REFUGEES HUDDLE IN thin slivers of shadows cowering from the baking heat and sun. A stench emanates from a stream of human effluent, and shelter amounts to flimsy makeshift cloth and stick tents.
Children, when not playing in the dirt, carry small containers to water sources as their mothers get high energy food packages from humanitarians.
Humanitarians from a number of aid agencies, including the Irish group Goal, are working in tents handing out high energy biscuits and feeds. They are also carrying out checks for malnourishment and registering people.
There is a mix of exhausted adults and young children – seemingly oblivious to what is around them – playing and laughing. A lorry pulls up with more refugees – adding to the 20,000 people who are waiting for a more permanent destination.
This is the scene inside the transit camp where people fleeing the war in Sudan arrive having made the perilous journey south through the arid landscape – avoiding disease and the baying mobs of gunmen.
It is located about 1,000 kilometres north of the capital Juba, near the town of Renk – about 40 minutes from the Sudan border.
The war in Sudan started in April 2023 but already 7.4 million people have fled, among them 3.8 million children. It has caused a major spike in hunger with an estimated 700,000 children malnourished.
The root of the conflict is a power grab by two generals – on one side is the Rapid Support Force (RSF) the other is Sudan Armed Forces (SAF).
The RSF has its origins in the notorious Janjaweed which has been blamed for the Darfur genocide in 2003. They were part of the Sudanese Armed Forces at that time and carried out atrocities as part of the civil war.
The city of Khartoum is the seat of the conflict but it has fanned out across the country.
The United Nations has said that Sudan currently faces the largest internal displacement crisis in the world and the most significant child displacement crisis, with more than 3 million children displaced inside and outside the country.
Some are heading north across the Sahara but a huge amount head south and across the border in the White Nile State of South Sudan.
South Sudan is gripped in a crisis of its own – crippling 250% inflation, a dysfunctional political bureaucracy and massive food hunger. Such is the fighting across the border that many of those returning home are former South Sudanese refugees.
Then there are the recent floods – a combination of heavy rains and Ugandan authorities releasing water into the White Nile from Lake Victoria – hundreds of thousands of people in South Sudan have been displaced.
It all adds into a growing perfect storm of disaster – and now the arrival of cholera, humanitarians believe, could spell the greatest humanitarian disaster.
We started our journey in South Sudan’s chaotic capital Juba which is home to 400,000 people. Like much of the country it lies on the banks of the Nile. The streets are packed with struggling locals, carrying massive bricks of paper cash – the currency crisis a complete disaster.
The signs of disaster are not just to the north, but here also. For many there is no running water so children as young as five and six years old carry water containers balanced on their heads towards home.
In the capital the headquarters of Irish aid agency Goal is located in a tightly guarded compound near the European Union, British and US embassies.
While it is managed from Dublin the small team there are a dedicated group of Kenyan, Ethiopian and South Sudanese aid workers.
They are led by Phyllis Jepkorir who said that it is impossible to see a quick solution to the crisis – the hardest part she said is trying to put the limited resources to best effect.
“It is shocking to see the way it has gone because we have never seen such a massive group of people going to South Sudan which is still trying to do things the right as a young country.
“The influx is very difficult to manage not alone the refugees but also the returnees. There are also problems of infrastructural issues such as a lack of roads because of the flooding.”
About 1,000 kilometres to the north is the town of Renk – it is 60 kilometres south of the Sudan border.
The town is located on a pan flat plain of red dust and scrubland. It has a dirt airfield to the east and the White Nile River to the west.
The local population live in what can only be described as challenging conditions – there is no running water and no road network except for a route North to the Sudan border.
The poverty is stark. Many people live in wood and reed structures with dirt floors – unchanged for millenia. There are barely functioning markets and water is gathered direct from the White Nile.
Our flight in passes over huge broad floodplains – traditional villages swamped by waters that burst from the Nile and roads are cut off in a catastrophic climate disaster that shows little sign of receding. Renk is only truly accessible by boat or propeller aircraft flown by United Nations crews.
The Goal headquarters is located in a small compound – the team are all South Sudanese and their leader is an affable former refugee Lokujo Chaplain.
He fled a previous civil war in 1987 and ended up in Uganda and it was this that prompted him to become a humanitarian after getting a UN scholarship to study.
His experience has led him to work in the field and help in various crises but he believes this is now the most difficult.
“The people’s lives changed in a short time and they were forced to run – they have nothing and they are very desperate.
“This is the calling that really I have been yearning for, that given my past experiences, I really think this the right thing I should be doing. These are the right people I should be serving, and this is also the right programme I should be managing,” he said.
That service is broad and complex – not least because of the refugee crisis. The town of Renk was struggling well before the arrival of the refugees. Now another crisis looms and that is the impending cholera epidemic.
Before travelling to the border we make a courtesy call to the Government’s local official -known as the Commissioner (akin to a county manager in Ireland) Akoch Jol Achiek.
The official, flanked by armed security, spoke through an interpreter and said the biggest challenge for the South Sudanese government is massive inflation.
He said that food costs have skyrocketed and the local population are now struggling in the same way as the refugees.
The Commissioner stated that the result of the rainy season has meant that there is now massive flooding and described the situation “as the most dangerous season” leading to the outbreak of cholera which he said was first recorded in October.
The local town is served by the civil hospital. Goal and other aid agencies are working there in what has been dubbed the stabilisation centre. What it actually is, is a centre where the gravest, most sick adults and children are treated.
Children have bandaged limbs to treat infections from insect bites. Infants are being treated for TB and pneumonia. On a wall a chart lists out the deaths.
The situation at the border is a lot less dynamic than before – hundreds are crossing now rather than the thousands in the early days of the war.
But they are making a perilous journey through war and a land that is scarce of resources to keep them nourished. It is taking them days and weeks to find their way from cities like Khartoum.
Many are crossing on foot but others come across on the back of donkey-drawn carts – their possessions just bundles of clothes.
They are met by humanitarians, including medics from Goal, who give them high energy foods and assess them medically for malnutrition. It is then onto the transit camp.
The fighting across the border is tens of kilometres away and SAF control the ground on the other side.
Regardless of that issue the most dangerous enemy is microscopic in the pools of untreated stagnant water – the threat of cholera.
Humanitarians from a number of organisations including from UNICEF and the World Food Programme (WFP) as well as Goal all believe that the 100 or so cases so far have not been infected in Renk or at the border but instead the victims have brought the illness in from across the border.
The key takeaway from the tour of the border and transit camp is that even without the war, the accompanying food insecurity, climate change effects and the arrival of killer diseases mean the lives of these people are incredibly fragile and any upset can send them to disaster.
Rose Ejuru is the WFP programme director in the border area – she is a former Goal worker and gives her stark assessment of the situation.
“I think it’s an emergency situation – we just need to save lives. Saving lives means we just need more funding to be able to provide access to food and access to nutrition for the most vulnerable groups that are coming from Sudan and those people who have been here for some time they have no future, so they only rely on the humanitarian partners,” she explained.
The situation in the broader South Sudan has meant that there is a stall on moving people on from the under resourced transit camp.
In hushed discussions with security sources and South Sudan-based humanitarians we learn there are fears that – coupled with the economic and humanitarian disaster in the country – a collapse of the Juba regime could unleash a bloody feud that will plunge the region further into disaster.
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