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When I first started telling people that I would be doing a year of mission work in South Sudan, the reaction was almost always the same. “Don’t you know it’s not safe there?” “Wow. Are you sure you want to go there?” “Why do you want to go somewhere so unstable?” It was an understandable reaction based on the portrayal of this country in the news in America. Everything shown is war and distress and horrible people mercilessly killing others. These things are happening in this country and they are awful. I don’t want to belittle them in any way, but I also want people to know that there is so much more to this country than the violence. There are so many things that you would never see in the news.

CNN won’t write a report on the city of Wau and how it has been rebuilding itself since the war. It won’t talk about the parish of St. Joseph, its full church services and the children that literally run into mass to sit in the front row, its participation in Mission Sunday and how the parishioners gave out of heir poverty to raise over 12,000 South Sudanese Pounds to give to those less fortunate than themselves, and its Salesian priests and their preachings on living and leading joyful lives. It won’t talk about the students of Mary Help Nursing School, how they attend clinicals every morning and then have class until 5:30 PM, how they go to school every day except Sundays and have a total of 6 weeks off from school a year, and how they work this hard because they want to help people and improve the healthcare system of South Sudan.

BBC won’t spotlight on the citizens of South Sudan who create a welcoming environment for people visiting from other countries. They wont talk about the man who lends the Americans his phone at the airport and goes out of the way to help them get where they need to be, the woman who offers to show the foreigners around the market and teach them what reasonable prices are, or the student who offers to spend time teaching Arabic so someone can follow the conversations going on around them. You won’t see videos of children running to the roads to wave at the “Cawaijas” (white people), staying after school and decorating their school for a festival, or praying the rosary respectfully.

There are a lot of terrible things happening in this country, but there are a lot of beautiful things happening too. It is easy to focus only on the negative and forget to even acknowledge the positive.  It is easy to see the faults of a group of people and attribute that to a whole nation. It is easy to be fearful of places and cultures that are unknown. I wish everyone could come experience a little bit of what I have experienced here. There has not been a day that I have felt unsafe, that I have not seen joy in the people here, or that I have not found beauty in this country.

South Sudan needs your prayers. It needs prayers for peace, for a strong and just government, for leaders who will serve the country honestly and for an end to the violence. It needs prayers for all of the horrible things that you see in the news, but it also needs prayers for the growth and continuation of the things you would not see in the news. It needs prayers for continual faith formation, for the education of the young, and the funding of programs that provide this education. The news will never show the full picture of a situation, only God knows the extent of what is happening in this country and it is only through Him that things can come to be how they were meant to be.