S. Sudan refugees in Uganda struggle one day at a time

By Halima Athumani

KAMPALA, Uganda (AA) - The tent is 10 feet long, 10 feet wide. Inside, seven families share the space they now call home.

Bible held tightly in his left hand, Patrick Deng, 48, points to the far side of the tent.

“I sleep here with my wife and three children,” he tells Anadolu Agency, speaking with a stammer. “It gets very crowded in the nights.”

Next to his space, bags and an empty mattress have been laid down on the floor with a mosquito net hanging on top.

“My neighbor was pregnant when she got here, but she gave birth this week, I think she has gone to the health center now,” he says.

Outside the tent, some women, who can afford better food than the cornmeal and beans supplied in the transit center, cook food for their families.

Located 450 kilometers north of the capital Kampala, the Nyumanzi transit center in Adjumani is meant to host 2,000 refugees. Today, 7,000 occupy it.

A surge of refugees since the crisis in South Sudan in July has been the cause of overcrowding in the camp.

It has led to 930,000 refugees fleeing into six neighboring countries, including Uganda.

A walk around the camp reveals dire conditions, from poor hygiene and sanitation to congestion and hunger, all increasing the risk of disease outbreaks.

Near a massive water tank, children share drinking water out of small dirty jerricans.

According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 64 percent of new arrivals at the Nyumanzi transit center are children below 18.

Girls as young as eight years old busy themselves with laundry or carry younger siblings; many appear malnourished with runny noses.

To decongest the transit center and avoid a re-emergence of cholera, the UNHCR and Ugandan government officials reportedly forcefully relocated the refugees to the Pagirinyi settlement camp,-- also in Adjumani -- or over 50 kilometers to the west, to the Bidibidi camp in Yumbe.

A move that has been met with resistance.

Christine Oleyo, 36, who escaped the war with four of her children told Anadolu Agency that the Ugandan government used excessive force on Aug. 22 when she was transferred to Pagirinyi.

“They got our luggage and threw them in the trucks, the little children were lifted and also bundled onto the trucks telling us to leave, they even tear gassed us,” she said.

Ugandan Minister for Disaster Preparedness and Refugees Hillary Onek criticized the move by refugees to resist relocation.

“When you are a refugee, you have no choice, when you run away from problems into somebody’s home, whatever you are given is what you take,” he told Anadolu Agency.

“When cholera broke out, we deployed maximum medical support, the danger is it’s likely to re-occur. Should we let them die or we move them?

“Those who resist moving away from here have to be forced to go. Here there is law and order, not just wild perceptions,” added Onek, who was accompanying UN High Commissioner for Refugees Fillipo Grandi on Tuesday as he visited the Nyumanzi center and the Pagirinya camp.

Among the over 22,000 refugees relocated to Pagirinyi settlement camp is 28-year-old Grace Daaba. The mother of five sits under a tree with her children. They all scramble to eat from a saucepan, the little boiled cassava that they have.

Grace, who came from the Pageri village in Nimule, near the Ugandan border in South Sudan, arrived at the camp on July 28.

“I arrived here with just my children; I do not know where my husband went after the fighting broke out,” she says.

“The officials gave me a basin of flour, five cups of beans and a three-liter jerrican of cooking oil. Since then, I have not received any more food,” she says.

A meter from where she is seated is Grace’s mud-and-wattle makeshift house with an old plastic white covering. What should be the wall can barely keep her warm during the night or dry when it rains.

Pointing at what serves as a roof, she explains: “I didn’t get a new cover on arrival, so my neighbor gave me this old one.”

Inside, Grace has several plastic jerricans and basins she uses to keep water. On the right is a small mattress atop an old wooden bed she says is used by her blind and dumb brother.

On the bare mud floor just flattened enough for basic comfort is a papyrus mat on which another mattress is laid.

“I sleep here with the three young ones, the other two sleep at my neighbor’s place,” she says.

At the height of the conflict in South Sudan after the war broke out on July 7, many of the refugees were welcomed by heavy torrential rains in the Ugandan camps.

“When it rained , all my children fell ill, they started vomiting and developed running stomachs [diarrhea]. When I took them to the health center they were only given paracetamol.”

Mid-August, the UN refugee agency and the Ugandan government confirmed an outbreak of cholera.

“49 South Sudanese refugees and one Ugandan national have been confirmed to have contracted the disease, but we are implementing containment measures in the recently-opened Pagirinya settlement,” the UNHCR statement at the time read.

Initially the government would dig up latrines for new entrants, but David Kazungu, the commissioner for refugees in Uganda told Anadolu Agency: “We only help the very vulnerable, everyone else is supposed to dig up their own latrine.”

Grace, now approaching two months in the camp, has nothing.

“I don’t have the tools to dig the latrine or the money to pay someone to carry out the hard labor, so I use the bush in the night,” she tells Anadolu Agency.

For her children, “I just dig holes in the garden, they ease themselves and I cover it, that’s why you hear of cholera in the camp.”

In several statements UNHCR indicated that due to a shortfall in funding it was failing to provide adequate lifesaving assistance to the refugees such as providing clean water and enough food ratios. UNHCR has only received $122 million making up 20 percent of the total $608.8 million needed for refugees in South Sudan

Prime Minister Ruhakana Rugunda on Tuesday while meeting the UN agency high commissioner said :“Our government has applied for a $50 million concessional loan from the World Bank to fund the Refugee Host Empowerment Program (ReHoPE).”

The UNHCR is also injecting $31 million into the program until 2017.

On Sep. 19, the UN General Assembly will host a high-level summit to address large movements of refugees and migrants.

“We will use the New York Summit, to flag the refugee crisis and to flag that it needs more support,” said Grandi on Tuesday. “It cannot be just the countries near the conflict that shoulder the biggest burden, it has to be shared.”

Meanwhile, Grace with her 10-month-old baby on her back, walks to her garden where she has planted some maize, ground nuts, beans and sweet potatoes.

Hopeful she told Anadolu Agency, "I pray I get a good harvest, for now, if this food is little, I give the children to eat what’s there, if there’s no food, we all sleep hungry."

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