‘As any displaced and dispossessed person can testify, there is no such thing as a genuine, uncomplicated return to one’s home’ – Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York, 1999)

Nyakuol And Kuok

Shortly after my arrival in Lϵr in early January 2007, I visited Nyakuol, the widow I had met in Kakuma. There, she had been a leader of the women’s support group in the southern Sudanese Nuer community and spoke out openly against under-age pregnancies and girls’ lack of access to education. After 15 years searching for refuge due to the civil war in southern Sudan, in December 2006 she and her four children repatriated to Lϵr with the assistance of the UNHCR. Her oldest daughter resettled with a cousin in the USA, while the oldest son chose to stay in Kakuma to complete his secondary education. Nyakuol commented: ‘I wanted to come back to see my family and because my friends were leaving [Kakuma] and I was alone. I wanted to have a permanent place. Kakuma was not home, we were there only because of war’.

Nyakuol’s elder sister, Nyapiny, who returned from Khartoum in 2005, gave her temporary shelter. She lived on a small plot next to the landing strip. Before the conflicts, her family had been influential and prosperous, with large herds of cattle and plots of land. When the war broke out their cattle were killed and the land was taken by the government. Nyakuol’s parents died and her siblings were dispersed. Three sisters and a brother went to Khartoum, while the eldest brother moved to Juba. Nyapiny, like 104 all her sisters, she was a widow, having lost her husband in 2002, while four of her six children died during the inter-Nuer conflict. In 2001, she sent her daughter and her son to Nyakuol in Kakuma.