CHAPTER 2 — WE ALL BECAME BANKERS
POV: Nyakor Malith – The Trader
The first lesson Nyakor ever learned about money came wrapped in a sugar sack.
It was her mother's hands—cracked, worn hands—ripping the sack open in front of a silent house.
Inside: 300,000 South Sudanese Pounds, bundled in rubber bands and sweat.
She was 11.
That money had once been her father's compensation from the Ministry of Roads. He'd died when his government-issued truck tipped into a river with no bridge. The papers called it "an isolated incident."
Her mother called it "cheap blood."
By the time the sack arrived—delayed, debated, delayed again—it couldn't buy a year's worth of sorghum. The money had already started losing its voice. It crinkled, yes. But it didn't speak.
It couldn't command a goat.
It couldn't pay a teacher.
It couldn't even keep the lights on past midnight.
So Nyakor learned to translate silence into survival.
She sat now behind her small plastic table in Gudele, legs crossed like a prophet waiting for her offering. The market swelled around her in a storm of flesh, sweat, and bargains.
Her table was an altar of ruin.
On the surface: a digital calculator, three bundles of SSP wrapped in plastic, a small solar lamp, and a metal cashbox that never fully closed.
Behind her: a green umbrella branded with "MTN Airtime Here."
Beside her: hope—wounded, wheezing, but refusing to die.
A woman stepped forward, veil drawn low.
"I need dollars," she said.
Nyakor didn't blink. "We all do."
The woman laid out a neat pile of 50,000 SSP notes, crisp but empty.
Nyakor tapped her calculator.
"Half a dollar," she said. "Take it or walk."
The woman stared. "But it's fifty thousand."
"And bread is five thousand," Nyakor replied. "The dollar is God. Your money is smoke."
The woman didn't argue. None of them did anymore. She took the single, torn dollar bill Nyakor slid across the table and walked off.
Probably to a pharmacist. Or a smuggler. Or a priest.
Who knew anymore?
There were ten other dollar vendors in that stretch of market. Some used umbrellas, others trees. Some dealt from shadows, others boldly in daylight. But Nyakor was the only one who didn't smile.
She didn't pretend it was fair.
She just did what the banks refused to do: make money mean something.
And for that, she earned silence.
The kind of silence people respected more than sermons.
A boy came running—her cousin's son. Twelve years old and already thin as an invoice.
"Nyakor," he gasped, "they're bringing bodies to the clinic again."
She barely looked up. "Which bodies?"
"From the school. The dormitory in Lologo. No food for four days. Some of them died in their sleep."
"Take this," she said, handing him two 100 SSP notes, "and buy water."
He hesitated. "That won't be enough."
"Buy the water and the receipt. People will believe it if there's paper."
Her hands shook only once that day, and only when she opened the cashbox to count her hidden stash.
Twelve hundred USD, clean and pressed, wrapped in a cloth stamped "Zain."
She could've fled with it.
Gone to Kenya, Uganda, even Egypt if the borders opened their mouths long enough. But she didn't.
This wasn't just money. It was memory.
Every dollar came from someone's fear.
And she knew how fear moved. It never forgot the road home.
That night, Nyakor lit a candle by her bedside—not because the power was out, but because she wanted to remember fire.
She pulled out a dollar bill from her stash. Crisp. Untouched.
She thought of her brother.
He'd loved poetry. Had written lines in the margins of ration cards. "We are the currency of collapse," he once scribbled. "Our value declines with every promise they print."
When he died of malnutrition, she didn't cry.
She went to the Forex man who ran the black-market west of Customs Road.
And she traded her tears for training.
Now here she was. A street banker. A keeper of broken promises. A woman who dealt in ghosts.
The dollar bill danced in the candlelight. Green. Glorious. Indifferent.
She held it up, stared through it, and whispered, "What are you buying now?"
Then, slowly, she touched it to the flame.
It curled like a scream.
Burned like truth.
Ash drifted onto her mattress.
And Nyakor slept, finally.
Broke.
Free.
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