I’m awestruck by the resilience of children in South Sudan, still standing strong and staying hopeful despite all the harrowing challenges they must face. The stories I have read and heard in the process of creating this piece have been disturbing to say the least: the young girls who are cruelly married off to men five times their age, the alarming number of malnourished children (over 1 million) who must be rushed to hospitals from time to time, the fearful uncertainty of being forced to live in the rebels’ camps, and much more.

 

It led me to ponder how constrained these children must feel, having to deal with all these restrictions because of their sociopolitical and economic conditions. For some children, the constant struggle of trying to continue living is perhaps the only thing they know. My piece depicts an unidentifiable person being restrained by threads, symbolic of the restrictions that hold them back. The lack of identifiable features reflects how this person could represent any individual in South Sudan, to whom freedom may seem like an impossible concept, speaking volumes of this nationwide issue.