Rebuilding Southern Sudan

Hard as it may be to believe, the Darfur crisis is not the worst tragedy Sudan's people have suffered in recent years. That occurred in southern Sudan, which is slowly emerging from a conflict that lasted more than two decades.

These days, CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan reports, the women of southern Sudan have reason to celebrate. The end of Africa's longest war — after 21 years of suffering and 2 million killed — has finally brought them peace ... and brought them home.

For many, the journey was long and treacherous, but none more so than for a young boy called "One O'Clock," whose extraordinary survival has become the stuff of legend.

His name was given to him by Noura Sawa, who saved the boy from certain death when she stumbled across him lying in the grass following an ambush by Arab militias that began at exactly 1 o'clock. He was 10 months old at the time. There was no one else around, Sawa says.

The survival story of "One O'Clock" soon made its way to James Morris, the executive director of the World Food Programme in Rome. Morris just had to meet this famous little boy. Morris also met the woman who didn't hesitate to take him in — even though she already had nine children of her own.

They are just two of the 4 million people displaced by the war who are returning to southern Sudan now that it's over.

"They are coming home faster this year than we had expected," says Morris, "and that's good news."

The problem is that they are coming back to nothing, says World Food Programme's Simon Crittle, who's been working closely with returnees for the past year.

"This country has been so badly affected by war, it's been completely destroyed, so the people are coming back; they are trying, but it is very, very difficult," Crittle says.

No one has tried harder than Sawa and the women of her village, which didn't even exist a year ago. With food and tools from the World Food Programme and land from the local government, they built everything from scratch.

South Sudan is one of the poorest and least-developed places on earth. Crittle took Logan to a "cattle camp," where the Dinka people literally live among their animals. It's how south Sudan's dominant tribe has guarded its most sacred possession for centuries — and it's all these people have.

The tribesmen's haunting faces, painted white with the ash from burning cattle dung, seem almost prehistoric.

It's only when you come to a place like this that you just start to understand how far south Sudan still has to go. It may seem as if time has stopped still for these people — but when you talk to them, you realize they know the modern world has left them behind.

And they want to catch up. Health education and schools topped the list of things they said they need desperately.

What Crittle and others working in south Sudan want the international community to understand is that just because the bullets have stopped flying doesn't mean the emergency is over.

"The Americans have given us over 200 million (dollars)," he says. "Now other governments are starting to come to the party. However we are only 50 percent funded, and if we don't get the money we need, it will literally be a tragedy for southern Sudan. "

South Sudan finally has a chance to find its way out of poverty so that decades of suffering can really end — but it can't do it alone. For the children, who have only known tragedy, peace should not be as hard to endure as war.