From Episcopal News Service:
Almost three months have passed since Sudanese Angelina Rambang last heard from her husband. He’d been working with a bank in Juba, South Sudan, when fighting erupted last December after President Salva Kiir accused his sacked former deputy turned rebel leader Riek Machar of plotting a coup d’état.
The resulting conflict has forced some 1.5 million people to flee their homes to escape the violence, and thousands have died, a harsh reality as the Episcopal Church commemorates the Martyrs of Sudan on May 16. Kiir and Machar agreed to a truce on May 9, but fighting has continued in some parts of South Sudan and 5 million people are now in urgent need of humanitarian aid.Rambang is taking each day as it comes. But the mother of four, a member of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in San Jose, says: “I am a Christian. I have faith in God that maybe [my husband] is hiding somewhere and maybe there will be a time he will call.”
…Gabriel Tor, also a member of the Sudanese diaspora living in the U.S., describes the conflict in similar terms. “It’s needless, heartbreaking,” he told ENS during a recent telephone interview.
After South Sudan separated from the Islamic north following decades of civil war and as the result of a 2011 independence referendum, “we had high hopes that we were going to be peaceful, a better economy, modernizing ourselves and building the civilization that we have missed for years,” said Tor, also a member of Trinity Cathedral in the Episcopal Diocese of El Camino Real.
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