There is chat of families back home in the market town of Yei — two hours south of the camp — and how they will dress up when they return back for their leave.
But the team have won the respect of the men.
“The women do just as good a job as we can,” said Atom Julius Pitia, an NPA supervisor and a former southern rebel solider.
“It’s true that sometimes they may be slower, especially when digging in the hard ground,” Pitia said.
“But they are also often more thorough than the men — and in this business, that is something of vital importance, because you don’t want to miss a mine,” he said.
Similar all-women demining teams work elsewhere in the world, including in Kosovo and Cambodia, but the ones in Sudan are the first in the war-torn country, NPA program manager Kjell Ivar Breili said.
Breili said the female teams have recently beaten several of the six male teams NPA runs in terms of the number of explosives cleared.
“We don’t have problems of fighting or drinking with the women,” Breili said.
Since the war ended, deminers have opened up over 13,000km of roads in southern Sudan, and cleared more than 813,000 unexploded ordnance or landmines, the UN’s Mine Action Office (UNMAO) said.
The women’s teams have also impressed the UN.
“The NPA female demining team demonstrates that women can be just as effective as their male counterparts in dealing with the legacy of landmines from Sudan’s civil war,” said Joseph McCartan, deputy director for UNMAO.
“They are deployed on exactly the same tasks as their male colleagues,” he said.
The women doing the hard work are aware of the risks but they shrug off the danger with nonchalance.
“If you follow the procedures it is not dangerous,” Festo said.
“It’s much safer than if people were walking here without us to clear the mines away,” she said.
RSS