In early July, the country of Sudan, wracked by civil war since the 1980s, officially split into two separate nations, Sudan and South Sudan. Six months earlier, over a seven-day period, the people in southern Sudan had voted in a national referendum on whether to secede from the North. The voters had two choices: "Separation" or "Unity." For the vote to be valid, 60 percent of registered voters had to participate. For the referendum to pass, a simple majority had to vote in favor of independence. The author shares his experience on traveling to the area of South Sudan just months before that country's independence from the North. In this article, he outlines crisis points that continue to threaten the region's stability. (Contains 5 notes.)