This is no life for a
Refugee resettlement camps offer a safer space for South Sudanese children, who make up 64% of all refugees in Uganda
Manyang Deng solemnly contemplates the bleak landscape of white aid tents from the scrappy shade of a tree, his eyes weary beyond his 10 years. Nearby, oblivious to the baking sun, his two younger brothers are playing. One is six years old, the other just four.
Manyang looks after them. He has done so for over a year, since his father died here in the sprawling Nyumanzi refugee settlement in northern Uganda and they became orphans. Manyang doesn’t talk about his father’s death, or the day he lost his mother.
That was two years ago, back home in South Sudan, before he fled with his father and brothers from the lawlessness and brutality of the conflict in the world’s youngest state. They had only the clothes on their backs.
“Life is very hard when you live without parents,” he says softly and stares at the ground. “Sometimes we don’t go to school because we don’t have books or food.”
Manyang and his brothers are among the wave of South Sudanese children who have sought refuge outside the troubled country’s borders since fighting broke out between forces loyal to the government and the opposition in December 2013. More than 3.2-million people have been forced to flee their homes, according to the United Nation’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Some 1.8-million are displaced inside South Sudan, and 1.4-million people have crossed its borders.
About half of all the people displaced are children and many have either been separated from their parents or orphaned, the UN’s undersecretary general and emergency relief co-ordinator, Stephen O’Brien, told the Security Council last month.
“I have received more and more harrowing reports of families being separated with little to no provisions; of the sick, disabled and elderly simply terrifyingly being left behind to a inhuman — or sadly a too well-known; and of attacks including killing, rape and abduction of young men,” O’Brien said. More than 17 000 children are believed to have been recruited by the armed militias in South Sudan.
Those who survive the marauding gangs and the dangerous journey south, often through marshland or dense bush and at risk from wild animals, find themselves in a foreign land with new perils — even in Uganda, which the UN has described as exceptional in its welcoming policy towards refugees.
Refugee families are given a small plot of land to build a home and to farm so that they can survive.
But Manyang, who was only nine when his father died in Nyumanzi, could not provide for his brothers.
This is really difficult for children without adults, Irene Nakasiita of the Uganda Red Cross Society says.
Concerned for Manygang’s welfare, a neighbour in the settlement — herself a refugee — took the three boys in despite struggling to provide for four children of her own.
Adau Deng (24) — no relation to the brothers — came across them in Nyumanzi after fleeing South Sudan with her young children when fighting broke out in her native Jonglei state. Deng lost touch with her husband, a soldier, and has been raising her children, aged between five and 12, on her own.
With Manyang and his brothers, eight people share her white aid tent. It is a daunting task looking after so many children, Deng admits. She was still a child herself when her