I say. That is what the word Akobo translates to in the Anyuak language, though the people who have lived here for generations are overwhelmingly Nuer, not Anyuak, and the river that shares the name loops westwards and north through the same flat country on its way to meet the Baro. The westernmost point of Ethiopia - where the country's map tapers to a finger pressed against South Sudan - sits inside this woreda. From there, the land is swamp in one season and grassland in another, and almost no roads are written on any official document.
The terrain across Akobo is remarkably flat. Elevations hover around 410 metres above sea level, with few distinguishing high points - a landscape where the horizon runs unbroken for kilometres in every direction. Rivers include the Gilo, which feeds into the regional hydrology of the Sobat basin. About ten percent of the woreda is forest according to the Ethiopian Rural Economy Atlas; the rest is savanna and seasonal wetland. There is no paved road network. There are no agricultural cooperatives. Raising livestock is overwhelmingly the primary source of income - which is to say, the primary basis of existence - because farming alongside the annual flood is nearly impossible for anyone who cannot time their planting to a week.
The Baro River entered flood stage on 23 August 2006. Two people drowned. Over 6,000 others were displaced across Akobo and the adjacent woredas. Authorities watched warily as foot-and-mouth disease threatened the cattle - the wealth that the flood had already chased to higher ground - and as malaria spread in the standing water. The 2006 floods were not extraordinary. What was extraordinary was how routinely they recurred. Every rainy season Akobo people and Jekow people drove their cattle to higher land and waited out the water. The houses, temporary by design, dissolved and were rebuilt in rhythm with the rains.
At the start of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, Akobo was part of the short-lived Administrative Zone 3. By 2001 the zone had been abolished and Akobo absorbed into Administrative Zone 2. In 2000, the Ethiopian Unity Patriots Front - a rebel group opposed to the EPRDF government in Addis Ababa - captured Akobo and held it until at least 2004. The Ethiopian army eventually returned. Between 2001 and 2007, Akobo was moved into the newly formed Nuer Zone. Its northern kebeles were split off to create the Wanthoa woreda; some eastern kebeles joined Jor. The maps kept redrawing themselves. The people in the cattle camps noted the changes and continued.
The 2007 Ethiopian census recorded a population of 24,674 in Akobo - 14,273 men and 10,401 women, with the skewed sex ratio reflecting patterns of male migration in the pastoral economy. Only six hundred and five people, just under two and a half percent, lived in anything identifiable as a town. The rest lived in cattle camps, seasonal settlements, and homesteads. The 1994 census, which covered more kebeles, recorded ninety-nine point nine four percent of the population as Nuer; the same percentage spoke Nuer as their first language. Protestantism had swept through the Nuer - ninety-six point six seven percent of the 1994 population identified as Protestant, with small numbers of Ethiopian Orthodox and Catholic adherents. Traditional Nuer practice around Kwoth and the leopard-skin chiefs coexists beneath that statistic in ways a census cannot measure.
Akobo woreda sits at approximately 8.00 degrees N, 33.50 degrees E in the Gambela Region of western Ethiopia, adjacent to the South Sudan border. Elevation is consistently around 410 metres. The Akoba River forms the border with South Sudan; the Baro flows along the northern edge. Gambela Airport (ICAO HAGM) is the nearest commercial field. The landscape from the air appears dramatically different by season - flooded plain during and after the rains (May-October), dry savanna the rest of the year. The westernmost point of Ethiopia lies within this woreda. Visual navigation during the wet season can be difficult due to expansive surface water.