Inside Aid in South Sudan
South Sudan is the world’s newest country and the scene of one of it’s worst humanitarian crises. Join a United Nations film crew on their journey to see the conditions in which people are living and meet some of the aid workers working day and night to save lives.
By David Gough and Thomas Maddens, United Nations OCHA
Wai, South Sudan, February 2015
At first sight, this place looks much like anywhere else other along the east African equator. The soil is dry and dusty, and barely anything grows without the protection of thorns. There are no schools, 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 by sound not sight. 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, a film crew from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 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. Sadly, the picture we found there is playing out in remote communities throughout the country.
(click play to see the first part of our video journey)
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 are 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.
But in many places, episodes of fighting continue and the first priority of aid workers is nothing more than keeping people alive. But this in itself can often be a major logistical and practical challenge.
There are less than 500 kilometres of paved roads in south Sudan (a country larger than France), making transport by road a painfully slow proposition at the best of times. During the rainy season, the road network is simply impassable. Some parts of the country are accessible by river barges that ply the river Nile, but many communities can only be reached by air.
Aid workers shuttle in on helicopters and set up impromptu camps from where they assess the needs of affected communities. They then radio back the needs to warehouses in the capital Juba, and prepare for distribution of the food that is then dropped from cargo planes onto rapidly constructed drop zones.
(click play for part two of the video)
For people like Nyatapa Bapiny, who fled the town of Canal when government forces burst into the town one morning last November, the aid that they are now receiving is the difference between life and death.
Sitting under that flimsy stretch of cloth, is a woman who three months earlier lost 3 of her 4 children in the space of minutes — one to a bullet, the other two to the surging currents of the river Nile. A mother who says, “my children died and I could do nothing to save them”.
Since then, she and another family she knew from Canal have sheltered in the bush close to the airstrip of Wai, trying to survive until help could come. Members of the local community shared the little they had and taught them some of the basic techniques for survival in the bush, but were it not for the aid that is now arriving here in Wai, the prospects for Nyatapa and her surviving child would be bleak indeed.
“With the food we were given this morning, we can survive for now,” said Nyatapa. “But what will happen if the soldiers come back and we are forced to run again?”
“Only God knows what will happen then.”
ends
