Poni

For a few years Poni has looked after the house we have on a small compound in Juba. When catching up with her and another colleague, Sebit, we got talking about her two kids and there was an amazing frankness about her story. This directness is one of the things I enjoy about being here. It's not that there aren't taboo subjects in society, but personal experiences, when guards are down, will be relayed with no self-consciousness.

When she was 19 and still at school, living with her mother in Juba, Poni became friends with a Ugandan guy who she says forced her to have sex one day when they were messing around. It was the only time they did it, her first experience of sex, and she became pregnant. Poni is feisty so when she realised she was expecting she traced the Ugandan in Juba to discuss what had happened and he gave her money for an abortion, which she decided she didn't want.

She went to Uganda to stay with her sister (because of the conflict many South Sudanese from the southern part of the country have family members who live in camps or elsewhere in Uganda) and concealed the pregnancy for 7 months. Then her sister told her she must return to Juba and tell their mother, but Poni feared the reaction of her mother and uncles as it's common to ostracise a woman who becomes pregnant while 'at home' (i.e. unmarried and living under the family roof at the time). The uncles were livid and wanted to attack the Ugandan but he was hard to track. Her mother was sympathetic and allowed her to stay, but she had to earn money and took a job at the hotel next to our compound, which is how she later came to work for us. I am sure Poni would have been a university graduate by now if it wasn't for becoming pregnant young.

Now in her mid 20s Poni has a second child with a guy who was a childhood sweetheart and who agreed to act a a father figure for the first kid, although the kid is currently in Uganda. Poni nips home to breastfeed the second, and the ease with which she tells me when she needs to do this, as I am technically acting as her manager, makes me smile.

One of the most fascinating things as she told her story about the Ugandan was Sebit's reaction. 'You must have liked it [the sex] though as you didn't report it to the police'. I understand why she didn't report it: the police would never take that sort of complaint seriously. I doubt it would be viewed as a crime or that a woman's word counts for much next to a man's.

Although I am privileged enough to never know for sure, these experiences of first-time sex, fear of family reactions, shame and men who do not view their actions as rape, must be the norm for many hundreds of millions of young women around the world.

It had been roasting all day and there was a mini dust storm at dusk (pictured above the standard barbed wire perimeter fence), followed by a torrential downpour. I sweated through the night but it was still a good recharge after a night of travel.