Opinion: It's Christmas Every Day in Sudan

JONGLEI, SUDAN (Dec. 21) -- This week, I fly back to London for Christmas and will metamorphose from mud-hut-dwelling aid worker to merry reveler in one fell swoop. I have been wondering how it will feel to be catapulted into the climactic point of the festive season with no warmup. Straight from the heat and dust of Sudan to a frosty land of tinsel and lights; mince pies and mulled wine; frenetic Christmas shoppers and Wham's "Last Christmas" at every turn.

I work for Tearfund's Disaster Management Team in Jonglei State, southern Sudan, where our work focuses on emergency nutrition and health interventions. Malnutrition is a part of everyday life; maternal mortality rates are the highest in the world; and one out of every seven children will die before their fifth birthday. That's enduring poverty for you.

This is a place of invisible and complicated boundaries, with feuds as old as time. It was the battleground for Africa's longest-running civil war, (from 1955 to 2005, with an 11-year period of peace from 1972 to 1983). A fragile peace accord was reached in 2005, but inter-tribal fighting continues to abound, and the political future remains deeply uncertain. In this vast and volatile place, Good Will to All Men is not a concept readily embraced.

Christmas also heralds the dry season in southern Sudan: water is rapidly disappearing, and food supplies will not last until the next harvest. UNICEF recently warned of an impending food crisis in southern Sudan as a result of the poor rains this year. Our area of operation within Jonglei has been particularly affected, and the already high rate of malnutrition seen in our emergency feeding program is expected to skyrocket as the "hunger-gap" approaches. The obligatory over-laden Christmas table sits a little uncomfortably, juxtaposed against these surrounds.

Last week, we held a Christmas party for about a hundred of our local Sudanese staff, many of whom walked for hours through the bush for the occasion. We slaughtered and barbecued two bulls, cleaned and cooked a veritable mountain of intestines and distributed bags of second-hand clothes donated by kindly Americans as gifts.

Mid-celebration, I found myself reflecting upon how "un-Christmassy" it all was. In this place, you cannot hide behind the Christmas tree or lose yourself in the Christmas brandy. There is no Santa Claus, no decorations in my mud hut, no two-month courtship where greetings cards and nodding reindeer woo one into the Christmas spirit. Just something that looks a lot like every day life. Do they know it's Christmas time at all?

And then someone at the party read the Christmas story.

In a time of insecurity and political fragility, a man and woman travel hundreds of miles to return to the village of their birth in order to register their names for an election. A heavily pregnant woman walks for days in order to find somewhere to safely give birth. She cries out as she gives birth in a mud hut; outside the cows low under a night filled with the brightest of stars. A couple flee a country with their newborn baby and spend the next few years as refugees, waiting for when it's safe enough to return home. A village is raided and burned; in the morning, the massacred bodies of children are found.

Like a gramophone record on repeat, this story plays out again and again here, stripped of baubles and mistletoe. It is radical insofar as it is so very ordinary.

This is Sudan. Here it is Christmas every day.
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Ali Claxton is a program support coordinator for Tearfund's Southern Sudan Program. Tearfund is a U.K.-based relief and development charity that operates disaster management programs in North and South Sudan, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, in addition to working through partner organizations in more than 64 countries. For more information, visit www.tearfund.org. Ali blogs at www.alietta.wordpress.com.