Women make South Sudan safe, one explosion at a time

Monica Achol holds her breath as she crouches on the dry grass under the protective cover of a tree. She focuses on the field ahead, her fine, red-colored dreads tied back into a high ponytail. A metallic cable snakes from a detonator she is gripping tightly, across the dusty ground, to a target 200 meters (about 650 feet) away. 

“All clear!” her colleague, Antasia Bullen, shouts through a walkie-talkie. 

Ms. Bullen counts to three. When she utters the word “Fire!” Ms. Achol presses the round button with both her thumbs. 

The explosion lifts the surrounding soil and sandbags, sending fragments of metal flying in all directions. Even from the distance where Ms. Achol is crouched, the ground shakes. 

Only then do the team members breathe a sigh of relief. They have witnessed hundreds of explosions like this, but now there’s one fewer bomb in South Sudan, their home. 

Thousands more are still buried in fields across the world’s youngest country, one of the most heavily contaminated with mines and bombs. Ms. Achol and her colleagues are at the forefront of the fight to remove them all. “We’re saving the lives of our people,” she says later, while clearing up the site of the explosion.

South Sudan has been in turmoil for most of its existence. It fought for decades to gain independence from neighboring Sudan in Africa’s longest-lasting civil war. In 2011, the new republic was formed, but peace didn’t hold. Two years later, another civil war broke out along ethnic lines, killing nearly 400,000 people and displacing millions. 

Explosive remnants of war – which have killed or injured more than 5,000 people in the last decade – are still scattered over 500 million square feet, according to the United Nations Mine Action Service.

And after 12 years of independence, extreme poverty, ethnic rivalries, and tensions over resources – all stoked by the climate emergency – continue to roil the vast desert nation. Conflict that broke out in neighboring Sudan in April has so far brought over 130,000 returnees, adding yet another emergency to an already challenging situation. 

Amid this reality, deminers like Ms. Achol focus on the future, making their country safer one controlled mine explosion at a time. “I give my people freedom to work, to cultivate their land and grow food, so more can return home” safely, she says. 

Guy Peterson

Monica Achol, a deminer, is helped into her protective clothing by team leader Loice Nyoka before going to excavate a suspected mine in Ayii.

Women in charge

A fast talker with a warm smile, the young mother became a deminer for the international nongovernmental organization Mines Advisory Group in 2018. She’s out in the field six days a week, while her daughter stays with family in the capital, Juba. Ms. Achol says she wants to give back to the communities she grew up in and provide a safer future for her child.

In South Sudan, it is overwhelmingly women who are clearing their country of unexploded ordnance. They are more deliberate with their work, follow protocols, and cause fewer accidents than men do, mine experts say. But there’s a dire reality, too. Many men have died on the front lines while fighting for their country’s independence and during the civil wars, leaving behind thousands of single women to tend to their families.

In Ms. Achol’s demining group of 10, seven are women.

“In Africa, the family is traditionally headed by the man, but not in South Sudan,” where a lot of families are headed by women, says Anna Tazita Samuel, the director of Women for Change, a local nonprofit based in Juba. “Not because they wish so, but because of the situation. They always think beyond what’s in front of them.”

On a recent afternoon, another demining team arrived at a primary school in Ayii, in the southernmost part of the country, to spread awareness amongst South Sudan’s next generation. 

Around a hundred new children have recently returned from refugee camps in neighboring Uganda, where they stayed for years to keep safe from the civil wars that started in 2013. But around October last year, some families began receiving only half of their monthly food assistance as foreign governments slashed spending on international humanitarian aid. That pushed many to return home.

In the school’s courtyard, Clara Haas points to a poster with colorful illustrations of bombs and land mines. She’s a risk educator and travels the country to warn about the dangerous devices. “When they are underground, they may stay for years, but they don’t expire, OK? They will only expire when you step on them. Then they explode,” she says. 

Sitting on cramped wooden benches, some children rest their arms and heads on the table after a long school day. Others whisper answers in their neighbor’s ear, too shy to speak up in front of everyone when Ms. Haas asks a question. 

But there’s a harsh reality to this lesson. For these learners, it’s not just a lecture about abstract threats – they quickly recognize one of the perilous objects as being identical to one sitting in the school’s backyard.

After the lesson, the risk educators walk with the teacher through thick, high grass behind the classroom, passing barracks and run-down buildings wrecked by years of war. And there it is, in the corner of what used to be the students’ restroom: a rusty, cone-shaped bomb, too dangerous even for the visiting team to move. They call a fully-equipped team of colleagues working nearby to destroy the munition before a child picks it up.

Guy Peterson

Antasia Bullen stands for a portrait in the base camp used by deminers clearing nearby territory. Ms. Bullen, a team leader, has been doing this kind of work for five years.

Hoping for freedom

On farmland close to the school, Loice Nyoka takes one heedful step after another. Her heavy boots barely touch the sand as she combs through the ground. A farmer has called the team of deminers to examine his land. 

Ms. Nyoka was a young girl when she saw her neighbor step on a land mine and lose his limbs in a small village nearby. The young mother grew up during back-to-back wars and spent a childhood on the move, fleeing her home and returning, a story she shares with millions of other South Sudanese. Once, she ran into gunmen on her way to find food. Then they came and raped her aunt, she says.

In 2017, when fighting worsened, she moved her family to neighboring Uganda to keep them safe. There, relatives take care of her 2-year-old son Elian, while Ms. Nyoka clears their land back home. 

“I pray that these ups and downs end with me, that the same thing won’t happen to my child. The young kids, they should live, get freedom,” she says. 

South Sudan hopes to remove all anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions by 2026. An ambitious but unlikely goal, experts say, as workers like Ms. Nyoka discover explosive devices every day across the country. 

Tak, tak, tak, tak. The rhythmic sounds of her metal detector accompany each step. Then a high-pitched beep rings out: Danger lurks underground.

Ms. Nyoka’s colleague, Ms. Achol, rushes to the scene. Wearing white helmets with oversize visors and thick bulletproof vests, the women dig up the soil: yet another bomb, buried only a few inches underground. Within the next few weeks, they’ll destroy 40 more cluster munitions like this one.

Meanwhile, thousands of South Sudanese are crowded in refugee camps, waiting to return to their motherland once it’s safe enough to do so. One day, when the country calms down, Ms. Nyoka says she will bring her son Elian home from Uganda and show him all the land she and her colleagues made safe. 

“I’ll then be proud to have raised a son in my own community where he learns about his country and his culture,” she says.