12th May 2022

I slept well.  When I woke I decided that although I had asked the teachers to come at 10 o’clock, I would go at my usual time to ask children to go back home.  Pascalina told me that police had stayed on our veranda all night and that things had been quiet.  However she did not open her shop.  Things were also quiet on my way to school.  As I had expected very few children had come, but I sent those who came back home.  Then I sat for a while doing a few administrative tasks.  The men who were plastering our classrooms were working, but I could see that the cooks who should have been at the school to cook lunch for them had not come.  I was told later on that the workmen went home.  I walked home, again without incident.  HUMAES continued to work in their office so I joined them.

Police and soldiers were out in numbers, trying to keep the town secure.  In the late afternoon, HUMAES heard that two policemen had been shot dead very close to the police station and a civilian injured.  The gunman was arrested.  There was another incident elsewhere involving killing with pangas (the local word for a machete).  This decided us not to reopen the school again until things were more settled.  The HUMAES staff all left the office to keep an eye on their homes.  I spent the rest of the day with far too little to do, just reading.  Watching other members of the compound, they also simply sat.  Most are illiterate, so they had nothing to divert them.  How they can sit, doing nothing for days on end is something I find very hard to understand.  I suspect that this must make them relive all sorts of past traumas of a similar kind, and eventually lead to mental illness. 

Who are these people who are destroying the peace of Nimule?  Unlike what has happened in Mogali, they are not soldiers.  They seem to be young boys and youths taking advantage of an unsettled situation, but I don’t really know for sure.  People are suggesting that it is ‘the blacks’.  These are gangs, often called ‘Niggers’.  Unlike the term Nigger in western parlance, Nigger is not a racist term here (after all, everybody here apart from me is the same colour).  It is a term for a gang member of a particularly vicious type.  They carry pangas or guns, take drugs, steal and murder.  From what I have been told, many come from wealthy Juba families who bail them out if they are arrested.  I believe there is an element also that are simply disaffected youth, without education or hope in life.  Some may be street children.  Here in South Sudan many people have guns.  Pangas are a farming tool, so they can be found in almost every home.