The culture of impunity in South Sudan — the world’s youngest nation — has spawned a civil war with no official body count. While government forces and rebels kill, rape and terrorize civilians, the United Nations refuses to estimate the death toll and ignores sites of mass burials.

Forgotten among the carnage is a new generation of trauma victims, waiting for peace and justice or, at the least, a time and a place to mourn the ones they’ve lost.

This is part one of a four-part series. Read the rest here.

by NATHANIEL ROSS KELLY

Okot made his hand into a fist and watched his blood flowing out from the needle in his vein.

His eyes were usually filled with a kind of serene curiosity — a warmth and intelligence that told you he had a question, an observation or a joke on the tip of his tongue. Now they were derelict. Almost every part of his face — the wide, flat cheekbones, the sealed lips, the rigid jawline — gave the impression of composure, but his eyes betrayed how hard he was trying to hold himself together.

A mango tree caught the sunlight in its canopy and painted shadows across his button-up shirt and faded jeans. Two days and two nights worth of sweat and grime caused the fabric to cling to his skin. Six other donors sat haphazardly around him, and each of them looked like he’d rather give every last ounce of his blood than make small talk. At random intervals a curse or a shriek punctured their silence.

As his offering collected at the bottom of a plastic bag, Okot tried not to think about the things he’d witnessed since entering the Juba Teaching Hospital.

Women and men crying soundlessly in the 90-degree heat. A young man with his intestines spilling out as he was rushed to surgery. A woman in a brightly colored hijab wiping vomit from the edges of her mouth. A child with a bandage wrapped around his stomach wound. His mother or sister with eyes that were seeking something far away. And the dead in the middle and dead at the periphery of every image in Okot’s mind.

They filled the mortuary to capacity. They were heaped together inside shipping containers, like goods that had expired or become obsolete. And they were resting one atop another out in the open, because the nurses had exhausted places to store them.

“In my life I’d never seen such a big number of dead bodies, not even in my past experience during the liberation struggle,” Okot tells me.

The bodies couldn’t stay there much longer, competing for space with the living. Soon they would be moved to a neighborhood called New Site, lowered into mass graves, covered up and forgotten.

I came to know Okot years ago when I looked after him and dozens of other kids at a home for orphans in South Sudan. He was hardened by the time we met, thin as one of the papyrus reeds that grows along the Nile River, and smarter than just about anyone else, child or adult, whom I encountered during my first months in one of the poorest places on earth.

Losing his parents could’ve turned him into a beast or a bitter young man. Instead, he flourished into the type of person who gives blood when the world ruptures.

“I personally dropped my tears,” he tells me now. “The whole hospital was smelling like a carcass or a butcher.”

A nurse plucked the needle from his arm and offered him a bandage and a Mirinda soda. He rested for 10 minutes, sipping the drink and watching new patients stumbling and being carried through the hospital’s iron gates. When he felt he’d regained the energy needed to face the city beyond those gates, he stood up and began his long walk home.

He moved cautiously along the asphalt streets and dirt roads of Juba, the capital of South Sudan. He cut through areas that resembled overgrown villages rather than urban neighborhoods. He passed red-roofed hotels and stores with gaudy signs written in English and Juba Arabic, the unofficial lingua franca of the country. Not far from his home he saw a man aiming his assault rifle at nothing in particular in the sky and pulling the trigger, repeatedly.

“Everybody was traumatized, everybody was crazy,” Okot says. “Everybody wanted to do whatever he wants as long as he has the gun.” The date was Dec. 17, 2013. His nation’s new war had started inside the city less than 48 hours ago.

He experienced a small measure of relief when he finally crossed the threshold of his room, but the feeling didn’t last. By the time his eyes adjusted to the dim light, the solace in his chest had dissolved into a cloud of agitated particles. Standing in a circle of his belongings, he tried to calm the dust storm enveloping his heart and lungs and history. He tried to talk down the ache in his stomach, knowing food would only make him feel worse.

As he collapsed into a chair he realized he still smelled like he’d been lying down with the dead.