[Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier, by Christinia Crippes] Five decades of civil war. A brief moment of unity at the new nation’s Independence Day. Then, another civil war.
This is the history and the reality the people of South Sudan, which gained its independence from Sudan in 2011, have been living. Packing a world of suffering into the word, The Revd Samuel Enosa Peni describes the people of South Sudan as having gone through “trauma.”
Peni, the bishop of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan and Sudan’s Nzara Diocese, has the unenviable task – as do many faith leaders in the war-torn country – of trying to offer a place of peace and healing.
It’s made all the more difficult because the faith leaders are living that same reality as the people they’re trying to help. Peni’s family, for example, have almost all moved to neighbouring Uganda while the bishop continues work as the chairman for a justice, peace and reconciliation commission.