It was like a rumble of thunder and flashes of lightning when the “One peace, One people” concert kicked off at the Freedom Square in Yei, with plenty of sweat dripping down the foreheads of thousands of jubilant music lovers.

Major Fidel Hawa has been working as a senior corrections officer at the South Sudan Jubilant Centre in the Wau area for years, despite her limited knowledge of gender-specific needs and the human rights of prisoners.

A recent mission to establish whether there were children in the armed forces in South Sudan’s Eastern Equatoria region has returned a clean scoresheet, as not a single child was found within the ranks of both the opposition and government forces.