Votes are being counted throughout Sudan to determine whether southern Sudan will secede from the north and form Africa’s newest nation. Photo by Sara Fajardo / CRS

Voting in Sudan’s referendum has ended, and the vote totals are being counted. Preliminary results will be announced on February 2, and final results are scheduled to be announced by February 14.

For updates on the vote totals, visit SouthernSudan2011.com.

This report was filed by Renee Lambert.

Young Sudanese polling officials sat inside a small two room school, silently unfolding ballots while national and international observers looked on. It was just after 7 pm, the polls had closed 2 hours earlier. Outside the school the sun was setting, so the polling officials were counting by the light of small lanterns. Shadows of the young officials unfolding ballots bounced off the walls of the small room and goose bumps covered my arms as I realized the significance of what I was witnessing. My eyes had already welled with tears more times in the past week than could be counted on both hands, but this did not stop them from tearing up again. And I knew that what I was feeling wasn’t even a fraction of what the Sudanese polling officials and observers must be feeling.
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Sister Veronica Daniel casts her ballot in Juba, Sudan, on Sunday, January 9. Photo by Sara Fajardo/CRS

Dan Griffin, CRS senior adviser for Sudan is in Juba, the capital city of southern Sudan, during the referendum process. He filed this report on the first day of the historic vote.

Sunday January 9th, Juba, Sudan—Between jet lag and excitement I’m wide awake by 4:00 am. The CRS guesthouse is not far from St. Theresa’s Cathedral. I can hear the choir coming to the end of an all night vigil. Even closer is the polling center for this area, the Kator section of Juba.

At 5:00 a.m. I can hear police and soldiers giving instructions to assembled voters. By dawn the line extends for a hundred yards before wrapping around the block. By 8:00 a.m. the polling centers are reporting voluminous crowds. President Salva Kiir cast his ballot on the morning news. In stark contrast to celebrations in Juba, reports are coming in of violence over the weekend in Abyei and Unity state. More than 40 casualties are confirmed. Initial reports speak of contained violence. Voting will proceed in Unity State as planned. The referendum on the status of Abyei, originally scheduled for today is postponed indefinitely.

Journalists swarm polling stations, photographing, interviewing, and sending live broadcasts via satellite. Centers open on time. The voters stand in orderly lines, and people are showing up at the right polling centers with the right documentation. Some have lined up most of the night, while others will be in line all day.
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Signs peppered the city of Juba encouraging people to get out and vote in southern Sudan. Photo by Sara Fajardo/CRS

Dan Griffin, CRS senior adviser for Sudan is in Juba, the capital city of southern Sudan, during the referendum process. He filed this report the day before the beginning of the historic vote.

Saturday January 8, Juba, Sudan—I arrived in Juba for the fifth time in a year, Saturday morning at 10:30 amm. From the very beginning, I knew this trip would be different. I first came to Africa twenty years ago this month. I started working on Sudan issues more than ten years ago, working for the Catholic Diocese of Torit as a Justice & Peace coordinator at a time Sudan was famous for having neither. Flying back this time, reading reports of the preparations for the referendum starting the following day, I was struck how my own sense of the geography of Sudan has been shaped by its suffering. I first learned place names from reports on where atrocities ocurred; I learned the locations of towns and villages largely from the people who fled them. My introduction to Sudan was through its famines and its wars, and that history makes this trip, this front row seat to this historical moment, a unique and joyful one.
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Dan Griffin, CRS senior adviser on Sudan, recorded these images of Sudanese Archbishop Paulino Lukudu Loro casting his vote in the historic southern Sudan referendum.

A calm, joyful procession of voters waited hours in long lines for the chance to vote for unity with the North or independence for southern Sudan.

People cart off their belongings at the Juba river port where 700 returnees arrived on Monday, January 3, 2011. Children and youth made up the majority of the passengers on the boats. The journey from Khartoum down the River Nile is a 15-day trip. . Photo by Karina O’Meara/CRS

Karina O’Meara is a CRS Business Development and Communications Program manager in Juba, Sudan. She reports on Sudanese leaving the north to start new lives in southern Sudan.

It was mid-morning when we arrived at the Juba River Port last week and it was jostling with the sounds of people unloading bedding, horses, cars, and cooking supplies from the four open-air containers that flanked a large passenger boat. An estimated 700 people had made the up-to-15-day journey from Khartoum and Kosti to reach southern Sudan’s largest city.

Each day, in the lead up to the referendum, thousands of people have flooded into Juba and other main cities across the south. Every day people arrive en masse on boats, planes, and buses. The International Organization of Migration calculates that around 116,000 Sudanese left northern Sudan in government organized returns to the south in the past two months. An additional 49,000 traveled to south by other means.

The returnees bring their most prized possessions. One little girl in a sun-bleached pale orange dress, about age 11, clutched a well-traveled wooden desk, leaving no doubt who owned it.
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CRS regional information officer Sara Fajardo is in Juba to report on southern Sudan’s weeklong referendum process. She shot this video of Cardinal Wilfrid Napier OFM, Archbishop of Durban, South Africa, who is part of an ecumenical monitoring team in southern Sudan and talked about the region’s historic vote. Videography by Sara Fajardo/Catholic Relief services).

Men wait in line to vote in Juba, Sudan, on Sunday, January 9. The six-day-long referendum process allows southern Sudanese to vote to either continue as one unified Sudan or to secede and become their own nation. Photo by Sara A. Fajardo/CRS

CRS regional information officer Sara A. Fajardo is in Juba, capital of southern Sudan, reporting on the referendum. She filed this report this morning.

People began arriving long before dawn. Some were rumored to have spent the night. By the time we arrived several hundred men and women snaked the grounds of St. Kizito parish in Juba, Sudan. The men stood in one line. The women stood in another. Many carried radios and listened for news of the turnout to Sudan’s historic vote in their home counties. Women whispered, radios hummed, and a few tired children whimpered as they nestled on their mother’s welcoming backs.

All waited patiently. Their time had come. It was time for them to cast their ballot. This was there once-in-a-lifetime chance to vote to decide whether southern Sudan will secede from the north or remain united with northern Sudan.
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Sr. Catherine Arata, SSND, director of Pastoral Services, Solidarity with Southern Sudan shared the following story about the close of the 101 Days of Prayer for a Peaceful Referendum:

To officially close the “101 Days of Prayer for a Peaceful Referendum in Sudan”, the Wau Committee for Peace organized a final message at the Jur River in Wau.

The idea was to spread an encouraging word of peace as widely as possible, reaching all the people of Sudan, without any distinction between southerners and northerners.
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