AYOD, South Sudan (AP) — Longhorn cattle wade through flooded areas and climb a slope along a canal that has become a refuge for displaced families in South Sudan. Smoke from burning dung rises near mud and grass houses where thousands of people now live after floods swept away their village.
“Too much suffering,” said Bichiok Hoth Chuiny, a woman in her 70s. She supported herself with a stick as she walked through the newly established community of Pajiek in Jonglei state north of the capital Juba.
For the first time in decades, the floods had forced her to flee. Her attempts to protect her home by building dikes failed. Her former village of Gorwai is now a swamp.
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“I had to be towed here in a canoe,” Chuiny said. An AP journalist was the first to visit the community.
Such floods are becoming an annual disaster in South Sudan, which the World Bank has described as “the world’s most vulnerable country to climate change and also the country most lacking in the capacity to cope with it.”
More than 379,000 people have been displaced by floods this year, according to the UN humanitarian agency.
Seasonal flooding has long been part of the lifestyle of pastoral communities around the Sudd, Africa’s largest wetlands, in the floodplains of the River Nile. But since the 1960s, the swamp has continued to grow, flooding villages, destroying farmland and killing livestock.
“The Dinka, Nuer and Murle communities of Jonglei are losing the ability to raise livestock and farm in that region in the ways they used to,” said Daniel Akech Thiong, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group .
South Sudan is ill-equipped to adapt. The country has been independent since 2011 and was involved in a civil war in 2013. Despite a 2018 peace deal, the government has failed to address numerous crises. About 2.4 million people remain internally displaced due to conflict and flooding.
The latest flooding of the Nile has been attributed to factors including the opening of dams upstream in Uganda after Lake Victoria reached its highest level in five years.
The centuries-old Jonglei Canal, which was never completed, has become a refuge for many.
“We don’t know where this flood would have pushed us if it weren’t for the canal,” said Peter Kuach Gatchang, the chief of Pajiek. He was already planting a small garden with pumpkins and eggplants in his new house.
The 340-kilometer-long Jonglei Canal was first conceived by the Anglo-Egyptian colonial authorities in the early 20th century to increase the outflow of the Nile into Egypt in the north. But its development was interrupted by the long struggle of South Sudanese against the Sudanese regime in Khartoum, which eventually led to the creation of a separate country.
Gatchang said the new community in Pajiek is neglected: “We have no school and no clinic here, and if you stay for a few days you will see us carrying our patients on stretchers to Ayod town.”
Ayod, the district headquarters, can be reached by a six-hour walk through waist-high waters.
Pajiek also has no mobile network and no government presence. The area is under the control of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement in Opposition, founded by President Salva Kiir’s rival, who has since become Vice President Riek Machar.
Villagers depend on aid. Recently, hundreds of women lined up in a nearby field to receive some from the World Food Program.
Nyabuot Reat Kuor walked home carrying a 50-kilo bag of sorghum on her head.
“This flood has destroyed our farm, killed our livestock and displaced us forever,” said the mother of eight. “Our old village of Gorwai has become a river.”
When food aid runs out, she says, they will survive on wild leaves and water lilies from the swamp. Food aid rations have already been halved in recent years as international funding for such crises declines.
According to the WFP, more than 69,000 people who have migrated to the Jonglei Canal in Ayod province have been registered for food assistance.
“There are no passable roads at this time of year and the canal is too low to support boats carrying a lot of food,” said John Kimemia, WFP airborne coordinator.
In the neighboring village of Paguong, surrounded by flooded areas, the health center has few supplies. Medicines have not been paid for since June due to an economic crisis that has left civil servants across the country unpaid for more than a year.
South Sudan’s economic problems have been exacerbated by the disruption of oil exports after a major pipeline in Sudan was damaged during the country’s ongoing civil war.
“The last time we got drugs was in September. We mobilized the women to carry them on foot from Ayod city,” said Juong Dok Tut, a clinical officer.
Patients, mostly women and children, sat on the floor as they waited to see the doctor. Panic swept through the group as a thin green snake passed between them. It was not poisonous, but many others in the area are. People who venture into the water to fish or collect water lilies are at risk.
Four life-threatening snakebite cases occurred in October, Tut said. “We dealt with these cases with the antivenom treatments we had, but now they are over, so we don’t know what to do if it happens again.”
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