OLD FANGAK, South Sudan (PA) – On a piece of land surrounded by floods in South Sudan, families drink and bathe in the waters that have swept the latrines and continue to grow.
About 1 million people in the country have been displaced or isolated for months by the worst floods in memory, the heavy rainy season being a sign of climate change. The waters began to rise in June, washing away crops, multiplying roads and worsening hunger and disease in the young nation struggling to recover from the civil war. Now hunger it is a threat.
During a recent visit by The Associated Press to the heavily hit Old Fangak area of Jonglei State, parents talked about walking for hours in the deep waters of the chest to find food and health care as malaria and diarrheal diseases spread. spread.
Queen Nyakol Piny, a nine-year-old mother, now lives in a primary school in Wangchot village after their home was defeated.
“We have no food here, we only rely on UN humanitarian agencies or by collecting and selling firewood,” she said. “My children get sick from the floods and there is no medical service in this place.”
She said she was looking forward to peace returning to the country, believing that medical services would follow “that will be enough for us”.
One of her nieces, Nyankun Dhoal, gave birth to her seventh child in a water world in November.
“I feel very tired and my body feels very weak,” she said. One of her breasts was swollen and the baby had rashes. She wants food and plastic wrap so she and her family stay dry.
The mud sucks at people’s feet as they engage in daily struggles to hold back water and find something to eat.
Nyaduoth Kun, a mother of five, said the floods destroyed her family’s crops and life has been a struggle for months, with people selling their precious cattle to buy food that is never enough.
The family eats only two meals a day, and adults often go to bed on an empty stomach, she said. He started collecting water lilies and wild fruits for food.
She said she had little knowledge of the coronavirus pandemic that is devastating other parts of the world and is spreading undetected in South Sudan with scarce resources. “There are many diseases that live among us, so we can’t figure out if it’s a coronavirus or not,” she said.
Instead, her fear is that the makeshift dam around their house could collapse at any time, flooding young children.
The head of Wangchot village, James Diang, made the decision early during the floods to send severely affected children to the city center after a few drowned “and everything was quickly destroyed.”
Now the cattle are dying, he said, and the survivors have been transported to drier areas.
The remaining inhabitants eat tree leaves and sometimes fish to survive, he said. Fever and joint pain are widespread.
When there are no canoes to carry people when the waters rise, “our children die in our hands because we are helpless,” he said.
He hopes, like everyone else, for lasting peace and an improved dam so that the community has enough dry land for planting.
People in South Sudan have put their trust in President Salva Kiir and former armed opposition leader Riek Machar to lead in this transition period, “but now we are failing,” said Kueth Gach Monydhot, deputy director. of the government in the area. “We have no hope, we have lost confidence in them.”
The situation in Fangak County remains volatile, with almost all of its more than 60 villages affected by floods and “unanswered by the government,” he said. “Do you think they will plan for other people when they fail to implement the peace agreement?”
At the clinic in Old Fangak run by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, Nyalual Chol said the dam she was trying to build against the floodwaters collapsed and her house collapsed quickly.
She had been home alone with her four children. As in many families, her husband left for work in another part of the country as a soldier.
She arrived at the canoe clinic after an hour’s journey, seeking help for her sick child. There, she also received a ration of food.
The coordinator of the “Doctors Without Borders” project in Old Fangak, Dorothy I. Esonwune, recalled the sight of newly displaced people sheltering under trees without mats, blankets or mosquito nets.
Meanwhile, the charity’s mobile clinics have been suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic, further complicating efforts to reach people affected by floods.
“The water continues to rise, the dams continue to break and there are people still displaced, but they do not have the main necessities,” she said, describing several people often gathered in one shelter.
Now, the international community has sounded the alarm about the likely famine in another flood-affected part of Jonglei State.
The representative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in South Sudan, Meshak Malo, called on the parties to the country’s peace agreement to end the violence and ensure safe humanitarian access to prevent the dire situation from turning into -a complete catastrophe.
The new report on probable famine opens its eyes and is a signal to the government, which has not approved its conclusions, said the president of the National Bureau of Statistics, Isaiah Chol Aruai.
“There is no way for the government to ignore or minimize an emergency when it is found to be an emergency,” he said.