Londoners who deliver medicine and relief amid the killing of a civil war

A family doctor, a CBI executive and a hedge fund manager are helping the aid effort in South Sudan. Martin Bentham meets them

HIGH on a rooftop in South Sudan’s capital Juba, London GP Lois Fergusson and her husband Alex st a nd in t he f e ro c i ous African sun describing the killing and suffering they have encountered working in the midst of the civil war blighting the world’s newest country.

“The first time they came in with guns, the second time a week later with guns and grenades. I was sorting out an evacuation and at the same time thinking my wife is over there towards the gunfire,” says Alex, recounting an occasion last year when the refugee camp in which he and Lois were based was attacked. “There were injuries and deaths on both occasions,” Lois adds. “One man we knew was killed.”

Such violence has become familiar since the conflict in South Sudan — largely forgotten in the West — erupted in December 2013 following a ri f t between President Salva Kiir and his deputy Riek Machar.

At least 10,000 people have been killed since then as Machar’s rebel force seeks to topple President Kiir. Two million more have fled their homes. It has given an unhappy start to a nation created in July 2011, when a split with its northern neighbour Sudan was agreed after decades of conflict that claimed around 2.5 million lives.

But while many might flinch from entering the country, Lois, Alex and a third Londoner — former City hedge fund manager Damien Mosley — have all left their careers to work for the aid agency Medair. Lois, 31, who married Alex in 2009 after they met as students at Cambridge University, began work as a GP in Newham, but has now spent a year in South Sudan providing primary health care in areas in which medical provision is scant or absent.

She recalls another incident when the Upper Nile State refugee camp, where she and her husband were working last year, was hit by the ethnically-targeted killing which has become common in the conflict.

“People were confined to base in every compound and another aid agency next to us had their compound surrounded. Five people were killed over the next few days. Three were dragged from their cars and executed.”

International aid workers were not targeted, but one of Lois’s local colleagues was forced to hide for 18 hours under a market-stall table.

“Even in the midst of all that we were most concerned about our colleagues,” Lois adds. “The primary fear is the physical danger to them. But it is stressful. I get really hot, which isn’t great in this temperature.” Her husband Alex, 30, who worked for MP Andrew Selous and the CBI before switching to inter-