Culture shock can hit you whether you arrive in Africa or in Canada and America. The change is just too dramatic. When I arrive in Africa, and especially in Sudan, I am immediately struck with the vast difference between Sudan and Canada and America. We north Americans have it made in the shade.

I have taken people to Sudan who used to complain about our own country. Several days in Sudan changes their whole thinking and world-view. In south Sudan, 98% of the people have no electricity of any kind. Even in Juba, the Capitol of the south, electricity is very sporadic.

On their return to North America, suddenly they realize how many benefits we have. We complain about health care. They have little or none in most of the south. We complain about stores not having our favourite brand of some sort of soup or cold cuts. They have no such luxuries. Often they don’t even have the basic maize meal needed to boil into as pasty food once a day.

We have clean running water, hot and cold. They just have dirty water in most places. A few good wells are working with pure water, but they are too few and far between. We are concerned over political issues because of our own desires and opinions. In south Sudan they are only just getting up off the ground where they have been blasted by war for 23 years. Politically, they have yet to get the ‘machine’ up and running.

I have to consider jet-lag a luxury, because I can fly in and OUT. I don’t have to live my life in south Sudan, trying to scratch a living out of now overgrown patches which used to be small less-than-an-acre plots but were abandoned because of raids, bombs and genocide.

Yes, a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) has been signed, all 400 pages of it. Just one problem: it means next to nothing to the three million hungry people who are returning to what used to be home. They return with nothing but determination.

Even the great sums of money which are supposed to be sent from the rich north of Sudan as oil revenue payments rarely arrives, and never on schedule. And with what they do get in the southern Government, they have to rebuild the whole infrastructure which the north destroyed when they tried to destroy the south. That will cost more than they can ever get from the north.

If we wait for our world governments to step in and come up with a plan to rehabilitate the south of Sudan, we will wait a long time, and the watch money being thrown at problems without enough safeguards against corruption, fraud and mismanagement.

It’s going to have to be “We the people” who help them.

We are rich, even by world standards. By Sudan’s standard in the south, we are wealthy beyond imagining.

They are poor. “We” have to do something about it.