Hi @gracie_ss
I think you will have more luck if you provide examples of your data and your code, what is called a "reprex" (minimal reproducable example) .
To work with the country names you will probably need to get into string handling. The "stringr" package is the best for this, and is part of the tidyverse (like tibble and sf). This will help you to remove the "north" and "south" part of the names and compare them.
By the way, a tibble is a kind of data.frame.