OLD FANGAK, South Sudan (AP) – On a stretch of land surrounded by flooding in South Sudan, families drink and bathe from the water that swept latrines and continues to rise.
About 1 million people in the country have been displaced or isolated for months by the worst floods in living memory, with the intense rainy season a sign of climate change. Waters began to rise in June, washing away crops, flooding roads, and increasing hunger and disease in the young country struggling to recover from civil war. Now famine is a threat.
On a recent visit by The Associated Press to the Old Fangak area in the hard-hit state of Jonglei, parents talked about walking for hours in the water of the chest to find food and healthcare as malaria and diarrheal diseases spread.
Regina Nyakol Piny, a mother of nine, now attends a primary school in Wangchot village after their house was flooded.
“We don’t have food here, we rely solely on UN humanitarian aid agencies or by collecting and selling firewood,” she said. “My children are getting sick because of the flood water, and there is no medical service here.”
She said she is eagerly waiting for peace to return to the country, believing that medical services will follow “that will even be enough for us.”
One of her nieces, Nyankun Dhoal, gave birth to 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 wants food and plastic sheeting so she and her family can stay dry.
The mud sucks on people’s feet as they struggle daily to hold back the water and find something to eat.
Nyaduoth Kun, a mother of five, said the floods devastated her family’s crops and life has been a struggle for months, with people selling their prized livestock to buy food that is never enough.
The family only eats two meals a day, and the adults often go to bed on an empty stomach, she said. She has started collecting water lilies and wild fruits for food.
She said she had little knowledge of the coronavirus pandemic that is ravaging other parts of the world and is spreading largely unnoticed in South Sudan with few resources. “There are a lot of diseases living among us, so we can’t figure out whether it’s coronavirus or not,” she said.
Instead, she fears that the makeshift water dike around their house could collapse at any time, flooding the young children.
Wangchot village chief James Diang made the decision early on during the flood to send severely 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.
Leftover residents eat tree leaves and sometimes fish to survive, he said. Fever and joint pain are widespread.
When there is no canoe to transport people during times when the water is flowing, “our children die in our hands because we are helpless,” he said.
Like everyone else, he hopes for lasting peace and an improved dike so that the community has enough dry soil to plant.
The people of South Sudan relied on President Salva Kiir and former armed opposition leader Riek Machar to lead during this transition period, “but now they are abandoning us,” said Kueth Gach Monydhot, acting deputy director of the government in the US. area. “We have no hope, we have lost faith in them.”
The situation in Fangak province remains unstable, with nearly all more than 60 villages affected by the floods and “no response from the government,” he said. “Do you think they will make plans for other people if they don’t implement the peace deal?”
At the clinic in Old Fangak, run by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, Nyalual Chol said that the dyke she was trying to build against floodwaters collapsed and her house was also rapidly collapsing.
She had been 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 by canoe after an hour of traveling in search of help for her sick child. There she also received a ration of food.
Dorothy I. Esonwune, the project coordinator of Doctors Without Borders in Old Fangak, recalled the sight of newly displaced people hiding under trees without mats, blankets or mosquito nets.
Meanwhile, the charity’s mobile clinics were suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic, making efforts to reach sick people stranded by the floods even more difficult.
“The water keeps rising and the dikes breaking and there are still people on the run, but they don’t have the basic necessities of life,” she said, describing several people who are often crammed into one shelter.
Now the international community has raised the alarm about a likely famine in another flood-hit part of Jonglei state.
The representative of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in South Sudan, Meshak Malo, has appealed to the parties signatory to the country’s peace agreement to end the violence and ensure safe humanitarian access to prevent the dire situation turns into a complete disaster.
The new report of likely famine is an eye-opener and a signal to the government, which does not endorse its findings, said National Bureau of Statistics Chairman Isaiah Chol Aruai.
“There is no way the government will ignore or downplay an emergency when it really turns out to be an emergency,” he said.