Separated and Searching: The Lost Children of Uganda’s Bidibidi Refugee Settlement

The last time Margaret saw her parents, her life was being torn apart. In the middle of the night, soldiers killed her father as she watched, hiding from a crevice of her house. They beat Margaret’s mother and dragged her to prison. Margaret, suddenly alone, began to run.

“I don’t know why the soldiers came or why they chose my parents,” Margaret said. “I just had to get away.”

Margaret and her foster mother sit outside their home in Bidibidi’s Zone 5 in northern Uganda. (Photo: Elissa Miolene)

After the most recent wave of violence erupted in South Sudan, in 2016, approximately one million people like Margaret have been forced to flee their homes. In the year following, South Sudanese children came to Uganda at the rate of one per minute. Today, many of those children live in the Bidibidi settlement, a sprawling, fence-less refugee camp in northern Uganda.

“We’ve heard girls and boys tell us, ‘I was walking with my mother and she was killed in front of me,’” said Alma Rose Temayia, a child protection officer with Save the Children. “You’re running for your life with the person you love the most, and then that person is killed. What are you supposed to do then?”

At face value, there’s only one thing to do. You locate friends, family, neighbors — anyone who has a tie to the life you’ve left behind. But in a country ravaged by violence, finding those you love can be nearly impossible. Regardless, in Uganda, countless children are still willing to try.

Beida, a 17-year-old South Sudanese refugee, has lived in Bidibidi since she fled her home in 2016. “There’s no stability in my home, and that is difficult,” she said. “Even if we were to find out that today there is peace, tomorrow, there would be war.” (Photo: Elissa Miolene)

When Margaret left home, she was just 15 years old. She walked for three days to reach the border of Uganda, constantly thinking about the fate of her family.

“I prayed and prayed for my mother,” Margaret said. “But I didn’t even know if she was alive.”

After arriving in the camp, Margaret barely spoke to anyone until she was approached by Lemi Jackson, a Save the Children caseworker. Margaret stayed silent for three days, but eventually, she told Jackson what she knew: her mother’s name, age, and the last time she’d seen her. After taking down the details, Jackson opened a family tracing case.

Save the Children is one of the primary organizations handling child protection work in Bidibidi. Each of the agency’s 25 caseworkers manages the needs of approximately 80 children — and those with the most immediate needs are unaccompanied children like Margaret. The sheer size of Bidibidi puts such children at a high risk of abuse, rape, and forced marriage, compounding existing psycho-social issues common for children in such circumstances.

Because of this, caseworkers often begin supporting unaccompanied children through reunification. To do so, they partner with the Uganda Red Cross, hoping to link children with family members who have their best interests at heart.

In a case like Margaret’s, the Uganda Red Cross initiates reunification after hearing from Save the Children. The former organization calls community leaders and holds meetings, contacts staff in settlements throughout the region, and sends volunteers into Bidibidi’s five zones to locate any unknown family members.

A child stands on the roadside at the Bidibidi settlement. (Photo: Elissa Miolene)

Sometimes, this process works. Veronica, for example, arrived in Bidibidi when she was just 16. Pregnant and alone, she knew she’d never see her parents again; her mother fled the conflict months before, and her father had died of tuberculosis. It was her brothers, Simon and Santino, who Veronica was desperate to find.

Soon after Veronica’s arrival, she spoke to Swadik Haruna Mafu, a Save the Children caseworker, about finding her brothers. Three days later, Simon and Santino were standing outside their sister’s hut. She later gave birth to a healthy child, a baby boy that she named after Mafu.

However, in a context as complex as the South Sudanese refugee crisis, every reunification case varies. Robert Baryamwesiga, the Commandant of Bidibidi for Uganda’s Office of the Prime Minister, said that the current systems work to an extent. Finding a relative is a purely manual process, he said, requiring staff to show documents to individuals at camps throughout the region.

“We’re seeing success with the child protection systems in place,” said Robert Baryamwesiga, the Commandant of Bidibidi for Uganda’s Office of the Prime Minister. “But with the right technology, we could do better. In the future, our tracing machinery needs to be tailored toward technology.”

Though the need is there, at the moment, using technological databases for reunification is only a work in progress — leaving countless children stuck in limbo while waiting for their parents to resurface.

For Margaret, it took over a year before she heard news of her mother, Mary. The Uganda Red Cross located Mary shortly after she arrived in Uganda. At that point, she was wavering between life and death.

“She’d been beaten so badly that she couldn’t raise her body straight,” Jackson said.

After a year of being tortured by the South Sudanese police, Mary had escaped. She eventually arrived at the Imvepi Settlement, a camp about 50 miles from Bidibidi, but was immediately transferred to a nearby hospital for treatment.

The details were limited, but Margaret finally had the information she’d been waiting for. Her mother was alive. However, she didn’t have a phone, transport money, or the ability to travel to the hospital — and Mary, bedridden, couldn’t contact Margaret either. Left with little choice, Margaret waited. But this time, she held onto hope that had, at one point, eluded her.

In mid-July, Mary was discharged from the hospital. Save the Children is now conducting a final assessment to ensure Mary is healthy enough to care for Margaret. If all goes well, the agency said, Margaret will soon be reunited with her mother.

“It’s hard when I can’t see her,” Margaret said. “Hopefully, we will be together again soon.”

Elissa Miolene was a 2017–2018 Global Health Corps fellow in Uganda. Prior to her fellowship, Miolene worked at Save the Children US, which is how she linked up with the agency’s staff in Northern Uganda. She received verbal consent to share the photos, quotes, and stories included in this piece, which were all collected alongside Save the Children’s caseworkers.

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