“This past summer I went with a team of four other photographers and videographers to Yida, a refugee camp in South Sudan, just across the border from Sudan. It’s home to 75,000 refugees from the Nuba Mountains and other areas who have fled there to escape the genocide in their home country. I had heard about the conflict in that part of the world, but I kinda thought, ‘This cannot really be happening. It's not possible that, in this century, hundreds of thousands of people are being bombed and starved and mutilated and raped and nothing's being done about it. That’s ridiculous.’ But when I actually got to the refugee camp and I saw the people living there, saw their scars, saw people with missing limbs, saw orphans and people separated from their families, saw the poverty, I realized it was true. And it blew my mind. This WAS actually happening, the government of Sudan was doing it, and the rest of the world, it seemed, was just turning a blind eye. As part of Operation Broken Silence, our purpose there was to make a documentary about life in the refugee camp. We’re not about going in and westernizing people or telling them what to do. We’re there asking them what they need and taking their story back to the rest of the world. They feel very much like no one is listening, so we’re trying to be the megaphone for them.
“The whole experience was life changing, of course, but I remember one man in particular. He was 22 years old. When we interviewed him about why he had fled his home in the mountains and come to the camp, he told about digging foxholes outside the school in his village so that when the planes came, when the bombs came, people could run outside and get down into the holes. I asked him how often that happened: maybe once a week? He looked at me and said, ‘No. That happens every day. Every day and every night.’
"It’s been going on for two decades now. You’d think that a person who had lived in that situation for so many years would be cynical and bitter, but he was full of passion for his country and for education. That was true of every person I met. That’s probably what surprised me the most: Just the resilience. These people are full of strength and hope. They’re not asking for a handout; they’re simply asking for basic human rights and for the rest of the world to listen.
“I think nowadays we get so overwhelmed with everything going on in the world that we find it hard to pay attention to one more thing. There’s Aleppo in Syria; there’s Flint, Michigan; there are so many others. And the government of Sudan does a great job of saying, ‘We’re not doing that. We’re not killing people.’ The world knows that it will take some effort to change what’s going on there. Also, some people just don’t know what’s happening or don’t believe it. I understand that. Three years ago I didn’t know either. That’s why our team felt it was so important to tell the story. We’ve made three documentaries already [available online at http://www.operationbrokensilence.org]. This will be our fourth, which we hope to release sometime next year.”
“The whole experience was life changing, of course, but I remember one man in particular. He was 22 years old. When we interviewed him about why he had fled his home in the mountains and come to the camp, he told about digging foxholes outside the school in his village so that when the planes came, when the bombs came, people could run outside and get down into the holes. I asked him how often that happened: maybe once a week? He looked at me and said, ‘No. That happens every day. Every day and every night.’
"It’s been going on for two decades now. You’d think that a person who had lived in that situation for so many years would be cynical and bitter, but he was full of passion for his country and for education. That was true of every person I met. That’s probably what surprised me the most: Just the resilience. These people are full of strength and hope. They’re not asking for a handout; they’re simply asking for basic human rights and for the rest of the world to listen.
“I think nowadays we get so overwhelmed with everything going on in the world that we find it hard to pay attention to one more thing. There’s Aleppo in Syria; there’s Flint, Michigan; there are so many others. And the government of Sudan does a great job of saying, ‘We’re not doing that. We’re not killing people.’ The world knows that it will take some effort to change what’s going on there. Also, some people just don’t know what’s happening or don’t believe it. I understand that. Three years ago I didn’t know either. That’s why our team felt it was so important to tell the story. We’ve made three documentaries already [available online at http://www.operationbrokensilence.org]. This will be our fourth, which we hope to release sometime next year.”
Watch Operation Broken Silence documentaries by clicking HERE or on the image below:
Katie Barber, Fundraising Enthusiast & Photographer for Operation Broken Silence
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