Perrysburg native Aaron Shapiro witnessed the birth of a nation in July while working in South Sudan, and although he’s optimistic about the new country’s long-term prognosis he sees severe growing pains in the short term.

The people were singing, dancing, and waving branches in the streets of Juba when they gained independence from Sudan on July 9, Mr. Shapiro said. But jubilation is giving way to the harsh realities South Sudan is now facing. Among the immediate challenges: an influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees and returnees; military conflict along the new border, and the daunting tasks of getting a government and an infrastructure off the ground after years of being under rule of Khartoum, the Sudanese capital.

“We don’t have roads. We have an infant government. The country is resource-rich, but there is no infrastructure. The refugees have been dropped off in the middle of nowhere and they have no food, no jobs. It’s going to take a massive effort to make their camps livable with water, food, health care, and sanitation,” Mr. Shapiro said in a recent interview while visiting family in Perrysburg.

A graduate of Toledo Christian High School and Taylor University, Mr. Shapiro, 28, has been working in Sudan since 2007, initially with Samaritan’s Purse and in July joining the Swiss-based nonprofit relief agency Medair as its project coordinator for emergency response teams in South Sudan.

“The culture in South Sudan is fascinating,” he said. “In some ways, however, they are not ready to enter a developed phase.”

A recent report by the U.S. Institute of Peace said the independence of South Sudan, which has a population of 8.3 million compared to the north’s 45 million, comes at a time when there is “a volatile political climate, limited capacity for governance, weak state institutions, a financial crisis, violent ethnic divisions, and an uncertain regional and international political atmosphere.”

Since Sudan’s independence from the United Kingdom in 1956, the northeast African nation was embroiled in two prolonged civil wars that lasted most of the 20th century, ending with a peace accord in 2005.

While separation from the north was approved by 98 percent of the voters in South Sudan in January, their main unifying force was a negative one — the ethnically diverse people’s long-running distrust of Khartoum, according to the report.

“South Sudan’s independence carries the question of whether the historical experiences that have long united the old south will endure in the new south, enabling the young country to become a unified political, cultural, and social entity — in short, a nation,” the U.S. Institute of Peace said.

Asma Abdel Halim, a University of Toledo professor and Sudan native who keeps close tabs on the region, agreed that South Sudan, despite having large oil reserves, faces an arduous journey to nationhood.

“There is war breaking out between ethnic groups,” she said. “Some ethnic groups feel they are being left out. Major ethnic groups are taking over resources.”

In addition, South Sudan is surrounded by nations with ongoing military conflicts, citing Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo that border South Sudan, and Somalia nearby.

“The area is a very hot area,” Ms. Halim said. “It’s a very unstable area and I think it’s totally unfair to just throw the southerners all at once into that area without having an infrastructure. The government of South Sudan has to carry the largest burden on this.”

She said millions of people who had left southern Sudan long before independence for work in the north are now being pressured to return to their homeland.

“They are being told, ‘Come back to the South and then get a work permit and you can work in the north.’ But many of these people lack the resources to do that,” she said.

Because of historic tribal and ethnic rivalries, some southerners who have lived and worked in the north for decades are being persecuted now that South Sudan is a separate nation, Ms. Halim said. Those who decide to move back to the South find a troubling scenario.

“It was like overnight, every southerner was declared a noncitizen,” she said. “They are now citizens of another country because the government of South Sudan did not negotiate this. They want northerners out of the South and the southerners back. But the place lacks infrastructure. How can you have people moving back to the South with no houses, no schools, no structure to come back to?”

Mr. Shapiro said his primary responsibilities with Medair are to provide for the hundreds of thousands of people who are either fleeing military conflict north of the border or returning to their homeland, only to wind up in temporary “transition camps” in the middle of nowhere.

He pulled a report at random from a folder he’d been studying on South Sudan, and the paper detailed an unnamed transition camp set up in a remote, barren area of the country.

The camp has 13,000 refugees and the people had been getting their well water from open troughs, a highly unsanitary system, Mr. Shapiro said.

Last year, there were serious outbreaks of cholera and Kala azar — a parasitic skin disease spread by sandfly bites — in many refugee camps.

Medair, one of numerous nongovernmental organizations working in South Sudan, installed pumps for the camp’s water supply, built latrines, provided basic shelter kits of tarps with poles, and gave out mosquito nets, blankets, and cooking utensils.

The threat of military conflict, meanwhile, is a constant concern along the new border.

George Clooney, the Hollywood star who has become the most visible supporter for peace in the region, initiated the Satellite Sentinel Project that includes a Web site with continuous detailed satellite imagery of the border region at satsentinel.org.

“We want to let potential perpetrators of genocide and other war crimes know that we’re watching, the world is watching,” Mr. Clooney said in announcing the project in December.

“War criminals thrive in the dark. It’s a lot harder to commit mass atrocities in the glare of the media spotlight.”

Mr. Shapiro, who met Mr. Clooney at a Juba restaurant in January and gave the actor a cigar, said the people who care about the region appreciate the star’s support.

“I think it’s great that a celebrity is bringing attention to a problem. He’s done a good job and he has educated himself about the region,” he said.

Contact David Yonke at: dyonke@theblade.com or 419-724-6154.