Katire

Yesterday, 4 February 2009, I finally had the opportunity to visit the community of Katire with Bishop Akio Johnson Mutek. He and others have often mentioned this place to me, commenting on its beauty and its needs. The bishop seems to have a special fondness for this village. He often goes there to celebrate Mass on Sunday, and makes other visits as well.

This is one of the villages I wrote about during my initial visit to Sudan in June. Until last Easter the Sacraments had not been celebrated there for 16 years. They sent word to the bishop on several occasions begging for a priest to come, echoing the words of the early Christians who said they could not live without the Eucharist. Repeated attempts were made without success. Several bridges along the road leading to the community have been destroyed. Most of the streams they span can be crossed by fording. However there’s one in particular that amounts to a small gorge that cannot. That chasm is what had frustrated all the earlier attempts to reach the community. However, last Holy Week, the bishop’s secretary, Fr. Peter Ben Louis, managed to place a piece of timber over the gorge and walk the motorcycle he was riding across the ravine and continue on his way. The community was overjoyed, and so motivated that they repaired that bridge, improved the road and are now working on some of the other places on the route that need attention. The bridge shown below has just been fitted with two thick mahogany beams; the previous ones lasted for 50 years.


Up to that point the village had been pretty much isolated and forgotten, but the arrival of Fr. Peter Ben and repair of the road opened up a whole new window of opportunity. There are now regular loads of bamboo harvested from the Matong Mountains hauled down from the community for use in building huts in Torit, as well as shipments of goods and supplies to the community which they can now purchase.

Katire is reached by travelling along the road that passes right in front of the compound where I live. At one point the road splits. To the left it heads off toward Ikotos, but that road is still not passable because of landmines; it is currently being demined by the Mechem group associated with the UN. To the right it branches off toward Katire, and then on into Gilo, further up into the mountains. Shortly after we veered off in that direction and passed a recently abandoned military camp, a rock mount was pointed out to me on the left. I was told that over 200 people connected with the first Anya Nya resistance (of which Fr. Saturnino Ohure was a leader) were executed there by a firing squad of the northern government in 1955, and their bodies thrown off the peak.

As we continued we passed through beautifully shaded teak forests and thick bamboo groves. I was told that further up the road, which only vehicles in the best condition can travel, was a former British airbase, where Elizabeth II of England was reportedly kept in hiding for a short period during World War II. Near there I’m told there’s a beautiful swimming hole that “only white people” use; it’s too cold for the local Africans.

Katire has a fascinating and painful history. Because of its beauty, agreeable climate, fertile soil and abundant forests, the settlement became unusually developed in the first half of the last century. It became a melting pot of Arabs from the north and people with different talents and areas of expertise from all the different tribes of Southern Sudan. I was told that former Bishop Paride Taban (of the Madi tribe, whose territory is located near the Nile on the Ugandan border) spent some time there as a child while his father worked there.

The community’s development centered on a very productive timber industry and British-run sawmill that harvested trees from the mountains, processed the wood in the lmill, and then trucked it on to Juba to be loaded onto barges and shipped down the Nile to the Mediterranean.



The sawmill was powered by a small hydro-electric plant that generated energy by diverting water from a nearby stream with a strong current through a large turbine.


The Arabs fled the village after the outbreak of the second civil war in the early 80s, but the sawmill continued functioning into the 1990s when fighting between factions in the SPLA made it too dangerous for anyone to stay there. The community was abandoned, the people took refuge in the mountains, buildings began to crumble and the village fell into ruin. Below can be seen the remains of the former mosque and the jail just behind it.



The community continued to be terrorized by violence until as recently as 2003 when more than 800 people were killed there by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group based in northern Uganda which makes frequent forays into Sudan.

The residents Katire are just now beginning to reorganize themselves. Below is a little boy sitting on steps to a structure that no longer exists, followed by a new home decorated with outlines of handprints, and a meeting of community leaders with a reporter from the local radio station about the state of education in the village.




Among the casualties of the war years are the Catholic chapel, priests’ quarters and school. Bishop Akio and the diocese are now in the process of repairing and rebuilding these structures.




For the time being, he celebrates Mass under the trees.


Near the end of our visit I was able to see the stream that passes through the community. It is crossed by a footbridge that is supported by branches of a tree that overshadows the water.



There are large rock formations that partially form the shore of the far side and create beautiful water falls.



Near the bottom of the one shown here I decided to play Joe Photographer and climbed down to get a shot from below. While trying to find the right angle up close to the water, I happened to step on some slimy decaying leaves. Without being able to do anything to stop it, I slowly slid (not fell) up to my waist in the pool at the bottom. I ended up being one of the “white people” to swim in the cool mountain stream.