Grain Grinder at Settlement for Orphans

The children in this camp were unaccompanied minors who were initially given up for schooling in Ethiopia by their families and then conscripted into the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA). These boys, many of whom were Nuer and Dinka, came from all over the Upper Nile. In 1991, up to 12,000 walked back when Mengistu regime fell and the Southern Sudanese refugees from Ethiopia. They returned home without parents or elders and found themselves in a position of being unparented, uneducated, unskilled, and untrusted. The houses viewed in the background were the attempts of these children to construct permanent homes.