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It's not every day that a new country is born. Michael Gettelman of the New York Times reports live from the newly-independent state of South Sudan.

JUBA, Sudan — After five decades of guerrilla struggle and two million lives lost, the flags are flapping proudly here in this capital. The new national anthem is blasting all over town. People are toasting oversize bottles of White Bull beer (the local brew), and children are boogieing in the streets.

“Free at Last,” reads a countdown clock.

But from the moment it declares independence on Saturday, the Republic of South Sudan, the world’s newest country and Africa’s 54th state, will take its place at the bottom of the developing world. A majority of its people live on less than a dollar a day. A 15-year-old girl has a higher chance of dying in childbirth than she does of finishing primary school. More than 10 percent of children do not make it to their fifth birthday. About three-quarters of adults cannot read. Only 1 percent of households have a bank account.

Beyond that, the nation faces several serious insurrections within its own sprawling territory and hostilities with northern Sudan, its former nemesis.

It is clearly an underdog story.

So many people here embody the distance traveled and the hopes to come. James Aguto, a former child soldier and longtime guerrilla fighter, now delivers babies. Mr. Aguto is a newly minted clinical officer, working in a government hospital, and his journey from taking life to sustaining it makes him an apt symbol for the transition this country is trying to make.

“There was one night I delivered six babies, six babies in one night!” he said. “I was so happy. I was making development here. I was showing that I had skills.”

Mr. Aguto now wants to be a doctor. “I have that spirit,” he explained.

The nation will certainly need it. More than 2,300 people have been killed in ethnic and rebel violence this year, with at least a half-dozen rebel groups, some with thousands of fighters, prowling the bush, attacking government soldiers, terrorizing civilians, and stealing cattle and even children.

The hospital where Mr. Aguto works is a case in point. In one bed lies a thin young man with a huge cast on his leg.

“Abyei,” the man grunted, referring to the disputed area on the border of northern and southern Sudan that is claimed by both sides. It is considered one of the many potential trouble spots that could plunge this region back into war. He was shot there in May, when the northern Sudanese Army invaded.

Nearby is another young man, hobbling around with a walker. “Unity State,” he said. “A militia.” He was shot as well, in another tense border area.

Ethnicity is a consistent fault line here. The government is dominated by the Dinka, the biggest group in southern Sudan, and some of the toughest rebel armies are commanded by members of the Nuer, a historic rival.

“This is just tribal fighting,” Mustafa Biong Majak, a South Sudan government spokesman, said with a dismissive wave of his hand, arguing that the clashes posed no threat to stability. “Let them die.”

But many people here fear that after the glow of independence wears off, the Nuer and the Dinka, who fought viciously during the north-south civil war, will become locked in conflict again. And even within the Dinka-dominated government forces, there are deep problems.

Government troops routinely take sides in local land disputes and battles over cattle, and recently soldiers have been hijacking United Nations trucks hauling food. Hunger is yet another challenge, with more than three million people in South Sudan, nearly 40 percent of the population, needing food aid to survive.

Less than 10 miles outside the capital, in the village of Rajaf, people are fleeing the countryside because bandits are killing farmers and kidnapping children. The rule for visitors is to leave by sunset.

“There is no security here,” said Rose Bojo, a tea seller.

Insecurity is such a drain on resources that under the current budget, the government of South Sudan spends about $700 million on security-related matters--more than the budget for education, health care, electricity, roads and industry combined.

But this is also a country of obvious possibilities. South Sudan produces about 375,000 barrels of oil per day, and though negotiators are still working on the specific formula of how the two Sudans--north and south--will share the oil, the south stands to make billions from its reserves.

It has land, miles and miles of thick forests and fertile jungles, where the trees drip with vines and branches bend earthward, heavy with fruit. Still, in most villages, there is no electricity, no running water, no metal even. Barefoot boys dusted with the red dirt stirred up by passing trucks sell bottles of honey along the road. The South Sudan government says 83 percent of its people live in thatched-roof huts, a legacy of decades of marginalization.

Even before Sudan declared independence from Britain and Egypt in 1956, southerners were clamoring for more rights and complaining about being treated as second-class citizens.

South Sudan is mostly animist and Christian, culturally more akin to sub-Saharan Africa than northern Sudan, which is predominantly Muslim and dominated by Arabs. Southern rebels fought for years against the central government, and in 2005 the Bush administration helped broker a treaty between the sides that granted the south wide autonomy and the right to secede.

This January, southerners voted by nearly 99 percent to form their own country, which is what will officially happen on Saturday in festivities to be attended by high-ranking Western officials and more than a dozen African leaders.

Some of the expected guests, like President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and President Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea, are cautionary tales of what can happen when guerrilla leaders finally take power. Zimbabwe and Eritrea are considered among the most repressive countries in the world. But South Sudanese officials say that they are aware of the pitfalls, and that their government will be different.

“If we had wanted to, we could have declared a five-year transition period from the beginning,” said Mr. Majak, the government spokesman. “But no, we didn’t do that. We held elections.”

For the past six years, the southern Sudanese have essentially been running their own affairs, policing themselves, patrolling their borders, and wooing investment and development aid. International aid organizations are still going to play a crucial role here, especially in health and education. For example, Mr. Aguto, the bush fighter turned clinical officer, was trained by Amref, an aid group. He is now looking for sponsors to pay for medical school so he can become a pediatrician.

“South Sudan started from zero,” he said. “Why shouldn’t we be able to transform?”

Pictured below is the new republic's first president, Salva Kiir.

And from the Time magazine web site, a hidden tour of the world's newest capital, Juba. This story was originally published in the French newspaper Le Monde.

A rope suspended across the street in Gumbo Market marks the entrance to Juba. A long line of trucks, blurred by the heat and dust, waits at the makeshift border — guarded only by a handful of policemen.

Brazilian chicken, Chinese refrigerators, Kenyan cigarettes, vegetables from Uganda and medicine from India...the cargo heats in the sun. David Grassly, the head of the UN representation in Juba says that in 2005 "beer used to be brought here from Yei by bike, 90 miles south of here, near the Democratic Republic of Congo and former Republic of Zaire." The reason: only bikes could zigzag between the mines left during the second civil war in Sudan (1983-2005).

Six years later, as it declares its independence, South Sudan still imports most basic foodstuffs. Trucks have to drive many miles to provide water to homes that do not have electricity either.

However, the city is growing and so is its population from 200,000 to 1 million in just six years. Juba looks like a city taken straight out of an African western. Makeshift houses made of bricks and sheet metal spring up everywhere. "It's anarchy" says Dennis Daramalo, the king of the Baris tribe. The Baris have been living on the shores of the White Nile the longest, and technically own the land in Juba. "It's anarchy and misery here. I've been to South Africa and Zimbabwe where the traditional chiefs live in palaces," he says enviously. His house is the biggest one in the area but is hardly anything special.

One still needs a vivid imagination to see Juba as a future capital. But that's exactly what it became Saturday, as South Sudan officially declared its independence from the North, after voting the move in a referendum in January.

From now on, Sudan will no longer be the biggest country on the African continent.

The Global Peace Agreement (GPA) signed at an end to the second civil war in 2005 triggered a wave of immigration from the North to the South. Even people who had fled the war slowly returned to South Sudan. NGOs and UN workers also came to Juba; a new Eldorado that became a place of hope and ambition even for people from the neighboring countries.

Anjelina is one of them. Between two games of cards she sells her body to truck drivers and to slightly-drunk soldiers for just a handful of cash. The 22-year-old woman's face is puffy from "Kwete," a local beer made from corn and sorghum. She came here a few months ago from Uganda with her sister. "There was no future there" she said.

But business isn't always good. "It's all right when police close the road, because truck drivers stop," says Gladys, who runs a tobacco and mobile phone shop. "We got here a bit early, before the market opens," she says.

The construction of Juba's central market has just begun. It's being built on the other side of the tracks, not far from the new Telecommunications Ministry commissioned by the Chinese. The broad wasteland and its grazing cows with huge horns will soon disappear.

People have come from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia and Lebanon. The youngest generation drive "boda-boda," Chinese taxi-motorcycles, run small shops or construction companies or import computer equipment, cauliflowers, water, toilet paper...a bit of everything since nothing is really produced locally in the oil-rich nation. Some of them make a fortune especially when catering to hotels. More and more tourists come here, spending the night in shipping containers converted into air-conditioned hotel rooms with cable TV and WiFi. The cost: 150 or 200 dollars.

"South Sudan has no industry, no big companies and no qualified work force" says the head of the Peace Dividend cabinet. Some complain about the number of foreigners in Juba. "They've been faster than us," says Diing Manok Ngor. "We only learned how to fight, or we were in exile when they started to come here. Isn't it too late for me?"

After years in exile, Ngor came back from Australia a few months ago to evaluate the local market which he considers competitive in some areas. His dream is to set up his own construction company in a city under construction. However, he has neither capital nor contacts in the Sudan's People Liberation Army — a former guerilla group which has become the country's armed forces.

"The former rebels have money and power to develop a country where 85 percent of the people are illiterate, but that has oil," says Melody Atil, founder of Peace Dividend. Three quarters of Sudan's oil reserves are in the South. The question is whether they will reproduce the North's political model (without the Sharia law), where a small elite controls everything. Atil says, that's exactly what the South needs to avoid if it wants to develop.

However, many analysts question the new country's viability. Some say it's a "pre-failed state," meaning an unfinished dream. "Many things have been done since 2005," says UN worker David Gressly. "The city was in ruins." This after SPLA rebels bombed Juba, a strategic region for the Sudanese army and supplies had to be brought in via planes or protected convoys on the Nile.

He adds that "the South's doesn't have its public services yet. They've only begun dealing with public affairs since the Global Peace Agreement. They're still learning."

Meanwhile, the presidential palace has been rebuilt for thousands of dollars. South Sudan's leader Salvar Kiir has been living in it since 2005. The South Sudanese government is also very proud of having built tarred roads, even though they total only a few dozen kilometers in a country as big as France. Most of them surround oil platforms near Juba platforms run by Asian companies.