OLD FANGAK, South Sudan (AP) – On a piece of land surrounded by floods in South Sudan, families drink and bathe in the waters that swept the latrines and continue to rise.
About 1 million people in the country were left homeless or isolated for months by the worst floods in memory, the intense rainy season being a sign of climate change. The waters began to rise in June, taking crops, flooding roads and worsening hunger and disease in the young nation struggling to recover from the civil war. Now hungry it is a threat.
On a recent visit by The Associated Press to the Old Fangak area in Jonglei state, parents spoke of walking for hours in the water up to their chest to find food and health care while malaria and diarrheal diseases spread.
Regina Nyakol Piny, mother of nine, now lives in a primary school in the village of Wangchot after her home was flooded.
“We have no food here, we rely only on UN humanitarian agencies or collecting firewood and selling it,” she said. “My children are sick from the floods and there is no medical service in this place.”
She said she looks forward to the return of peace to the country, with the belief that medical services will 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 is 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.
Mud sucks people’s feet as they engage in the daily struggle to contain the waters and find something to eat.
Nyaduoth Kun, a mother of five, said the floods had destroyed her family’s crops and that life has been a struggle for months, with people selling their cattle to buy food that is never enough.
The family has only two meals a day and adults often go to bed on an empty stomach, she said. She started collecting water lilies and wild fruits to feed.
She said she had little knowledge about the coronavirus pandemic that devastated other parts of the world and spread undetected in South Sudan, with few resources. “There are many diseases that live among us, so we cannot find out whether it is coronavirus or not,” she said.
Instead, his fear is that the makeshift water dike around his house could collapse at any moment, flooding the children.
Wangchot village chief James Diang made the decision at the start of the flood to send the severely affected children into the city center after several drownings “and everything was being destroyed quickly”.
Now the cattle are dying, he said, and the survivors have been transported to drier areas.
The remaining residents are eating leaves from trees and sometimes fish to survive, he said. Fever and joint pain are common.
When there is no canoe to transport people in times of rising water, “our children die in our hands because we are helpless,” he said.
He hopes, like everyone, for sustainable peace and an improved dike so that the community can have enough dry soil for planting.
The people of South Sudan trust President Salva Kiir and former armed opposition leader Riek Machar to lead during this transition period, “but now they are failing us,” said deputy government director in the area, Kueth Gach Monydhot. “We have no hope, we lose confidence in them.”
The situation in Fangak County remains volatile, with almost all of its more than 60 villages affected by the floods and “with no response from the government,” he said. “Do you think they will make plans for other people when they are unable to implement the peace agreement?”
At the clinic in Old Fangak run by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, Nyalual Chol said the dike she tried to build against the floods had collapsed and her home also collapsed quickly.
She was home alone with her four children. As with many families, her husband was on duty in another part of the country as a soldier.
She arrived at the canoe clinic after an hour of travel, seeking help for her sick son. There, she also received a food ration.
The coordinator of the Doctors Without Borders project in Old Fangak, Dorothy I. Esonwune, recalled the sight of recently displaced people sheltered under trees without mats, blankets or mosquito nets.
Meanwhile, the charity’s mobile clinics have been suspended because of the COVID-19 pandemic, further complicating efforts to reach patients trapped by the floods.
“The water continues to rise and the dykes continue to break and people are still homeless, but they do not have the main needs,” she said, describing several people huddled together in a single shelter.
Now the international community has raised the alarm about the likely famine in another part of Jonglei state affected by a flood.
The representative of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in South Sudan, Meshak Malo, called on the parties that signed the peace agreement in the country to end violence and ensure safe humanitarian access to prevent the terrible situation from becoming a total catastrophe.
The new report of probable famine is a warning and a signal to the government, which has not endorsed its conclusions, said the president of the National Statistics Office, Isaiah Chol Aruai.
“There is no way for the government to ignore or minimize an emergency when it is actually discovered,” he said.