A Known Unknown
People have identities and needs beyond being ‘conflict affected.’
Our field project managers Jenna and Sandy flew back to South Sudan last week to support our local South Sudanese team and they were reminded of the realities of development work in South Sudan and why we’re inspired to work there in the first place.
While organizations were forced to evacuate during the recent political conflict’s apex, we’ve elected to continue working and to go back into the field because millions are still in desperate need of development work.
“Certainly, the 860,000 displaced in and out of the country need that help, but there are still eight million others who call South Sudan a home […] The call for development still exists, and every day of interruption is a day of lost opportunity.”
While we are presently focused on providing fast acting water initiatives for the hundreds of thousands without a home and consequently, clean water access, our focus is also on sustainability and the provision of long-term solutions for the communities that need our help.
We can’t say when South Sudan’s instability will end. As Aly Verjee writes, the “nature and magnitude of the instability is the unknown; but to channel Rumsfeld, it was, and is, a known unknown.” What we do know is that without aid and development work, millions will suffer as a result of the state’s instability.
Our mission is to continue to help these communities have the most basic resource they need to survive: water.