SOUTH SUDAN: CELEBRATING CHRISTMAS AMONG WAR REFUGEES

By Jesús Aranda – We are celebrating CHRISTMAS and on the eve of the NEW YEAR 2018. I would like to be with you in your celebrations offering my warmly wishes of joy, peace and love to you and all your dear people.

I hope that, despite of all our problems, worries and sickness, we shall be able to open our mind and spirit to receive the Child Jesus Christ who is coming to give hope in our life and family, so that we could have better lives.

I pray for this and that He will be the centre of you and your family.

I am sending this message to all of you from the refugee camps where I have been working as a missionary since February of this year. We have been badly forced to leave our community in Lomin, Kajo keji, South Sudan and come with all our people (150.000, in average in Kajo keji county) to find better security and some peace here in the north of Uganda.

The lives of our people, since we started our exile in the camps, have been with a lot of sufferings, sadness and frustrations.

In South Sudan we were poor but with honour whereas here in ‘exile’ we are miserable and without dignity. We are living far away from our culture, land, properties and rely on the help which the different organizations give to us.

Here in ‘exile’ we don’t have proper and enough food, schools, health centres and land for farming.

In this terrible ‘exile’ those who have been suffering more the cross of being in the north of Uganda as refugees are the children and elderly people. For them it has been very difficult to adapt to this painful situation. Other group that has been suffering a lot are our young people; they live in bitterness and frustration as they see their future destroyed by those leaders running our dear country of South Sudan.

We ask all of you our friends, from South Sudan or from other countries, to pray to the King of PEACE, JESUS CHRIST, to send his Spirit of reconciliation to open the mind and heart of all those who are causing this evil suffering to the people, to change their selfishness behaviour and to accept all mankind as their brothers and sisters.

When this will happen we shall also live Christmas with joy and dignity.

May God bless you.

Yours in the love of Jesus Christ,

Abuna Jesús – Comboni missionary