“One thing I remember as we moved from one place to another, is the smell of dead bodies,” Mauot recalled recently. The family spent weeks in the bush, on a circuitous trip to Terekeka County in Central Equatoria State, before finding refuge in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. Mauot was not only a toddler but also blind. They picked him up as he cried, until their mother relented. But Mauot’s sisters refused to leave him behind. The pressure was so much that one day, she decided to get rid of me.” She threw him into a shallow body of water and was ready to move on.
“I remember when we used to go for hiding, I would start crying,” he told PassBlue in an interview from South Sudan. Unknown to him, his mom would later consider abandoning Maout himself partway into the family’s search for refuge. As they fled into the bush, 4-year old Mauot wondered who would shelter their little puppy from the danger he was escaping with his family. They were forced out by Nuer fighters, rebels from the second-largest ethnic group in South Sudan, who were angry with the control of John Garang, the leader of the rebellion that eventually won South Sudan its independence. LAGOS, Nigeria - Mauot Louis and his family ran out of their home in Sudan one day in the early 1990s, leaving their puppy behind. Every conflict in the world leads to stories like this, the writer says, as people with disabilities face extra hurdles in wars and related displacement. Maout Louis survived South Sudan’s war for independence from Sudan in the early 1990s, despite being being a “double-burden” to his mother when his family fled repeatedly into the bush.
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