To John Bul Dau, the story is all too familiar.

South Sudan is now teetering on the edge of civil war following several weeks of violence that have claimed the lives of at least a thousand people and forced another 200,000 to flee their homes.

This time, though, Dau is no longer a 12-year-old Lost Boy, the name given to the 27,000 young men forced from their villages when the northern Arab government attacked the ethnic minority population more than 20 years ago. At the time, South Sudan and Sudan were one country in the midst of a long and deadly civil war between the Arab north and the Christian south. In 2011, South Sudan became its own country.