A University of Wisconsin sophomore recounts her experience being detained and deported from her host country of Ethiopia.

By Rory Linnane | The Daily Cardinal

MADISON, WISCONSIN — A strong hand planted stiffly on my shoulder and sent shivers through my body, freezing every muscle as I stood on my host family’s front lawn in Ethiopia. I slowly turned as my eyes traveled up a large arm and over to the other arm, which was grasping an AK-47. I looked up at his face as he glanced back at two other armed men and his lips parted into a grin.

At this point I was halfway through a two-month summer trip to teach English in Haramaya, Ethiopia, through Learning Enterprises, a nonprofit student-run organization. Fourteen volunteers and a student program coordinator were staying with host families in eastern Ethiopia.

Capture

I was on my way to school with two other volunteers July 9 when I was stopped by the three armed men on my lawn. We later learned they worked for the Ethiopian National Intelligence Agency.

“You need to come with me to the police station for questioning, all of you,” the man who stopped me said.

“Why?” I demanded.

No response. Oh, right, I thought, authorities in Ethiopia don’t respond to that question. I learned it was dangerous to question their government. Any time I tried to discuss politics in a public place I was quickly hushed. As an American citizen on Ethiopian soil, I had no more rights than the Ethiopian people. A couple minutes after my foolish “why” question, we were flailing and yelling for help while the men shoved us into the back of a car.

Not knowing who was taking me or where I was going, the tears came abruptly like a kid in a grocery store who suddenly looks up to find she has lost her mother. My remaining dignity left with the breath stuttering out through my quivering mouth. I cried tears heavy with the universal fear felt by humans deprived of basic human rights. At that moment I felt perhaps the greatest connection with the Ethiopian people as I was forced to face what they struggle against every day.

In the next town over, we pulled into the police station where more volunteers from our program were waiting. We sat in the police office where we were watched fidgeting for hours before they told us that we were missing “a document” required for teaching in Ethiopia—a document to be discussed with officials in the capital 10 hours west, Addis Ababa. Commanded to pack all of our things for the trip to Addis, we concluded we probably wouldn’t be coming back to the town we had grown to call home.

Back at my host family’s house, trying to keep my eyes dry enough to pack my bags, I avoided looking anyone in the eyes. My efforts became futile when I opened the front pocket of my pack and found all the gifts I had planned to give my host family.

“Why are you crying?” the men asked me, laughing from behind their AK-47s.

“This is my family,” I whispered. “You are taking me from my family.”

Giving words to my emotions solidified them into a burning anger that replaced my fear and sadness. I thought of my students who waited hours on end for the chance to get into 50 minutes of class, before going home to help their family scrape up a living. They were certainly waiting at school for us now. And here was their government, ignorant and self-important, carting away free teachers and guarding us with 10 armed men in case we tried anything.

Detention

We drove all day toward Addis Ababa. In the morning we began requests for lunch that went unsatisfied, and in the afternoon we tried for dinner. Finally they gave in and we pulled over to a roadside shop. An official went to the shop and came back with a small pack of crackers for us all to split.

We kept driving into the night until we stopped at a hotel, still hours out of Addis. We were in a malaria zone. We asked to get our bug nets but were denied access to our bags. You’re not supposed to take malaria medication on an empty stomach, but I was getting bitten. I took my pill and just minutes later was keeling over. I spent the night without sleep, weak and dehydrated in the sticky lowland heat, dry-heaving over a hole in the ground overflowing with sewage, guarded by armed men with unknown objectives. The next morning we made it to the capital.

In Addis they took us straight to immigration. Again we were kept hungry, though this time we were advised to enjoy the “mental food” offered by the view from our holding room. Despite our waning energy, we kept our spirits up with songs, games and stories. Immigration officials interviewed us each individually. The officials gave each of us a different reason about what we were doing wrong in the country. My favorite was that we were “overknowledging” our students by challenging them in the classroom.

While we waited as a group during the interviews, we decided that no matter what happened, our primary goals were to stick together and to contact the U.S. embassy. We wrote the embassy’s number on skin covered by clothes and on small pieces of paper that we hoped we would be able to pass off to someone.

By the last few interviews, the officials became consistent in telling us that we had the wrong type of visa. Although airport staff told us to get tourist visas, these officials thought we needed business visas. That night they told us we had to leave the country the following day. If we had the cash on us to change our flights, we could do so; otherwise it was Ethiopian jail until our original flights left, which was a month later for me. We did not believe we had enough cash for all of us, but our goal to stick together remained intact.

Rescue

We spent that night under tight guard at a government hotel where we were still unable to contact the embassy, and the next day they drove us to the airport where we were held in a back room. After waiting all day, later that evening my blank stare at the wall was interrupted when a team of men entered the room and stated, “We are from the U.S. embassy. We are here to help you.” I bolted from my chair and smothered them in hugs and tears. The next hour was a flurry of phone calls home, information release forms and random expressions of glee.

A few hours later we were all on flights home, lessons learned. When traveling abroad it is important to be knowledgeable about the country and its government. While we were never given an official reason for our deportation, many of us believe it had to do with the ethnicity of the students we were teaching: Oromo.

Every Oromo person I talked to felt that the government actively oppresses the Oromo ethnic group as a means of maintaining power. The ruling party of Ethiopia, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front Tigrean People Liberation Front ({www:Woyanne}), has proven it will go to great lengths to protect its power. After the 2005 national elections threatened the party’s majority in parliament, Ethiopians accused the party of intimidation at the polls and forging ballots. Hundreds were injured, killed or arrested.

In a country with such a paranoid and forceful government, we could have foreseen some trouble with serving the Oromo people without any sort of clearance from higher up. We also should have gone to the U.S. embassy as a group for information about risks and instruction on safety.

When you go to another country, you don’t take your rights with you. As romantic and adventurous as it sounds to spontaneously pack up and travel the globe, when you don’t do your homework, reality can be harsh.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., 77, died from a brain tumor on Tuesday night. The brother of President John F. Kennedy, he was elected to the Senate in 1962.

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the quiet of a Capitol elevator, one of Edward M. Kennedy’s fellow lawmakers asked whether he had plans for a family Thanksgiving away from the nation’s capital. No, the Massachusetts senator said with a shake of his head, and mentioned something about visiting his brothers’ gravesites at Arlington National Cemetery.

In his half-century in the public glare, Kennedy was, above all, heir to a legacy — as well as a hero to liberals, a foil to conservatives, a legislator with few peers.

Alone of the Kennedy men of his generation, he lived to comb gray hair, as the Irish poet had it. It was a blessing and a curse, as he surely knew, and assured that his defeats and human foibles as well as many triumphs played out in public at greater length than his brothers ever experienced.

He was the only Kennedy brother to run for the White House and lose. His brother John was president when he was assassinated in 1963 a few days before Thanksgiving; Robert fell to a gunman in mid-campaign five years later. An older brother, Joseph Jr., was killed piloting a plane in World War II.

Runner-up in a two-man race for the Democratic nomination in 1980, this Kennedy closed out his failed candidacy with a speech that brought tears to the eyes of many in a packed Madison Square Garden.

“For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end,” he said. “For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.”

He was 48, older than any of his brothers at the time of their deaths. He lived nearly three more decades, before succumbing to a brain tumor late Tuesday at age 77.

___

That convention speech was a political summons, for sure. But to what?

Kennedy made plans to run for president again in 1984 before deciding against it. By 1988, his moment had passed and he knew it.

He turned his public energies toward his congressional career, now judged one of the most accomplished in the history of the Senate.

“I’m a Senate man and a leader of the institution,” he said more than a year ago in an Associated Press interview. He left his imprint on every major piece of social legislation to pass Congress over a span of decades. Health care, immigration, civil rights, education and more. Republicans and Democrats alike lamented his absence as they struggled inconclusively in recent months with President Barack Obama’s health care legislation.

He was in the front ranks of Democrats in 1987 who torpedoed one of President Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court nominees. “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, children could not be taught about evolution,” he said at the time.

It was a single sentence that catalogued many of the issues he — and Democrats — devoted their careers to over the second half of the 20th century.

A postscript: More than a decade later, President Clinton nominated a former Kennedy aide, Stephen Breyer, to the high court. He was confirmed easily.

___

There were humiliations along the way, drinking and womanizing, coupled with the triumphs that the Kennedy image-makers were always polishing. After the 1980 presidential campaign, Camelot took another hit when he divorced. He later remarried, happily.

In later years came grumbling from fellow Democrats that his political touch had failed him, and that he was too eager to strike a deal with President George W. Bush on education and Medicare.

“I believe a president can make a difference,” he said over and over in that campaign of 1980, at a time the country was suffering from crushing combination of high interest rates, inflation and unemployment.

But it wasn’t necessary to be a president to make a difference, or to try.

He once startled a Republican senator’s aide, tracking her down by phone in Poland, part of an attempt to complete a bipartisan compromise.

For years, he left the Capitol once a week to read to a student at a nearby public school as part of a literacy program.

When a longtime Senate reporter fell terminally ill, Kennedy dispatched one of his watercolors to her room in a nursing home, and cheered her with chatty phone calls.

___

Kennedy took up painting in earnest after a plane crash that broke his back in the mid-1960s and led to a lengthy convalescence. Much of his work hangs in his Senate office, several seascapes or images of sailboats of the type he piloted in the waters off Cape Cod.

The walls of other rooms are filled with political and personal memorabilia, family photographs or letters or some combination of the two that hint at the passage of time and power.

In one room hangs a photo showing Kennedy and his siblings and parents in a family portrait taken in the 1930s, at a time their father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was U.S. ambassador to England.

In another hangs a plaque from the USS John F. Kennedy, the Navy vessel commissioned in 1968 and named for the slain president.

In another, the letter he wrote his mother, Rose, teasingly accusing her of having covered up a deficiency in math. No, she wrote back firmly in pencil, she always got an A.

Elsewhere, this:

“To Dad. Thank you for helping me get ahold of that first rung,” wrote his son, Patrick, after winning a seat in the Rhode Island Legislature in 1990. The parent had dispatched aides to Providence to help assure victory for the child, now an eighth-term member of Congress.

___

There were other, far more public ways that Kennedy became the family standard bearer.

Robert Kennedy had spoken of the assassinated president at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Four years later, he, too, was dead, and this time the last surviving brother delivered the eulogy.

“My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life,” his voice trembled at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. “He should be remembered simply as a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”

A generation later, John Kennedy Jr., who had been a toddler when his father was in the White House, died in a small plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard. This eulogy invoked the words of William Butler Yeats, the poet: “We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair. But like his father, he had every gift but the gift of years.”

___

“Thank you my friend for your many courtesies. If the world only knew,” reads a letter hanging on one wall of the office. It came from Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, once the Senate’s top Republican.

As the most prominent liberal of his day, Kennedy was long an easy and popular target for Republicans. The automobile accident that resulted in the death of a young Pennsylvania woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, drew snickers both before and after it shadowed his presidential campaign in 1980. Kennedy was driving the car in the accident at Chappaquiddick.

It is a cliche, yet true, that if his name was invaluable in Democratic fundraising, conservatives long ago discovered they could generate cash simply by telling donors they were doing battle with Kennedy.

Kennedy understood that, and knew how to turn it to his own advantage.

When a Moral Majority fundraising appeal somehow arrived at his office one day in the early 1980s, word leaked to the public, and the conservative group issued an invitation for him to come to Liberty Baptist College if he was ever in the neighborhood.

Pleased to accept, was the word from Kennedy.

“So I told Jerry (Falwell) and he almost turned white as a sheet,” said Cal Thomas, then an aide to the conservative leader.

Dinner at the Falwell home was described as friendly.

Dessert was a political sermon on tolerance, delivered by the liberal from Massachusetts.

“I believe there surely is such a thing as truth, but who among us can claim a monopoly?” Kennedy said from the podium that night. “There are those who do, and their own words testify to their intolerance.”

___

More than a quarter-century later, he was still eager to make a difference. At a critical point in the 2008 presidential race, he endorsed Barack Obama over Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination, then embarked on an ambitious schedule of campaign appearances.

He cast his endorsement in terms that linked Obama to the Kennedys.

“There was another time, when another young candidate was running for president and challenging America to cross a new frontier,” he said.

“He faced criticism from the preceding Democratic president, who was widely respected in the party,” Kennedy said.

“And John Kennedy replied: ‘The world is changing. The old ways will not do. … It is time for a new generation of leadership.'”

___

That endorsement came a few months before the seizure that signaled the presence of a deadly brain tumor. There were memorable public moments ahead, a surprise visit to the Senate to cast the decisive vote on a Medicare bill and, before that, a turn at the podium at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

“As I look ahead, I am strengthened by family and friendship,” he said there last summer. “So many of you have been with me in the happiest days and the hardest days. Together we have known success and seen setbacks, victory and defeat.

“But we have never lost our belief that we are all called to a better country and a newer world,” he said. “And I pledge to you, I pledge to you that I will be there next January on the floor of the United States Senate when we begin the great test.”

His time in the Senate was growing short, though. He smiled broadly as he took his seat outdoors at Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 20, then suffered a seizure a few hours later at a luncheon inside the capitol.

“He was there when the Voting Rights Act passed” in the mid-1960s, the nation’s first black president said moments later in his remarks. “And so I would be lying to you if I did not say that right now a part of me is with him. And I think that’s true for all of us.”

___

Generations of aides recall Kennedy telling them the biggest mistake of his career was turning down a deal that President Richard M. Nixon offered for universal health care. It seemed not generous enough at the time. Having missed the opportunity then, Kennedy spent the rest of his career hoping for an elusive second chance.

Now, some Democrats wonder privately if the party can learn from that lesson, and take what is achievable rather than risk everything by reaching for what it uncertain. Republicans and Democrats alike say Kennedy’s absence has affected the debate on Obama’s signature issue, with unknown consequences.

It was the issue that motivated him even after he was no longer able to travel to the Capitol to cast a vote. He called it “the cause of my life.”

And in July, in a reflection on his own mortality, he worried that his precarious health might mean Massachusetts would have only one senator for a brief while, and Democrats would be handicapped as they tried to pass health care legislation.

After 47 years in the Senate — in a seat held by his brother before him — Kennedy urged a change in state law so the governor could appoint a temporary replacement “should a vacancy occur.”

Republicans join Democrats in mourning Kennedy

BOSTON – Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was a Democrat’s Democrat, so much so that he became a rallying point for those in his party and an object of derision for Republican opponents.

Yet his affability and capability to span the partisan divide on an array of legislative matters prompted an outpouring of condolences from those in the GOP as well as the Democratic Party following his death Tuesday at age 77 from brain cancer.

President Barack Obama led the Democrats, saying in a statement: “For five decades, virtually every major piece of legislation to advance the civil rights, health and economic well-being of the American people bore his name and resulted from his efforts.”

Former President George H.W. Bush spoke for his son, former President George W. Bush, in expressing sympathies from members of the Republican Party.

“While we didn’t see eye to eye on many political issues through the years, I always respected his steadfast public service,” said a statement issued by the elder Bush.

“Ted Kennedy was a seminal figure in the U.S. Senate – a leader who answered the call to duty for some 47 years, and whose death closes a remarkable chapter in that body’s history,” he said.

The widow of another Republican president, Ronald Reagan, echoed those sentiments.

“Ronnie and Ted could always find common ground, and they had great respect for one another,” Nancy Reagan said in a statement from Los Angeles. “In recent years, Ted and I found our common ground in stem cell research, and I considered him an ally and a dear friend.”

Her husband died in June 2004 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.

For the governor of her home state, the loss was personal.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose wife, Maria Shriver, was Kennedy’s niece, came to politics after careers as a bodybuilder and actor and credited Kennedy with helping him in his current role.

“I have personally benefited and grown from his experience and advice, and I know countless others have as well,” the governor said in a statement. “Teddy taught us all that public service isn’t a hobby or even an occupation, but a way of life and his legacy will live on.”

Kennedy’s death came just two weeks after that of Shriver’s mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, one of the senator’s siblings.

Vice President Joe Biden fought tears as he spoke about his friend and colleague of many decades in the Senate.

“I truly, truly am distressed by his passing,” Biden said. “You know, Teddy spent a lifetime working for a fair and more just America. For 36 years, I had the privilege of going to work every day and sitting next to him and being witness to history. … He restored my sense of idealism.”

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a 2008 GOP presidential contender, recalled losing to Kennedy in a Senate race. Nonetheless, the two joined forces in 2006 to help pass a universal health insurance law in Massachusetts.

“He was the kind of man you could like even if he was your adversary,” Romney said.

The Senate’s top Democrat, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., promised that Congress, while mourning Kennedy’s loss, would renew the push for the cause of Kennedy’s life – health care reform.

“Ted Kennedy’s dream was the one for which the founding fathers fought and for which his brothers sought to realize,” Reid said in a statement. “The liberal lion’s mighty roar may now fall silent, but his dream shall never die.”

Sen. Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat who heads the committee working on the health care bill, made a similar vow, saying, “We will continue to advance the ideals and issues that were so close to his heart and such a part of his remarkable life.”

Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat who visited Kennedy on Cape Cod this summer to discuss strategy on the health care overhaul, said he would miss his friend for the rest of his time in Congress.

“I’m not sure America has ever had a greater senator, but I know for certain that no one has had a greater friend than I and so many others did in Ted Kennedy,” Dodd said.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who beat out Kennedy for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, called him “an unwavering advocate for the millions of less fortunate in our country.”

Speaking during a visit to the West Bank town of Ramallah on Wednesday, Carter said Kennedy’s life was “devoted to the improvement of the status of life of those who are poor and deprived and persecuted and ignored and in need in our country.”

Kennedy’s junior colleague, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., lauded him for his cancer fight.

“He taught us how to fight, how to laugh, how to treat each other, and how to turn idealism into action, and in these last 14 months, he taught us much more about how to live life, sailing into the wind one last time,” Kerry said.

“No words can ever do justice to this irrepressible, larger-than-life presence who was simply the best – the best senator, the best advocate you could ever hope for, the best colleague and the best person to stand by your side in the toughest of times.”

FALKIRK, Scotland (AP)— Two runners and two hurdlers from Ethiopia were reported missing Tuesday after leaving their hotel before a track and field meet in Scotland.

The four are Betelhem Shewatatek (women’s 200 meters), Feleke Bekele (400 hurdles), Hagos Tadesse (men’s 400) and Tirehas Haileselassie (hurdles).

Scottish Athletics chief executive Geoff Wightman said his organization reported their disappearance to the police.

The Ethiopians were to compete Wednesday in the Falkirk Cup, a meet also featuring England, Ireland and Scotland. The four athletes are not regulars at major meets.

“My colleague actually tried to restrain two of them but they ran off,” said Dagmawit Amare, who is part of Ethiopia’s team management in Scotland and has been working with Scottish Athletics. “This is such a sad thing to happen for my country and the sport.”

JUBA, Sudan (IPS) – In the war-devastated South Sudan, a region with a population of over eight million people, Yeneneh Mulugeta is the only permanent ophthalmologist.

Dozens visit the eye clinic in the semi-autonomous region’s capital every day from across the South trying to have their sight restored, mostly old and silent, waiting their turn with a helper. The Ethiopian doctor has performed hundreds of cataract operations – removing the protein build-up that covers the eye – that miraculously bring back sight.

Reversible cataract is probably responsible for half the cases of blindness in the South, but Mulugeta and government officials in the health sector know there are thousands who have no access to treatment. They also know – although no comprehensive studies have been done – that many thousands are at risk from two of the world’s leading blindness-causing infectious diseases; river-blindness and trachoma.

“South Sudan looks to be the worst. Maybe two percent of the population is blind,” Mulugeta, who works with the Christian Blind Mission, said. This estimate is an extrapolation of numbers from neighbouring Ethiopia where 1.6 percent of the population is visually impaired but where there are far more public health services and infrastructure.

The Director of Eye Health at South Sudan’s health ministry, Ali Yousif Ngor, oversees the South Sudan part of an Africa-wide attempt to combat river blindness, also known as onchocerciasis (O.V). It is a disease spread by the black fly that carries larval forms of a worm parasite. These worms grow and breed, releasing thousands of larvae that move all over the body causing intense itching and blindness.

River blindness is prevented by widely dosing communities in affected areas with a drug called ivermectin. For the last two decades ivermectin has been provided free of charge by a U.S. pharmaceutical company in an attempt to eradicate the disease in endemic countries, mostly in Africa.

It was only at the end of the 22-year civil war in Sudan in 2005 that international health organisations and government officials were given a chance to reach many rural communities. “It is so hard to get everyone to take the drug at the same time, twice a year. That would really hit the transmission of the disease,” Ngor said.

Part of the problem is that officials like Ngor simply do not know how widespread the disease is. Ngor said that the government does not even know if O.V is more or less common than trachoma, another major cause of blindness in the South. Trachoma occurs when untreated, repeated infections of the eye by bacteria eventually causes scarring so extensive the eyelid partially turns in on itself. The lashes scratch the cornea causing intense pain and often first reversible and then irreversible blindness.

Ngor described one small village where the arrival of a mobile ophthalmologic team prompted 400 blind or partially sighted people to turn up in the hope of treatment. “But it was too late for many of them,” he said.

Even within Juba city, lack of knowledge about diseases mean patients often do not go to the clinic early enough to save their sight. But outside the city the situation is far worse; there are no ophthalmologists or even an optometrist to fix disabling short or long sight with a pair of spectacles. Glasses were desperately rare even in the capital until last year. During the 22 years of Sudan’s bloody north-south war the only way to get glasses was to travel to Khartoum, North Sudan, or to the neighbouring countries of Kenya or Uganda.

Levi Sunday is thin, smartly dressed and blind. As his stick tip-taps the ground uneven with tree roots and rain gullies, he moves faster than the average Juba citizen in the hot and small town.

He is Chair of the Equatorian Union of the Blind that has some 800 members. It is a comparatively large organisation by the South’s standards but Sunday said they are finding it hard to draw attention to the problems the blind and partially-sighted experience, including issues of poverty and stigmatisation.

“The union was formed in 1984 … to combat begging, train the blind in handcrafts like basket weaving so they can depend on themselves,” Sunday explained. Classes in other income-generating skills have also been put in place but in reality, Sunday said, many blind are begging.

The union also organises classes to help the blind learn to use a stick and has close connections to the blind school where Braille is taught. “Many of the blind are not educated because of the poor quality of education in the South, there is nothing for the blind – except here in Juba. Now we have Braille machines here so they can type their notes in Braille and read books in it,” Levi said.

Five former students are now enrolled at Juba University, a cause of some pride. The union is also responsible for dozens of marriages between Juba’s blind. Macho South Sudanese society is still too narrow-minded for blind men to easily marry girls with sight, Sunday said.

“There is great ignorance in the south. People do not consider the blind as human. They are seen as powerless. Sometimes they are not helped, even with food. The blind in the south can die because of a lack of support. Blind children are undermined,” Sunday said.

His chairmanship got off to a rough start earlier this year. The union spilt into those supporting Sunday and those supporting his predecessor (who established the union in 1984) over differences over the constitution and personal politics. Feelings ran so high a policeman was put outside the run down union building after someone punctured the wheels of the body’s ancient Suzuki (they have a volunteer part-time sighted driver).

Too much politics everywhere seems like a curse of the South. Even in peacetime life in the region is fraught for many. Southerners are still holding their breath for a 2011 referendum promised under the peace deal that will give them a long-awaited chance to vote for separation from north Sudan. But many worry that tense North-South Sudan relations will worsen in the run up to elections next year and the referendum vote. In the meantime tribal violence has intensified this year, with hundreds killed including women and children.

With these problems perhaps it is not surprising that the blind are side-lined. The four-year-old government has not yet met the poor standards of garrison times when the blind were provided free transport and educational support. Experienced blind teachers were recently threatened with dismissal, because they were deemed unfit to teach, a deep blow to the union’s confidence, although the threat was later retracted.

“Since the peace, I myself have not seen a change in the lives of the blind. People now (in power) are not cooperating with blind people… before the peace when Juba was under Khartoum at least we had free transport cards. Now there is nothing like that,” Sunday said.

For experts in the sector the problem is extremely worrying. The Carter Centre, an American non-profit that has trained surgeons to do trachoma surgery in rural areas, says that in Sudan some 5 million people could be at risk from river blindness.

“Early blindness is early mortality in South Sudan,” Dante Vasquez from the Carter Centre said. The blind tend to have poorer nutrition and are isolated so they die younger.

The Carter Centre has performed well over 4,000 trachoma surgeries, a procedure which involves cutting and re-sewing the eyelid in a way that turns the eyelashes back outwards, in the South and has treated hundreds of thousands of earlier-stage cases with antibiotics. Though Vasquez believes the true scope of the disease is unknown; and the centre could be just scratching the surface. In Ayod county the Carter Centre found 15 percent of the population affected, and three percent of children. Trachoma infection in more than one percent of the population is usually considered a serious health risk.

Children with the disease are stigmatised, not least by the pain that renders them unable to perform everyday duties. They also become a burden; as Ngor pointed out. He explained that every blind person also needs another to help them, thus creating a drain on family resources.

Children blinded by the disease are especially worrying as loss of sight follows repeated infection, normally only occurring by the time they are adults. “We’re seeing it in younger and younger populations. This is an indicator of how acute the problem is,” Vasquez said.