BACK                     Afterword (The Calling by Elizabeth Hankins)

As our Cessna 210 lifted off the red dirt airstrip into clear azure skies, I wondered how this near two week odyssey into southern Sudan would further contour the way I’d live and work going forward. To be sure, I’d seen a whole other world during this March of 2007, a universe of devastation, starvation and extreme poverty that might easily have produced a despair and ensuing paralysis. After more than two decades of civil war, this country remains a wasteland that redefines the ends of the earth. With no health or education systems, no paved roads and only minimal access to clean drinking water, the bush of southern Sudan epitomizes the idea of no man’s land.

But as the little aircraft carried me closer to the developing world of Uganda’s Entebbe, I felt no dejection at all, just a sense of urgency and hope. Because after five years of writing this book, interviewing and befriending Sudanese refugees in America and entering into the ever-winding labyrinth of human rights advocacy, I’d finally been an eyewitness to the history I had read and written about. I had seen that which I knew was true, but just couldn’t quite grasp without experiencing the context of it. And no, this trip hadn’t etched deeper resolve in me or caused me to care more deeply about the tragedy of Sudan. That was somehow already a forgone conclusion.

Instead, it had shown me what and who it was that I’d been learning to champion this half-decade. Now when I lobbied or wrote or did whatever it was a moment required on behalf of this land and its suffering people, I had more than statistical data or the latest IRIN and Reuter’s update to reference. Now I’d be able to feel the cratered rust hardpan beneath my feet. I would recall sweltering air that refused to buckle and an unforgiving sun that burned this African cosmos into an endless stretch of blackened trees and tan brush. Best, though, I would see the people, the gap-toothed grins in dust-shellacked ebony faces, the yellowed eyes of children, the blue-blind gaze of a young man crouched in the corner of a tukul. He, along with many others in some remote southern villages, had been struck with river blindness caused by the bite of a black fly. Now, without trying, I would remember how the smell of unwashed bodies hung in the stiff air and how the odor wasn’t at all unpleasant or distasteful.

Sudan was further away from my Texas home than I’d ever gone, yet crazy as it sounds, it was home. I’d never been somewhere that I’d felt more shaped for than this place. And as I caught my connecting flight back to the States in Amsterdam, I reflected on the power of a witness, the nature of a purpose and the exigency of answering a call to justice.

For more than twenty years, southern Sudan lived with uninterrupted civil war, most of it at the hands of a militant government (based in Sudan’s northern capital, Khartoum) that sponsored a systematic destruction policy responsible for the deaths of more than two million civilians. Another five million were displaced. This war ended in 2005 with the signing of a peace agreement that promised wealth and power sharing, among other commitments. Some two years later, this accord is fragile at best, rapidly unraveling as the international community fails to birddog its implementation. Instead, all eyes seem to be on the tragedy of Sudan’s western Darfur, this century’s first named genocide. What often remains beneath the radar, though, is the fact that the northern regime of Omar Al-Bashir that obliterated Sudan’s south is the same one arming local Arab herdsmen in Darfur with weapons, horses and a mandate to burn villages, kill men, rape women and kidnap children. To date, some 200,000 to 400,000 have died in Darfur. Another two to three million have been displaced.

Let’s talk straight here. Genocide, acts of genocide or crimes against humanity aren’t accidental and they aren’t acceptable. We have the Holocaust to remind us of this. More recently, we have Cambodia and Bosnia and Rwanda as witnesses. And to our shame, as the world has watched, we have the tragedy of Sudan. I wonder if human suffering and oppression in any realm creates a problem in every dominion. Like it or not, our humanity inextricably intertwines us. We really are our brother’s keepers, and if sacred texts and divine precepts don’t inspire nobility — or even fundamental moral responsibility — we have international laws written to protect the rights and dignity of all.

So what is it that compels man to act so cruelly against his brother? I’m certainly no theologian, no psychologist or sentry of human motives, but I’d venture to say that the hate driving Al-Bashir’s regime (and others like his) to such incomprehensible tyranny has its roots in greed. Espousing a plan to Islamize all of Sudan, this nefarious leader has used religion as part of his reasoning in scorching and securing southern (and now western) land. But what lies beneath the charred and evacuated earth, what’s left once a village has been scorched, depopulated and strewn with rotting corpses, has eluded the media spotlight. Because what remains is untold amounts of oil — and oil is power.

Back in the mid-seventies, the black gold was discovered in southern Sudan, but it wasn’t until the late nineties that a Chinese-constructed pipeline extending from the south to Port Sudan at the Red Sea was built and operational. Yet for much of the oil to be accessed, obstructions must be cleared. Even when those impediments were the black African villagers who had tended the land for millennia before.

So the combination of tribal infighting, deep-seated ethnic tensions and Islam versus animism and Christianity got tossed into the already simmering cauldron of “quest for oil.” The lethal mixture, as you might guess, caused the pot to boil over, scalding and killing millions of innocent civilians in its wake.

Please hear me. Oil and other natural resources are good. Products of the earth like gold, gems, timber and more are, I believe, divinely given gifts. But using destructive and illicit measures to acquire the resources is unpardonable. Turning villages into killing fields to lay hold of diamonds or gold or oil is a preventable catastrophe that must be interrupted via aggressive international collaboration. Helping devise global initiatives that foster good governance via transparency is one of the best ways to help fledgling economies like southern Sudan escape the “resource curse” that often impedes the forging of a post-humanitarian aid society where community development becomes sustainable. Natural resources like the oil in Sudan’s south may not be directly responsible for the wars and strife that seem to keep much of Africa aflame. But they’re certainly fueling and funding the intractable corruption that keeps parts of this continent in a state of permanent crisis.

Friends, we have a moral imperative to help end tragedies like southern Sudan and now Darfur. We have a responsibility to help create a world where genocide or gross human rights abuses will not be tolerated. Human suffering and oppression anywhere is a stain on our humanity everywhere. Perpetrators of despotism must become convinced that their dark schemes will not be met with impunity and that the village of this world will stand strong against those oppressing our weaker brothers and sisters. When we make the world a safer and more productive place in one village, one locale, one nation, we make it more secure, more prosperous, everywhere.

In this book, you’ve hopefully seen the best and worst humanity has to offer (fyi: The Calling has a forthcoming sequel that picks up where this story stopped and goes through the end of southern Sudan’s civil war and into the Darfurian tragedy). You’ve explored the horror that greed and religion, any religion, can inflict. Hopefully, though, you’ve been able to examine the good, the true and beautiful that authentic faith inspires. There are, I’m convinced, noble-hearted disciples in all faiths. And even when such believers cannot agree on doctrines, we can demonstrate mutual respect and remember that before we are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, or anything other, we are together human. Always, this gives us common ground from which to work and I pray we could remember and practice this.

I remember my last night in Sudan. I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I lay in the cool dusty air beneath a canopy of a million plus stars that glittered like Lazare diamonds scattered on bolt upon bolt of black velvet. All night, to the cadence of babies crying and children coughing, these witnesses to darkness blinked and orbited about as if they had some secret delight. They played, these carefree heavens, and I’d never known until that moment, that heaven frolicked while we were sleeping.

Thinking back on that night, I’m reminded again of the power of a witness. Just as stars guard the night by piercing the darkness, those who work for justice on behalf of our world’s voiceless cut the blackness of human suffering. They ease the yoke of oppression. True, the impact happens in degrees and not spades, but when one person says “no” to using religion for personal gain, the world becomes a little different. When a concerned nation adopts nascent initiatives like the Kimberly Process and Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative to help stem the flow of conflict resources, this planet becomes a little more secure. When a caring citizen e-mails a letter to a legislator or hosts a vigil or tells a friend the story of an afflicted nation or people, he bears witness that tyranny is real, anguish is the consequence and change can happen when we decide part of our work in the world is helping end the suffering of others.

May each of us do the good work of a witness. May we join with voices across time and space and embrace the brilliant mission of lighting dark places.