But the soldiers didn’t seem to believe that we had gotten lost and were not affiliated with any side. They ordered us into the station and confiscated our press passes, cameras and car keys. Being South Sudanese, I was asked to explain. But they were under the impression I was lying so we were told to sit on the ground, while at least five AKs were pointed at us. When they asked us to hand over our phones, I refused. It was our only link to the world beyond the station. My country ranks as one of the worst for press freedom and nine journalists were killed in the same state in 2015. I drafted a message to a journalist WhatsApp group with our location, ready to hit send should the hostility increase or a soldier start shooting. Just then, the phone rang; it was the commander. I explained that we had been detained. He would come to us, he said, before hanging up. It took a while, but just as I was losing hope that he would arrive, the commander’s car appeared. He spoke first to his soldiers and then to us, before giving us a clip for our story on the violence and displacement in the state, and sending us back to our hotel.
I’ve been detained countless times since and verbally harassed more times than I could count. But I’ve also grown professionally and know how to handle those situations much better than I did when I started out as a journalist and better than I did on that day in 2016. As we sat in that station surrounded by guns, the fact that we were almost certainly going to die kept playing on my mind. But more than that, I was thinking about how getting to those whose stories we want to tell isn’t always easy. But Al Jazeera has always been about the human stories, so to not tell them is not an option. That is why I was happy to join the Al Jazeera family.
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