OU FANGAK, SOUTH SUDAN (AP) – On a piece of land surrounded by floods in South Sudan, families drink and bathe from the waters that latrines have swept away and continue to rise.
Some 1 million people in the country have been displaced or isolated for months by the worst floods in memory, with the intense rainy season a sign of climate change. The waters began to rise in June, washing away crops, flooding roads and exacerbating hunger and disease in the young nation struggling to recover from the civil war. Now famine is a threat.
On a recent visit by The Associated Press to the Old Fangak area in the severely afflicted Jonglei state, parents spoke of hours in deep-water breastfeeding to find food and health care while malaria and diarrhea spread diseases.
Regina Nyakol Piny, a mother of nine, now lives in a primary school in the village of Wangchot after their house was flooded.
“We have no food here, we only rely on UN humanitarian agencies or by collecting and selling firewood,” she said. “My children are getting sick from the floodwaters, and there is no medical service in this place.”
She said she was eagerly awaiting peace to return to the country, believing that medical services would follow “it will even be enough for us.”
One of her nieces and nephews, Nyankun Dhoal, delivered her seventh child in a 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 a rash. She wishes for food and for plastic sheets so she and her family can stay dry.
The mud sucks at people’s feet as they struggle daily to hold the waters and find something to eat.
Nyaduoth Kun, a mother of five, said the floods had destroyed her family’s crop and that life had been a struggle for months. People sell their valued cattle to buy food that is never enough.
The family eats only two meals a day and the adults go to bed empty-handed, she said. She started collecting water lilies and wild fruits for food.
She said she had little knowledge of the coronavirus pandemic plaguing other parts of the world and spreading largely unnoticed in South Sudan with poor resources. “There are a lot of diseases among us, so we can not tell if it is a coronavirus,” she said.
Instead, she fears that the temporary waterway around their home could collapse at any time and flood the young children.
The mayor of Wangchot, James Diang, decided early in the flood to send severely affected children to the city center after several drowned “and everything was quickly destroyed.”
Now cattle are dying, he said, and survivors have been transported to drier areas.
Remaining residents eat tree leaves and sometimes fish to survive, he said. Fever and joint pain are widespread.
If there is no canoe to transport people during times of water shortage, ‘our children will die in our hands because we are helpless,’ he said.
He hopes, like everyone else, for sustainable peace and for an improved dike so that the community can have enough dry land to plant.
The people of South Sudan have put their trust in President Salva Kiir and former armed opposition leader Riek Machar to lead during this transition period, “but now they are failing us,” said Kueth Gach Monydhot, the deputy deputy director in the region. “We have no hope, but we have lost confidence in them.”
The situation in Fangak province remains volatile, with almost all of its more than 60 towns affected by the flood and ‘no government response’, he said. “Do you think they will plan for other people if they do not implement the peace agreement?”
Nyalual Chol was led into the clinic in Old Fangak by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, and the house she was trying to build against the floodwaters collapsed and her house also quickly collapsed.
She was home alone with her four children. As with many families, her husband served as a soldier in another part of the country.
She reached the clinic after an hour of canoeing to seek help for her sick child. There she also got a ration of food.
The project coordinator Doctors Without Borders in Old Fangak, Dorothy I. Esonwune, recalls the faces of newly displaced people hiding under trees without carpets, blankets or mosquito nets.
Meanwhile, the charities’ mobile clinics have been suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which further reaches efforts to reach sick people stranded by the floods.
“The water is still rising and the dike is breaking and there are still people who are displaced, yet they do not have the basic necessities,” she said, describing that people are often crammed into one shelter.
Now the international community has sounded the alarm about possible famine in another flood-stricken part of the state of Jonglei.
The representative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in South Sudan, Meshak Malo, called on the parties that signed the country’s peace agreement to stop violence and ensure safe humanitarian access to prevent the dire situation degenerates into a full-fledged catastrophe.
The chairman of the National Bureau of Statistics, Isaiah Chol Aruai, says the new report on probable famine is an eye-opener and a signal to the government, which does not endorse the findings.
“There is no way the government would ignore or scale down an emergency if it were really an emergency,” he said.