In South Sudan, life begins in the morning and ends at noon. Many people don’t get the chance to see the new dawn. They are cut off from the queue the same morning or during the day.
It is disheartening to start a life with an ending, but it is not something new that all endings, in South Sudan, are also new beginnings.
For an average South Sudanese, a new beginning could be a new problem that is bigger than the previous one and you have to deal with this one all the days of your life. We have been blessed with so many problems and no problem sits by itself. They meet together, thousands of them and cover one another just to attack one family or families and it is always the weakest, of the families that suffer the most.
It keeps getting even worse if you try to fight back. There is no amount of resistance that will ever make sense if you are always willing to try to fight back. I don’t know how that would look If all was played in a movie for you to watch this thriller, a mixture of fun and sadness.
Let us go through this life and imagine if it was a movie. You will laugh and you will most likely cry. The life of a common South Sudanese is like that of a housefly. The housefly is only given only 28 days on earth to live and in some circumstances; it can even be 7 days depending on temperatures and living conditions. The luckiest ones live for up to two weeks. I don’t really know what this insect will do with the 28 days but for all that I know, the shortest lifespan on earth is that of a housefly. It is barely a month.
For houseflies, the timer starts counting down the time they are hatched. You can imagine how that one feels, having only 28 days to live, damn! Despite its shortest life span, the fly will make use of every single second. It will sit on everything even on the plates of the kings and even try to taste what they eat.
If a housefly sits on the food of a bad man, it will be the end of its adventure because it will be killed or even eaten together with the food, but most flies are wise and cannot be easily caught. But some people are kind because they will only donate the food to the hungry when the fly has contaminated it. For the hungry, they don’t care whether the food is good or bad because their timer is also counting down. They can even eat the flies.
You know why flies are given bigger eyes; it is to see the timer that is counting. There is no time to waste on this earth when all that you have is just 28 days. The adventure of a housefly is sad. The fly will grow up to know the world as a bad place but for the days that it has got, it will make sure that it has seen, everything including the dirtiest places in the world where it spends 28 days of its life.
Every new day for this fly is a constant reminder that it has got some days left to live and must do everything possible to use these days well. It will make friends and not all will make good friends to this poor creature because if it tries to make friendship with the frog, it will be eaten up. There is no friendship between a frog and a housefly.
You have now known what that one means, to know how long you are left to live on earth. God has never given us that knowledge as humans but for every South Sudanese, every minute is like the last one and to get through the day is even a blessing. This is why we need to celebrate everything including the growth of a new fingernail.
It is very unusual for someone to be happy when they see a nail grow but you are telling life that, despite all the pain and suffering, you can still celebrate even the little things. This is how a common South Sudan gets through the day.
In Juba, you don’t have plans for the day because it is always not guaranteed. Everyday is a borrowed day and can easily be taken from you. The only thing you can do is to just pray for more days. Just like a housefly, your life depends solely on luck. If you are not lucky enough, you are just gone and because the timer is on, everyone is in a rush to have everything done before that time.
For the politicians, they don’t have enough time to be in the office and so all that they have to do is to make sure they take anything available before the oil wells dry up. The rest will just have to fight wars that have never been fought before. And of course, when you have nothing, you will always see everyone as your enemy, even those who are poorer than you are. We have no time and before we have nothing to lose, we want to make sure we destroy everything little thing that we have. Peace!