Nyantay Gatkuoth is a survivor of violence that rocked South Sudan’s eastern Upper Nile State during a military offensive earlier this year. Although blind, she managed to escape and has been reunited with her family at a refugee camp in Ethiopia.
Nyantay has been blind since South Sudan’s Independence Referendum in January 2011. “After the vote, it all went dark,” she recalls. She does not know why.
Now, she can only sense light from dark: “I can separate the morning and night, but that’s all.”
When her home village of Maywut was attacked earlier this year Nyantay did not know what was happening but she heard gunfire and caught snippets of conversation from people running past her about what was happening.
The 40-something year old mother of four fled into the forest, guided by relatives and neighbours. But at some point her hand slipped out from her guide and she found herself alone.
“I just kept running,” she says. “I heard the people shooting and I felt very scared, as I could see nothing and was running by myself.”
She fell into holes, ran into trees and suffered from heat and exhaustion.
At one point she sat down in the forest expecting death. “I could hear the lions and the hyenas,” she says. “I just wanted them to come and eat me as I was in such a bad place, hurting and lost.”
“I just waited and thought: ‘If the animals eat me, that’s fine. If the soldiers kill me, that’s fine.’ I no longer felt fear. I couldn’t think or care about anything but dying.”
The next day, some neighbours stumbled across Nyantay and took her to a safe place. She eventually crossed the border into Ethiopia, where she was reunited with the husband and four children whom she had presumed had died.
“When I heard their voices and knew it was them, I just passed out, then completely lost it. People had to pour water on me to calm me.”
Now she lives in the sprawling Tierkidi refugee camp, which houses almost 50,000 South Sudanese refugees. Her children are attending school in the camp.
This report is adapted from an article published by UNHCR, contributed by Hannah McNeish, a journalist.
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