Nyal sits in Panyijar County, in Unity State, in the Greater Upper Nile region of South Sudan. Its reputation for resisting external pressure is older than the current century. During the Nuer-British War of 1923-1933, during the Second Sudanese Civil War, and during the first South Sudanese Civil War of 2013-2019, Nyal kept its footing where other towns fell. That is partly geography - the swamps make it hard to attack in force - and partly a community that has refused, generation after generation, to be displaced from the ground their ancestors are buried in. The town has served as a security centre for people fleeing from across Unity State and Eastern Upper Nile, accommodating thousands of internally displaced persons while its own schools, clinics, and markets struggled to keep functioning.

In March 2014, an IRIN reporter flew over Nyal and saw that half or more of the homes in the area had been burned to the ground. By August that year, markets, schools, and health facilities in surrounding villages had closed. The International Rescue Committee warned of looming famine. Families were grinding water-lily roots into flour because there was almost nothing else to eat, and water-lily flour, as every nutritionist knows, offers almost no nutrition - it fills a stomach, briefly, and that has to be enough. Then the SPLA's spring 2015 offensive displaced still more people, who arrived in Nyal on foot because they could not afford canoes, dragging their belongings through swamps that hold poisonous snakes and crocodiles. They chose the danger of the water over the certainty of what soldiers on the roads might do.

By December 2015, ReliefWeb counted 6,000 to 10,000 displaced people in the Nyal area. Between 2,500 and 3,500 of them were living on islands in the swamps to the north - mostly women and children, many unaccompanied. The Food and Agriculture Organization was flying in supplies using large Ilyushin cargo jets, one of the few ways to reach a place that roads cannot. But humanitarian actors on the ground were few, and many island residents reported they were not receiving supplies at all. The town itself had only a main clinic run by Sign of Hope, a mobile market clinic run by UNIDO, and a smaller outpost in Maluak six to eight hours east. For people living in the swamps, herbal medicine from the Nim tree was often the only option when someone fell ill.

It would be wrong to tell Nyal's story only in the grammar of suffering. The Nyal Football League, formed in the 2000s, once had eight clubs; Niang FC from Greater Nyal has won five major trophies, holding a slight edge over their Nyabang FC rivals, the "Morning Stars," whose stadium sits in Duong Town. Mango harvests still come in June. Fishermen still go out at dawn when the toich water is calm. Mothers still braid daughters' hair in the shade of palm fronds. On 21 May 2016, heavy fighting returned between SPLA-IO opposition forces and troops loyal to President Salva Kiir, and the town's precarity was renewed. But the football league also kept going, on whatever pitches could be kept clear, because the ordinary rituals of life are themselves a form of resistance when the alternative is giving up.