lived, farmed and kept livestock.”
This was the beginning of the “tragedy of the commons” for my community, and for many other climate-vulnerable frontline communities that once lived a glorious, peaceful life in a world of their own, before the greedy actions of those who contribute most to the destruction of our common home.
But this level of fragility and social erosion had never been the story of my community. We had lived through wars and relative peace, through failed harvests and maladies. But then came 15 years of nightmares. Once rich in fertile land, sustained by herds of cattle, inexhaustible water resources because of its proximity to the Sudd Wetland, the community now has lost everything due to the sad and extreme interplay of climate breakdown and devastating wars.
Like the 1990s famine, the current humanitarian situation took an even more catastrophic turn.
Anyone who knows something about dire humanitarian suffering must have come across The Vulture and the Little Girl, a 1993 photograph by Kevin Carter that captures a distressing story. That very photo was taken in Ayod County, a few kilometers away from the bank of the canal. A starving, famine-stricken baby boy (mistakenly believed to be a girl until 2011) lay collapsed in the foreground, while a hooded vulture eyed him for a feast only a few meters away. The picture won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 1994. Carter died by suicide four months after winning the prize, haunted by the horrors he had witnessed through his camera lens.
“When we were growing up,” recounted a forty-year-old participant, “though almost half of the land was under water, we had only heard tales of floods and a single case of an earth tremor. We associated them with a distant past. My father told me about witnessing the earthquake firsthand in 1990, which they called ‘the year of the earth shaking.’ It happened in the beginning of the rainy season, when they, like all the nomadic pastoralists, migrated to marshy land to follow the green pasture and water for their cattle. His friend and he were sleeping around a cow-dung hearth when they were half awakened by the earth tremor. Each accused the other of shaking the dung-fuel mound.
“We are aware of these past events because we either have lived experience or we know them through stories and the way they are documented in the name of the people alive today.”
The Nuer have a distinctive way of documenting events and histories to ensure they will live on for generations. They name children after the circumstances surrounding their birth, as well as significant events, places, objects and the color of cattle. People still remember the floods of Paweer and Bhap and the 1990 earthquake because quite a number of people were named after them. These were children born amid the events or in their aftermath.
Life along the Jonglei Canal has its own set of hardships. The canal banks are increasingly becoming unsafe as erosion takes root, creating unstable slopes and numerous gullies. These gullies that can suddenly occur bring down houses and lead to the loss of cattle, goats and sheep as animals fall into them while wandering off in search of pasture. The community drinks directly from the canal, with numerous cases of water contamination reported, further harming an already painful existence.
Agricultural production has gradually been phased out by a combination of grain-eating birds, heavy downpours, and drought. The community’s vast grasslands, once covered by different types of grasses, sunk under water. The bushy forest of indigenous trees the land was known for disappeared, only to be replaced by papyrus and reeds. With the disappearance of grain grasses, including elephant grass, seed-eating birds such as the red-billed quelea, strip bare the sorghum that is already struck by floods or weakened by droughts. In September, at the grain-filling stage, swarms of quelea descend on the fields, consuming what families have spent months cultivating amid floods or drought, as they have this year.
“Unlike previous years, when a rain-driven flood was the usual disaster to befall crops, this 2026 year carries a different story,” described another participant whose garden, since the beginning of the month, hasn’t witnessed a drop of water. “The few drops that fell in June enticed us to plant our grain. Now this is August. We are supposed to be eating maize as the sorghum matures. Sadly, almost everything has withered. For the few resilient crops, especially sorghum, the quelea birds descending from the sky strip the sorghum heads bare, leaving tiny hollows where the grains once sat.”
But perhaps the deepest loss is not the land itself, but what the land carried. Ancestral sites connected to grandparents, spiritual leaders, clan identity, history and spiritual power have been vanished by the floodwater. Without them, the community is losing folklore and traditional knowledge passed from one generation to another.
Young people no longer see a future in the traditional livelihood system. They leave for distant places in search of a modern life that remains out of reach in their community. Some embark on dangerous migration routes, and many die along the way.
The social ills brought about by all these intertwining disasters have reached a new extreme. Women who once cooked with firewood now cook with papyrus and reeds, which produces sooty smoke that irritates the eyes and causes consequential respiratory problems. Young girls are married off at the very young age of 14 and 15 for bride prices that perpetuate despair and poverty: despair because these young girls equally shoulder gender-based violence and childbirth complications, and poverty because as one brides enters a household, another young girl’s hand is quickly brought in to take her place.
Before the 2013 war and the 2019 merciless flood, this community had schools, health facilities and functional roads. Now, after more than 13 years of war and seven years of flood followed by drought, it has been left with almost nothing. One of the few modern advances to reach this community is Elon Musk’s Starlink. It has given people who lack roads, schools, health facilities and reliable livelihoods a way to remain connected to the outside world, and they can now speak to the world from a place that still lacks many of the basic conditions of modern life.
