02/12/2025
By Buony Lam Them | LLDC3 Youth Representative 🇸🇸
Last night, Custom Market burned to the ground. What was once a place of hope, sweat, struggle, and daily survival is now nothing but ashes and silence. For many families, this fire did not only destroy shops, it burned their only source of food, school fees, and shelter.
This pain is not new to me.
It already happened to me in Nasir, where my own business was burned, my property destroyed, and I was displaced by this situation as these people’s are faced today. I know this pain personally. I know what it means to watch your future turn into ashes in one night. I know what it means to run with nothing left but tears and unanswered questions.
Some of us speak about peace, yet we are mocked, labeled, and reduced to tribe. We are called as if calling for peace is a crime. As if loving life is a sin. As if wanting our children to grow without gunfire is a weakness. But listen carefully, this is not a tribal cry. This is a human cry. This is the cry of South Sudan 🇸🇸.
Peace is not politics. Peace is survival.
Peace is a hustler boy waking up at dawn to push a wheelbarrow, not because he chose this life, but because hunger gave him no option.
Peace is a mother selling tomatoes in the burning heat, not for profit, but to keep her children alive.
Peace is a young woman working by the roadside, not because she doesn’t want a home, but because poverty and the broken economy have forced her there to survive.
Peace is women and boys struggling every day, not because they are weak, but because the situation has left them with no other choice.
Peace means people working with dignity, not desperation.
Peace means survival without shame.
Peace means opportunity without fear.
Our people are not suffering only on the news, they are suffering in real life, in silence, in homes with empty pots. In the villages. In the towns. In the streets. Hunger has no tribe. Pain has no language. Tears have no border.
Before the City Council talks of evictions, removals, and orders, let them first talk about where these people will survive. Give them safe open spaces. Give them dignity. Give them the chance to work, not the fear of tomorrow.
❗ We cannot talk about development where people are starving.
❗ We cannot build a nation on empty stomachs.
❗ We cannot preach progress while children cry for food.
Peace is everything.
Peace is food.
Peace is life.
Peace is development.
Development and hunger are enemies. They can never walk together.
South Sudan 🇸🇸, how long will the poor continue to bleed in silence while leaders debate comfort?
How long will traders cry in ashes while policies move slowly?
Let us choose peace, not tomorrow, not in speeches, but now, with justice, action, and mercy for the suffering people of this nation.
UN - OHRLLS
UNDP South Sudan
United Nations OCHA
Human Rights Watch