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Turning hardship and passion into a career

Akol Vankar Lonyamoi, 26, is a Nutrition Officer with World Vision Juba in South Sudan. She gives a personal account of her career path to humanitarian work. Akol grew up in Kenya and Uganda as a refugee, so she fully understands the challenges and instability of her fellow countrymen and women. Akol’s supervisor, Jacobus Koen, says: “…she is passionate about her work and assisting the children of South Sudan …”

Akol is a Nutrition Officer with World Vision in Juba. She attends to hundreds of malnourished children at the UNMISS Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) settlement. Credit: WVI/R.Ogola

Nothing gives me more satisfaction than the smile of a recovering malnourished child. This is enough to make me sleep soundly at night. My daily role as a humanitarian worker is to supervise and closely monitor the recovery of hundreds of malnourished children in camps for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and within host communities in Juba. Thousands of people have been reduced to living in IDP camps, and others are refugees in the East Africa region because of the war that erupted in my country in December 2013.

I understand the plight of these children and know the pain of war too well: I too was a refugee when another war broke out in 1998. I was only eight years old when my family was forced to move in search of peace in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp and later to Kaabong, in north-western Uganda, where I completed my primary-school education. I had to walk long distances and dodge bullets and soldiers, and on many occasions my siblings and I became sick after drinking dirty water. But regardless, one of my motivations was to work hard in school, surmount these challenges and help other people, especially children.

I passed my primary-school exams and was chosen among beneficiaries of a Catholic Church scholarship to attend secondary school. I felt very privileged, and I knew what I had to pursue to enable me to return to my community to assist children. Following good results in secondary school, I was lucky again to get a UNICEF sponsorship to pursue Clinical Studies in Kampala, Uganda.

The rest is history! Today I am doing what I love most: giving back to society and trying to make even a slight difference in the lives of the people I serve. I have worked for four organizations here in Juba, and I have experienced joy and sadness in equal measure. When a child is admitted to a nutrition malnutrition centre, he or she is in bad shape the majority of the time and cannot eat or drink. I am always heartbroken by this; it saddens me to see them like this.

Credit: WVI/R.Ogola

I also train mothers on good nutrition, especially on optimal infant and young-child-feeding practices, and messages to pass to other mothers through focus-group discussions and counselling sessions in emergencies. This is so that they can effectively care for their children when those children are out of our care. I also sleep well at night when the women I train compose songs in praise of good nutrition—an indication that they have understood the content.

Our young nation is at a crossroads. This is another heartache for me, especially when I visit IDP camps and I see children enacting the war, shooting each other. I see hundreds of orphaned children and wonder how long this will go on. It saddens me that we are stuck in our old ways of being unforgiving, that we cannot agree to disagree and move on to build a united country. I look forward to the day when the war will end.

I want to be the best there can be in the field of nutrition; I am currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in Human Nutrition Dietetics. I am very proud of myself and I know my family is too, despite the fact that many of them have not been as privileged as I have been. I admire men and women working in this field and I want to be just like them.