OLD FANGAK, South Sudan (AP) – On a piece of land surrounded by floods in South Sudan, families drink and bathe in the waters that ravaged the latrines and continue to rise.
One million people in the country have been displaced or isolated for months by the worst floods in record, with the intense rainy season a sign of climate change. The waters began to rise in June, washing away crops, flooding roads and worsening famine and disease in the young nation struggling to recover from the civil war. Now hunger it is a threat.
On a recent visit by The Associated Press to the affected area of Old Fangak, Jonglei State, the parents talked about walking for hours through deep chest waters to find food and health care as the malaria and diarrheal diseases spread.
Regina Nyakol Piny, a nine-year-old mother, now lives in an elementary school in Wangchot village after her house was flooded.
“We don’t have food here, we just rely on UN humanitarian agencies or collecting firewood and selling it,” he said. “My children get sick because of the floods and there is no medical service in this place.”
He said he looks forward to peace returning to the country, with the belief that medical services will continue “which will even be enough for us”.
One of her nieces, Nyankun Dhoal, delivered her seventh child to the world of water in November.
“I feel very tired and my body feels very weak,” she said. One of her breasts was swollen and her baby had rashes. She wants food and plastic sheets to keep her and her family dry.
The mud sucks at people’s feet as they engage in daily struggles to slow down the waters 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 as people sell their precious livestock 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, he said. He has started collecting water lilies and wild berries to eat.
He said he had little knowledge of the coronavirus pandemic that was sweeping other parts of the world and spreading largely undetected in South Sudan with few resources. “There are a lot of diseases that live among us, so we can’t figure out if it’s coronavirus or not,” he said.
Instead, she fears the makeshift water dam around her house could collapse at any moment and flood young children.
Wangchot village chief James Diang made the decision early in the flood to send affected children to the city center after several drowned “and everything was quickly destroyed.”
Now the cattle are dying, he said, and the survivors have been transported to drier areas.
The remaining residents eat tree leaves and sometimes fish to survive, he said. Fever and joint pain are widespread.
When there is no canoe to carry people in times when water comes out, “our children die at our hands because we are powerless,” he said.
He hopes, like everyone else, for sustainable peace and an improved dam so that the community has enough dry to plant.
The people of South Sudan have relied on President Salva Kiir and former armed opposition leader Riek Machar to lead this transition period, “but now we are failing,” the acting deputy director of the government in the area said. , Kueth Gach Monydhot. “We have no hope, we have lost confidence in it.”
The situation in Fangak County remains volatile, with almost all of its more than 60 villages affected by the floods and “no government response,” he said. “Do you think other people will plan when they have not implemented the peace agreement?”
At the Old Fangak clinic run by the medical organization Médecins Sans Frontières, Nyalual Chol said the dike he tried to build against the floods collapsed and his home also collapsed.
She had been home alone with her four children. As with many families, her husband was on duty in another part of the country as a soldier.
He arrived at the canoe clinic after an hour of travel, seeking help for his sick son. There, he also received a ration of food.
The coordinator of the Doctors Without Borders project in Old Fangak, Dorothy I. Esonwune, recalled the sight of nine displaced people taking refuge under trees without mats, blankets or mosquito nets.
Meanwhile, the charity’s mobile clinics were suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic, further complicating efforts to reach sick people trapped by the floods.
“Water continues to rise and dikes continue to break and there are still people displaced, but they don’t have the main needs,” he said, describing several people often crammed into a single shelter.
Now the international community has sounded the alarm about probable famine in another part affected by the floods of Jonglei state.
The representative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in South Sudan, Meshak Malo, has called on the parties that signed the country’s peace agreement to end the violence and guarantee safe humanitarian access to prevent the dire situation from becoming a full-blown catastrophe.
The new report on the likely famine is an eye-opener and a signal to the government, which has not approved its findings, said National Bureau of Statistics President Isaiah Chol Aruai.
“There is no way for the government to ignore or minimize an emergency when it is actually discovered to be an emergency,” he said.