by Krista Mahr

It was a blazing Saturday in October, and the crowd had been waiting for hours. Cousins, brothers, wives and daughters stood sweating under a few big mango trees on the banks of the Nile in Juba, South Sudan's new capital. Kids coaxed the unripe fruit out of the branches with sticks, getting the green orbs to the dirt with a plunk. The hot smell of charcoal wafted out from a makeshift tea stand, where a woman heaped spoons of sugar into small glass cups. At last, the barge appeared, first a dark smudge on the wide, brown river, and soon enough, a teeming, cheering vessel carrying hundreds of South Sudanese on the last leg of their very long journey home.

"Juba!" a man onboard called out from a megaphone. "Juba! We bring you good news!" As the boat pulled into port, passengers stood on the roof and hung over its railings, spotting their relatives onshore and waving wildly across the narrowing gap of water. On land, men yelped and women let out long, high-pitched trills. Somebody unfurled a government banner bearing the portrait President Salva Kiir in his signature black cowboy hat bearing the slogan "Return in safety and dignity."

.....In Renk, a remote town in South Sudan where thousands of returnees are waiting for passage, food is scarce and sanitary conditions are poor, with only a few international aid agencies scrambling to try to provide some services to an increasingly frustrated crowd. "The national government has made a political decision to evacuate people from Sudan and bring them south as quickly as possible without guaranteeing the practical consequences of that decision," says Peter Orr, a senior advocate for Refugees International. "Now they're turning to the humanitarian community and saying, You have to help these people."

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