So, tomorrow, Thursday 18th June, is the day. 11 years after I made a promise to a 15-year-old boy in South Sudan that I wouldn’t forget his village, my first novel – Something is Going to Fall Like Rain is finally coming out.
It’s been a long slog. A few years, and I have a million people to thank for supporting me along the way.
It’s the story of three aidworkers who get trapped in a village in South Sudan for six months or so during the 1998 famine – and also the story of a Dinka village’s fight to carry on existing despite war, starvation, aerial bombardment and disease.
You would think that it might be a depressing place, but Sudan is an incredible place, full of light and life, laughter and dancing, as well as grief, fear and tears. I was very lucky to spend time there on and off between 1998 and 2001, and to have worked many times elsewhere in Africa.
There is a fragile peace in South Sudan now. It is Darfur in the north of the country, a couple of hundred miles from the villages I visited in 1998 that has come to be synonymous with genocide.
But while that fragile peace holds by a thread the atrocities go on, and as two million people try to return to the country to resettle, they face a fight for all the basics of human existence, for water, food, land, education and healthcare.
For that reason a percentage of every book sold is going to go to Oxfam. And buying the book from the Reportage Press website – www.reportagepress.com will donate again, as for every 100 books sold a borehole will be dug in the drylands of the South.
For more on Oxfam’s work in South Sudan see
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/countries/sudan_south.htmam.co.uk/