Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
tries. My voyage was growing in the telling - and, by the time we had crossed into Lakes
State, it turned out I had walked through Liberia, Senegal and Ghana, spending a million
dollars along the way. With Ariike and his comrade John at my side, I didn't have my pa-
perwork checked once.
The further north we pushed, the more visible the signs of war. Some nights, we heard
short volleys of gunfire, somewhere in the indeterminate distance. Once, a blistering quake
seemed to tear open the sky, only for silence to quickly resume. But clearer yet were the
convoys that ploughed the same roads. On the main roads, the Red Cross were in action,
ferrying supplies further north; sometimes they moved alone, and other times alongside
UN trucks, peacekeepers bound for the centre of the conflict. There was a UN compound
in Bor that was still staffed; perhaps that was where these soldiers were heading. Along the
way, we scavenged whatever news we could. The rebels, we were told, had just attacked an
oil refinery in Unity State, directly north of Lakes State itself, and still held the key town
of Ayod, on the Nile's east bank. The main road between Bor and Malakal was still closed
- and, more than anything else, this gave me pause for thought. I had meant Malakal to be
a key staging post on my journey to the Sudanese border; I was going to have to rethink
those plans.
The town of Minkaman sits on the border between Lakes State and Jonglei State, with
only twenty miles of entangled papyrus swamp separating it from Bor. Here, the Nile
forms the border between the states, plunging into the brown vastness of the Sudd. From a
distance, it was clear that Minkaman had been transformed. The Red Cross trucks we had
seen ploughing the Juba-Bor highway had been bound for here, because Minkaman was
no longer the small fishing settlement it had once been; now it was a sprawling expanse of
white-plastic sheeting, tents, homes built around cars, and open-air campsites. What had
once been a small fishing village had become home to more than 80,000 displaced people.
Some of them had come from Bor itself, but the vast majority had come from the further
reaches of Jonglei State. Fleeing the rebels - who still controlled great swathes of the state
- the refugees had found, in Minkaman, a place to survive.
The camp was dominated by a succession of walled, barbed-wire enclosures, the base
of operations for each of the NGOs who had come here. Flags were flying, declaring not
nationalities but charitable organisations. Every tree along the riverbank had become the
home to a family. Children still scampered in the shade beneath those trees, while the
branches suspended pans, cooking utensils, mosquito nets and all the other household pos-
sessions with which the refugees had escaped. Drums were beating, sounding out the gath-
ering of new committees or makeshift churches, the kind of institutions a camp like this
needs to keep itself from sliding into anarchy. In many ways, Minkaman was a miracle, a
city sprung up from nothing, in a matter of months.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search