JONGLEI/GREATER PIBOR – K. doesn’t remember her age. It is believed that she is just 12 or 13, but she probably has more vivid memories than most adults. Perhaps, her remarkably stern facial expression is a result of some of them.

Two years have passed since she escaped the nightmare that was her life for three long years.

“I was a happy child,” she says, recalling her upbringing in a village with three siblings. Her parents, cattle keepers like several generations before them, encouraged her to go to school and choose what kind of life she would want.

Then came the night that would change her life forever.

During one of the frequent cattle raids that occur in this part of the South Sudan, K. was abducted, right in front of her powerless parents, then taken away to an unknown location.

She was swiftly introduced to a woman and told that she was now K’s mother. One of the young men who had brought her to her new, involuntary home was suddenly her brother.

“Maybe he wanted a sister?”

K. remains uncertain about exactly what happened, or why, on that fateful night.

She is reluctant to talk about her abductors, but when she does, she turns her head away.

They were young, she says, teenagers or in their twenties.

Boys and men in that age bracket often fight their peers from other communities, with each group either wanting to establish dominance or to exact revenge for losses they have suffered at the hands of their rivals. Sadly, these skirmishes sometimes include abductions and can lead to the displacement of hundreds of households.

For K., it meant losing not only her family but also any idea of what her future would hold.

All she felt she could do was to stay calm, take one day at a time, and hope for the best.

“I didn’t feel anything at all. I did not cry or worry because it wouldn’t have helped me anyway. I just had to try to be okay with my situation.”

K.’s rational approach to her difficult circumstances may have saved her from being beaten or abused in other ways, as many other abduction survivors have endured.

But behind her apparent serenity, K. was always on alert.

Three years later, it paid off.

When the right moment presented itself, K. grabbed it with both hands. In an unsupervised moment, she chanced it. Not knowing where they were heading, she decided to follow, at a safe distant, two women as they were leaving the village on foot.

The clandestine stroll turned into a long, long walk that involved lots of hiding not to be seen. Only after a few hours of tailing the women in the lead did K. arrive in a town relatively nearby. She went straight to the County Commissioner’s office to ask for assistance.

And help she received, with the Commissioner putting her in touch with Peter Warran, a social worker at the national non-governmental organization Grassroots Empowerment and Development Organization (GREDO), which has a long history of reuniting abduction survivors with their families.

Only at that point, K. felt safe.

“I was so relieved. I knew that nobody could take me away again.”

Peter and his team took her in, nurturing K. back to health and relative happiness. In the meantime, the tracing of her family began, with the organization using tried and tested methods to identify and contact her parents.

Despite its expertise, it took two years for the moment of truth to arrive. A week ago, a humanitarian flight took K. to Bor, and soon she will be reunited with her family/soon thereafter, she was reunited with her family.

For K., it is time to go back to school, play with siblings and friends, hug her mother and do all other things a South Sudanese girl of her age typically does.

Will K.’s new life involve everyday struggles? Surely, but she will no longer have to deal with them on her own.

Facts about abductions and the involvement of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS)

Between 2021 and 2023, more than 260 abducted persons in Jonglei State and the Greater Pibor Administrative Area were rescued.

As part of its protection of civilians and human rights mandates, UNMISS is committed to working towards the elimination of abductions in South Sudan.

Earlier this year, at an UNMISS-initiated National Accountability Conference, political leaders signed a joint communique and action plan to prevent intercommunal conflict and strengthen rule of law in Jonglei State and the Greater Pibor Administrative Area.