South Sudan ravaged by months of intense flooding
OLD FANGAK, South Sudan — On a scrap of land surrounded by flooding in South Sudan, families drink and bathe from the waters that swept away latrines and continue to rise.
Some 1 million people in the country have been displaced or isolated for months by the worst flooding in memory, with the intense rainy season a sign of climate change. The waters began rising in June, washing away crops, swamping roads and worsening hunger and disease in the young nation struggling to recover from civil war. Now famine is a threat.
On a recent visit to the Old Fangak area in the hard-hit Jonglei state, parents spoke of walking for hours in chestdeep water to find food and health care as malaria and diarrheal diseases spread.
Regina Nyakol Piny, a mother of nine, now lives in a primary school in the village of Wangchot after their home was swamped.
“We don’t have food here, we rely only on U.N. humanitarian agencies or by collecting firewood and selling it,” she said. “My children get sick because of the floodwaters, and there is no medical service in this place.”
The chief of Wangchot village, James Diang, made the decision early during the flooding to send badly affected children to the town center after several drowned “and everything was being destroyed rapidly.”
Now cattle are dying, he said, and survivors have been transported to drier areas.
Remaining residents are eating tree leaves and sometimes fish to survive, he said. Fevers and joint pain are widespread.
When there is no canoe to transport people during times that waters surge, “our children die in our hands because we are helpless,” he said.
The people of South Sudan put their trust in President Salva Kiir and former armed opposition leader Riek Machar to lead during this transition period, “but now they are failing us,” said the government’s acting deputy director in the area, Kueth Gach Monydhot. “We don’t have hope, we lost confidence in them.”
The situation in Fangak county remains volatile, with almost all of its more than 60 villages affected by the flooding and “no response from the government,” he said.
“Do you think they will plan for other people when they have failed 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 floodwaters collapsed, and her home quickly collapsed, too.
She had been alone at home with her four children. As with many families, her husband was away on duty as a soldier.
She reached the clinic by canoe after an hour of travel, seeking help for a sick child. There, she also received a ration of food.
The Doctors Without Borders project coordinator in Old Fangak, Dorothy Esonwune, recalled the sight of newly displaced people sheltering under trees without mats, blankets or mosquito nets. Meanwhile, the charity’s mobile clinics were suspended because of the COVID-19 pandemic. , further complicating efforts.
“The water continues to rise and the dikes continue to break and there are people still displaced, yet they don’t have the main necessities,” she said, describing several people often crammed into a single shelter.