Podcast Episode 3: ‘That Was the Chicken I Paid to the Driver’

Stephen Ohidor

In 1997, my dad had his second wife, and then the family did not like him. So one of the brother to the lady stabbed him from the back with a spear through to his chest. So he was bleeding, and the spear was just hanging, and people are like, “Don’t remove. If you remove, he will die.”

There was a facility, we call it, a primary health unit. My dad was carried there, and I was just holding him. They injected him all around, and then they removed the spear. Then they started stitching him from the back.

And then people use honey to clean the wound, and he survived. He’s still alive. I just look at that like what they did was a miracle. So I said, “I need to be a doctor so that I also help people.”

Soyia Ellison, Host

Stephen Ohidor was born in a tiny village in South Sudan, a nation that didn’t yet exist at that time. From an early age, his life was marked by civil war. His schooling was constantly interrupted, and his village faced a deadly cholera outbreak. One day when he was 12 years old, an aid truck arrived in his community, and Stephen saw a chance to change his future. He convinced his father to give him a chicken to pay the driver for a ride to Kenya where he could continue his education.

Today, even as conflict continues, he manages the Carter Center’s Trachoma Control Program in South Sudan. He’s responsible for overseeing the delivery of preventative medicine and surgical services for people with trachoma, a bacterial infection that causes intense pain and leads to blindness if left untreated.

This is “Far Away, Up Close, Global Stories from The Carter Center.” I’m your host, Soyia Ellison, director of storytelling at the Center. In today’s episode, Stephen talks about growing up as the eldest son of a cattle farmer, living through the Civil War and what it’s like to help people access life-changing healthcare.

Stephen Ohidor

I’m Stephen Ohidor and I work for The Carter Center as a trachoma program manager. I lead and oversee the implementation of the SAFE strategy for the Trachoma Control Program that includes surgery, antibiotic distribution, environmental cleanness activities, sanitation. We also do research, and as part of the leadership team within The Carter Center, we also involve in advocacy and partnership with other organizations and the government stakeholders.

What we normally do in the community is we provide a very simple message. Trachoma is caused by germs, and this disease can move from one person to another using our hands, when you maybe touch or rub the face of a child who is infected without washing your hands. We also talk about flies. So they need to keep their environment clean so that they avoid the breeding of flies that increase and really facilitate transmission, especially with children.

We try to emphasize the community to dig local latrines where they’ll be able to bury their feces. For those with animals, let’s say going after cattle, so when they come back, they need to bathe so that they remain clean. When we give visual pictures that demonstrate what happened if someone get infected, the end result is that you’ll become blind.

In some communities, there are already songs that they made and people sing. The disease exist and the treatment is just very simple. This one song, it’s not in my dialect, but it’s in Toposa that they call it lomeme and they sang that lomeme comes and make everyone within the community blind.

But the time The Carter Center came, they told us how to remove this disease from our community, and women have to sing that song while they’re cleaning the compound. When you’re blind, that is a very serious issue. Somebody need to be guiding you if you want to move anywhere.

There are going to be such discrimination. If you’re a man, you might not marry. If you’re a lady, it’s a similar thing. You might be exploited for many other things, including sexual, because you can’t see and you can’t defend yourself.

Economically within the family, you are not a productive person. You’re not able to cultivate. You’re not able to work. For children, for people who want to go for education, your ambitions are all closed.

I grew up in Eastern Equatoria in one of the village. The village is really very small. I’m a sibling of seven. My father is not educated. He’s a farmer. He has cows.

Much of the work that I do during my childhood was more of rearing cattle, looking after goats and cows. Another thing I had was babysitting. People used to come to my mom, and they would come and take me out from her for at least three months. You have to be babysitting while mothers go to the farm.

Another thing also that I do was really more of a hunter. I had the bow and arrow who would kill the animals and would bring meat home. My grandmother would be very happy. We had the school in my area and the school was on and off because we lack teachers, and by that time nobody’s paying anybody. So it’s only people who they might have gone to the town, or they came from Uganda and Kenya. They volunteer to teach, to provide knowledge to children. And I started learning the importance of like, “Yeah, I need to go to school.”

Soyia Ellison

When Stephen was about seven years old, his father was injured in a spear attack and that experience made Stephen interested in healthcare.

Stephen Ohidor

He was bleeding and the spear was just hanging, and people were like, “Don’t remove. If you remove, he will die.”

There was a facility, we call it a primary health unit. My dad was carried there, and I was just holding him. I think they have maybe lignocaine by then. So they injected him all around and then they removed the spear.

Then they started stitching him from the back and then people use honey to clean the wound. And he survived. Up to now, he’s still alive. I just look at that like what she did was a miracle. So I said I need to be a doctor so that I also help people.

A second incident that really pushed me for that was there was a cholera outbreak in my village. It was very bad. I think in my village alone, maybe we lost, I would say, maybe more than 50 people, including a community health worker whom we call really a doctor who served people. He died, and there was nobody that was helping people.

But again, if there was to be someone, maybe two or three of them who would help, I think that we’re not going to lose that population. There was one vehicle that came to the village to deliver sorghum. I think it came from Kenya.

So I decided, I talked to my dad now, the school here ends only in class four. I need to go out to study to further my studies. And he told me, “Yeah, you can go.” And I got one chicken and that was the chicken I paid to the driver for me to get into the vehicle.

Soyia Ellison

At 12 years old, Stephen arrived in Kenya alone and spent the next few years completing primary school with support from the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. In 2005, the Sudanese government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement signed a peace agreement, and by 2007, schools in southern Sudan reopened. Stephen came home to continue his studies. He was 16. A few years later, in 2011, the people of South Sudan voted in a historic referendum that would determine their future. The Carter Center sent a team of election observers to monitor the vote.

President Jimmy Carter, Archival

We just returned from southern Sudan. We’ve been working there now for almost 30 years and finally succeeded in getting a vote in southern Sudan to let them decide whether they want to be an independent nation or not. And I don’t have any doubt that in a few days after the votes are tabulated that we’ll have a new nation in Africa.

News Report

Midnight in the streets of Juba, now the capital of the world’s newest country. People here took to the streets as South Sudan officially declared its independence, the culmination of a United Nations backed peace process after decades of conflict.

Stephen Ohidor

There was a lot of excitement when the south separated. There were a lot of hopes that we’re independent country, so we’ll be able to manage ourself, provide for ourself, we’ll be able to govern ourself.

Soyia Ellison

But just two years after South Sudan gained independence, civil war broke out again.

News Report

The world’s newest country seems to be unraveling. What started as a power struggle between the president of South Sudan, Salva Kiir, and his former deputy, Riek Machar, has spread and become a fight between rival ethnic groups, the Dinka and the Nuer. The UN says that the violence over the last week has already claimed more than a thousand lives.

Stephen Ohidor

The fighting started on Sunday around 2:00 p.m., and then at night it becomes terrible everywhere. And so it happens where I was staying. The fighting, really intensified, and it comes very close up to the house. So some people just ran. The army, the opposition, they ran.

There were about five of them. They were helpless. They don’t have the guns. The other group was able to kill them, all the five, and we were just within the fence. And then these people were crying. You still have the sound.

Bullets were just on the roof, and we were just inside on the floor to avoid any bullet coming through the door. So it is stopped for about maybe 20 minutes, and I went out of the gate and there were these three soldiers I think who were drunk, and they all have guns and they were shooting people. He came, and he just pushed a gun on my back. And then the other one in front came and also put the gun here and this one pushed this direction, the other one pushed this direction.

So there was a woman, a neighbor, she belongs to the tribe of the soldiers and she screams. She was like, oh, in the dialect, “Leave him. Stephen is a good guy. He’s not from the people you’re looking for.” And then they told me, “Just go.”

So I left back into the compound and then the other two behind each of them shot at least two bullets up, like a celebration. This woman came and she was talking to me like, “Sorry, so these guys are just drunk. They’re drunk on people’s blood that they have killed, and now they want to kill everyone.” I think I was just left as maybe by God’s mercy.

You just have to say, “OK, yeah, I still have another life.” It made me understand a complex human existence, and the anger, the hatred, that we have and why other people can really be innocently killed. When we were about to graduate, rebels storm our school, and we had three students killed in front of me.

So the principal of the school and any other person there, they ran to Uganda. So I have to facilitate the transportation of the bodies of these three guys. We buried one there in one of the church, and then two, we were able to transport them into their home areas. And I have to go on the plane to ensure you hand the body to their families.

And lastly, the government came and they took me for interrogation. They put me in a corner and there was this general who was just hitting my head with a pistol. “Tell us what happened.” They asked me, “Why didn’t they kill you? You are the leader in the schools. You should have been killed.”

Said, “This is very clear. We know the politic and the dynamic of the fighting that was happening.” So they asked me where I came from. I told them I came from Eastern Equatoria, and he just barely told me like, “Oh, sorry. So if you are to come from this area where the school was, we’re going to kill you.”

So that is the situation. The fight continued within South Sudan, different parts of the country, and that hatred really developed. People within the country are really not looking at themselves as South Sudanese, but as ethnic groups, ethnic lines, you have descriptions and identifications on where war is, who you should fight, who you should stay with and all that. Given that the social fabric has been broken, it create fear within the population.

When it comes to implementation and programming, we’ve had a lot of our programs that we could not implement due to insecurity, a certain group fighting a certain group. So it causes displacement of the population. You can’t imagine where you’ll really go to implement your services. What is your target population? How do you even determine that this is a place you need to go?

People are divided. It also reduces trust. This medicine is brought maybe to cause infertility for us, so you’re coming to do something to our eyes. It takes a lot of community advocacy for people to believe that, OK, you are a very neutral entity that is coming to provide services to everyone. We are humanitarian, and we have our principles that safeguard us and the work that we do.

We do first an assessment security-wise of visibility, looking at contingency plans whenever anything happens, which groups will we be talking to, movement and who will not go there, medicine whether community will accept or not. So we have to do all these check boxes for us to implement an activity in an area. Every day is just like prayers. You’re not even sure when you travel from point A, you’re reaching point B.

It’s always, “God, just allow us go through.” And you’re making decisions for the life of people who are helping people and it’s very challenging. How do you want to move the team? Do you want to continue? How about where they stay? Where else is safe? And you have to make some of the big, big decisions, which sometimes even will not go right because every day is uncertain.

We have cross rivers where we have to enter into a river up to your chest to put medicine on your head. So that commitment put everyone to be at the same level in terms of passion and really dedication. What do you intend to achieve in life? What do you want actually to have in your name? How do you want to help other people?

We have our team on the mountain that is implementing surveys, and it’s a lot of hiking. There are places you go seven hours, 10 hours. It is cold. So just like where people exist, we will be there.

The Carter Center as a whole really understands the complexity of the work that it does. There’s somebody behind you and you are working with the community, and you’re delivering these services. You feel supported, and the community also feels supported because you are there with them.

We’re not doing from windows. We are really on the ground, and we hear the stories from the field where things happen, and we sleep with communities, we stay with them, we eat together. And so we become part of the community, and there’s nothing you can really imagine being happier.

Soyia Ellison

Despite the challenges of working through a civil war, Stephen and his team continue to empower communities to fight trachoma. They’ve distributed drugs to over six million people and helped over 17,000 patients access surgery that alleviates their suffering and preserves their sight.

Stephen Ohidor

So people develop this disease over time and with continual infection, it will really cause a wound under the eyelid. And then this wound sometimes will heal and make a scar. Instead of your eyelid staying very straight, it will constrict.

So your eyelashes go down and scratch on your eyeball. Cornea, the black part of the eye, it is like a mirror or a glass. So if you get a scratch on your glasses, you’ll have issues, you’re not able to see well. It’ll cause pain because these eyelashes will always be scratching on your eye.

So that scar will prevent light from going down into your eye to the retina. You’re not going to see very clearly. The surgery happens on the eyelid. We do an incision and then a stitch is being made to pull the eyelid. It’s like correcting something that is bending, and you want to pull it a bit to ensure it stays straight. And that way there will be no more scratching. There will be an increased opening where light will go into your eyes and you’re able to see.

Soyia Ellison

Stephen says that you can see the impact of the eyelid surgery almost instantly.

Stephen Ohidor

When you have this condition, it will be very difficult for you to see me straight on the face. You’ll always bow down because the wound that is being created by the eyelashes has an issue with the ultraviolet light from the sun. You feel immediately like there’s something burning your eyes, and you have to look down just to ensure you don’t have direct contact with light.

Now, somebody can raise their head and see you in the face and smile. We had a boy, I think at the time he was eight years. He was blind from trachoma, but when he was operated, he was just seeing, and I shed tears and I was very happy. Imagine this child, what would happen to his life just at this young age?

What will his future be like? Maybe he will become somebody in the community, a community leader who organize people, who talk to people about peace     , who leads his people during difficult moments. It keeps me really every time motivated that this little thing that we can do that can really change someone’s life.

Soyia Ellison

That’s all for this episode of Far Away, Up Close. Thanks for listening.

I’m your host, Soyia Ellison. 

The series is a presentation of The Carter Center in partnership with Audiation.

Sandy Smallens of Audiation and I are the executive producers.

Our story editors are Susie Armitage and Andre Gallant.

Our series producer and audio video editor is Colleen Cox.

Sound design, mix engineering, and theme and original music composition by Paul Vitolins and Marcelo De Oliveira for Audiography.

Madeleine Evans is our production coordinator.

Audience development by Jacob Kramer-Duffield, podcast cover art by Matt Zivkovic for Matia.

We’d like to thank all of our story subjects who so generously shared their time and lives with us.