WE ARE SHEPHERDS | KAIROS GLOBAL | JANUARY 2023

Author: Fr Shiju Paul SVD

Intro: Fr Shiju Paul SVD shares what life is like serving among refugees in a conflict zone. 

On 31 March 2022, I participated in an evacuation drill around midnight organised by the security officer. When the emergency siren goes off all the resident staff must rush into our safe room within two minutes with a carry bag. A safe room is built with reinforced concrete with a heavy, sealed window and a steel vault-like door that can protect those inside from bullets and grenades. The carry bag must contain all travel documents, ID card, a water bottle, first aid kit, emergency snacks and an extra pair of clothes before being driven or walked to the UN compound or to the airstrip for emergency evacuation accompanied by UN peacekeeping soldiers. Welcome to life among refugees in a conflict zone!

I have been living with refugees for two years now in Maban County, Upper Nile State in South Sudan. It borders the Blue Nile State of Sudan, the epicenter of decades-long civil war and killings. In 2020, I voluntarily consented to a call by our Generalate for serving with Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) in conflict zones. There are no members of my religious order here. SVDs left South Sudan on 29 July 2016 after a militia group entered the mission compound and shot two youth who were staying in the youth centre. Prior to that, our tukuls (a round hut made of mud and grass) were burnt down and one of our sisters, a Slovakian nun who was a medical doctor, died from gunshot wounds inflicted in an attack by three soldiers on 20 May 2016. Subsequently the SVDs too were flown out to safety in Nairobi, Kenya. They have moved to the Bidi-Bidi Refugee Settlement in Uganda, considered to be the largest refugee settlement in the world today for ministering with the refugees from South Sudan and other places.

The Beatitudes is a Geography. The more accurate expression of the Beatitudes is, ‘You are in the right place if you are merciful. You are in fact in the right place if they persecute you, or insult you.’ It’s about social location. It's about where we choose to stand. The Beatitudes is not a spirituality, it’s a geography (Fr. Greg Boyle SJ). It tells us where to stand. The Blue Nile State in Sudan is rich with fertile soil and minerals. It is into this state the River Blue Nile enters Sudan. As elsewhere in the continent and in many parts of our world, everyone wanted a share of the Blue Nile’s rich agricultural and grazing fields, mineral resources such as gold and chrome, various natural resources such as forestry and the Nile’s water. Frequent conflicts and competition to access control of these resources between indigenous tribes of Blue Nile and Arab-dominated North can be traced back well before 1956 when Sudan became an independent country. After independence these resources fed the political elites of the north in revenues, hydroelectric power and industrial scale gold mining to compensate the lost oil fields to South Sudan in secession. Resistance to political exclusion and economic exploitation has killed more than 250,000 people to date in this area since 1955. And Africa's longest-running civil war rages on.

Living in Tents. Refugees live in UNHCR-provided tents. Tents, though temporary are not just shelters for those escaping life-threatening violence. It is more than the unknowns of wandering and uncertain searching for a new destination to belong. It is a home that gives people a sense of normalcy and regained dignity. God tented with the Israelites in the wilderness. In Jesus, God pitched God’s tent with us up close in person in Jesus. There are currently four major refugee camps or tented settlements in Maban County. They host over 141,548 refugees from Sudan's Blue Nile (BN) State. Though all hailing from Blue Nile State, they carry their bitter ethnic divisions among themselves. They outnumber the local Mabanese host community, who themselves are victims of long running conflicts. As a result, there have been sporadic violence between the refugees and the host community over competition for limited resources in cutting down trees for firewood, grazing land for livestock and land for farming and access to employment. 

I live outside the camp in a guarded JRS compound that hosts some 30 staff, many of whom were refugees themselves or child soldiers at certain points in their lives. Among them a few are Catholics. It is both creative and challenging to live alongside under the same roof with women and men of different faiths or no faith. Last year we built a simple tukul as our small chapel in the compound. This is our ‘tent of meeting outside the camp’ (Exodus 33:7). It is a powerful imagery of the presence of God in Hebrew Scripture where Moses regularly encountered the Divine in deep contemplation. Fr Richard Rohr, a great Franciscan mystic of our times would say the ‘tent of meeting’ is the initial image and metaphor that eventually became our much later notion of ‘church’. Even though this tent is foldable, moveable, and disposable, it is still a meeting place for ‘the holy,’ which is always on the move and out in front of us. 

‘Cannonball Moments.’ The Jesuits celebrated Ignatian Year from May 22, 2021 to July 2022 marking 500 years of St Ignatius' conversion when a cannonball struck him on the battlefield. A cannonball moment is when specific experiences force us to stop how we live and invite us to live the trajectory of our lives in a new way where God becomes more present. ‘Cannonball Moments’ is the appropriate word to qualify my life in a refugee camp in South Sudan. I arrived in the camp by a United Nations Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) flight as there were no other safe means to get here. It lands on a gravel air strip guarded by UN Peacekeeping Forces as there is no wall fence, or offices around it. Insertion into this way of life has many challenges, such as dietary adjustments to simple local food, limited supply of solar/generator power, and slow and erratic internet connections. There are no tarred roads. Now it is summer with an average daily temperature of 43-46 degree Celsius with dust storms. We use shared common drop-hole toilets, fetch water from common taps to do laundry, living in small tin sheet-roofed rooms, and the only movement is for work from the base to the camps and back, following strict security protocols. In the long haul, all these limitations become a challenge. Every day one wakes up to the enormous scale of humanitarian needs with the sight of simple plastic roofed tents and mud huts stretching for miles and miles. In the past, the current JRS compound where I live used to be a military barrack for the Sudanese army. Therefore, the deminers have to sweep metal detectors over the ground always before we undertake anything on the ground. I saw G4S security teams painstakingly digging and scraping through loose soil with sharp tools to remove any undetonated explosives. 

We are Shepherds (Genesis 47:3). The shepherd is concerned with the actual physical needs of the flock such as seeking water, shade, and good fodder for animals. They are constantly engaged with the real life issues of their flocks rather than living in ivory towers of entitlements and theological abstractions. Interestingly, the Region of Maban falls under the jurisdiction of the Khartoum Archdiocese in Sudan. This area has been without a parish priest for the past ten or more years because of the war.  There are no other religious or priests here apart from my companion, a Kenyan Jesuit. Pastoral needs of the host community is provided by a team of catechists and a resident priest with JRS. There is a small church building still standing in Maban, and in other 50 or more grass thatched centers people gather on Sundays for prayers led by the catechists.

JRS serve the cause of refugees and other forcefully displaced people.  Services offered include education, psychosocial and pastoral programmes to help the refugees rebuild their lives. During the week I accompany the psychosocial team members to the camps to conduct various programmes for men, women and youth. In fact, all are Muslims in three camps and in one camp almost 90% are Christians of diverse ethnicities which is also a cause of inter-ethnic fights. The psychosocial programmes we conduct provide safe spaces where participants can share their trauma and pain. We provide an atmosphere in which participants can tell their stories of gender-based violence, loss and pain, trauma and struggles. Women go through it a lot as they flee through areas controlled by the rebels or by the military. 

Strangers in the Land. You shall not oppress a stranger, since you yourselves know the feelings of a stranger, for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt (Exodus 23:9). Biblical persons explicitly or implicitly identified with the status of strangers for various reasons often the same as today: war, famine, political persecution, seeking better life, etc. In fact, the Bible is a book of migration! I conclude with the words of Gregory Boyle SJ, ‘No daylight to separate us. Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognise it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonised so that the demonising will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.’ 

Fr Shiju Paul SVD was ordained in 1997. This year, 2022, he completes 25 years in ordained ministry together with his elder brother, a CMI priest and his younger sister, 25 years in vows. He has worked in Zambia, Botswana, Ghana, and the USA. He currently works in South Sudan with the Jesuit Refugee Services in a refugee camp.