Seeing Indigenous Canada in South Sudan
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Seeing Indigenous Canada in South Sudan
It was the parts of South Sudan where First World and Third World conditions overlapped that reminded me of the Canada I knew.
Mingkaman internally displaced camp in South Sudan. Alissa Everett/ Getty Images
When I landed on the tarmac in Juba, South Sudan, in August 2018, the airport was nothing more than a large army-green canvas tent held up by wooded beams. I was here because the journalism-training organization Journalists for Human Rights (JHR) had invited me to visit as part of a culture and knowledge exchange with South Sudanese journalists. The skeleton of a new airport sat a stone’s throw away but, like many things in South Sudan, construction had been interrupted by five years of civil war. Three days before I landed, peace was declared, not for the first or last time. There was hope but it was tentative.