Yei is a city with a population of about 40,000 people (2005) about 70 miles southwest (as the crew flies), only about 30 miles north of the Uganda border.
The main access to Juba is by road. There are two roads that come in -- one from Yei and the other from Lokichoggio in northern Kenya.
These pictures are of the main road between Yei and Juba. This is the main access for road traffic into the Capital. The only other access is by air or the occasional barge coming down from Khartoum in the North.
Sudan gets one rainy season each year. It lasts from about June through September. This year it has been extra hard and long as some claim it is an El Niño year (which happens every five years and we are due one this year). Even here in Nairobi the rains have not really stopped. Here we experience two rainy seasons each year -- the first from March through May and the second from November through December. Well, it hasn’t really stopped raining since May, in fact we had a real “frog strangler” the other day with torrential rains, hail, thunder -- the works.
So, in a country like South Sudan, which has no paved roads outside its Capital, when you have torrential rains for four months straight, these pictures are what you get.
It is rumored that there are about 500 trucks stuck on that road trying to get through either direction.
Just when you begin to wonder why we do what we do, the Lord provides experiences to remind us. Usually it is in the form of an evacuation of missionaries or Christian workers from a battle zone, or it is the transport of medical patients, or it is the joy on the faces of members of a work team from a church in the US after they have spent ten days ministering to a small village in the middle of the vastness of Sudan. This time it was three simple pictures taken from a sister mission aviation organization . . . of a road.
