MY LIFE AS A CORK Allan Drummond
I’ve often compared myself to a cork, tossed into a clear, mountain stream which will carry me through a variety of adventures, until I arrive at my ultimate destination. What an adventure it has been, and continues to be! There have been times when I’ve bubbled along joyously, a blue sky above, clear water below with schools of tiny fish darting about in it. At other times, heavy rain has washed brown soil from the hills, muddied the waters, and I haven’t seen a way out. I’ve been washed up on a sandbank, and marooned for a time, to be freed by rising waters which have had their origin several mountains and ridges away. But most of the time, I have just done what a cork does, carried along by forces over which I seem to have little control. At this stage, I appear to be a reasonably healthy little cork capable, in my late seventies, of doing things which younger people might think twice about. So when Brother Bill Firman invited me to spend some time with Solidarity with South Sudan, I went with the flow. I’m not a great tourist, in the sense of going places and looking at the sites. I much prefer to meet people and, in spending the best part of three years with the people of South Sudan, I was greatly enriched by all whom I met. While I was there, I read of a survey which declared South Sudanese to be the unhappiest people on Earth. For one who was living there, it was clearly nonsense! They had reason to be unhappy, given that 400,000 people had lost their lives as a result of war in 2017-2018, and that killing, looting and rape continued in the ‘peaceful’ years. But the people I mixed with, including trainee teachers, are extraordinarily resilient and optimistic. The South Sudanese don’t produce much, in the way of raw materials or manufactured goods. The one thing at which they excel is making babies, and in the area of Western Equatoria, where I worked, the children are numerous and well fed.
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