Aid Saves Lives in South Sudan
Wai, Jonglei State, South Sudan, February 2015
At first sight, this place feel much like anywhere else other along east Africa’s equatorial belt. The soil is dry and dusty and barely anything grows without the protection of thorns. There are no schools and few houses. Livestock are few and far between. It is eerily quiet.
But when night falls, when the fierce heat of day abates and the wind slows to little more than a rustle, the vast sea of humanity that is sheltering here reveals itself. At first it sounds like little more than a murmur, but soon the murmur becomes a buzz that increases in intensity until it is almost a cacophony of sound
Here in Wai, amongst the shifting sands of South Sudan’s increasingly bitter civil conflict, thousands of people have sought refuge from fighting in nearby towns and cities. They are the pawns in a power struggle whose roots go back over decades, the cracks papered over by a string of peace agreements but never settled, a lust for power never satisfied.
Last month, … travelled to Wai to see what conditions are like for the people trapped by this conflict, and to gauge the response of the humanitarian operation that has been leveraged to assist them.
Aid experts in South Sudan say that 6 million people there will need humanitarian support in 2015 and they have appealed to governments and other donors for $1.8 billion to finance this. It’s a huge sum of money but for people in places like Wai it really is the difference between life and death.
The needs are huge and vary from essential life saving supplies like food and medical supplies to all the things that displaced people need to get their lives back on track. So where the populations are relatively secure aid workers will also be distributing shelter for the homeless, seeds so that people can plant crops, tools so that they can harvest the crops and even starter kits for schools so that kids can get back to learning.
These operations are complex
