Thousand of displaced people in Warrap State depend on aid to survive

Dec 4, 2020(Nyamilepedia) — Thousands of people who have been displaced by violence and floods in Warrap State hardly get enough food or shelter.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that at least 377,300 people have been displaced by floods and violence in Warrap since July.

Most of the displaced people are living on aid from the government and NGOs in the country.

According to James Athian, one of the displaced in the state, he has been living in a makeshift camp in South Sudan’s Warrap state together with his nine children for two months as his house was destroyed by floods.

“I have nine children and every time they get sick of malaria. (There is) no food and no good place to sleep,” Athian told Reuters, standing near submerged houses in his village of Mangar Ajak.

Aleu Akol, another displaced person who has been at Mangar-Ajak for one-and-a-half months, said people received aid from humanitarian organisations but he had to find other means to supplement that.

“We fish in this water to survive because I don’t have work that can generate income. See, my legs are swelling from (being in) the water,” he said.

South Sudan has been hit by the worst rains in living memory which have submerged almost half of South Sudan’s 78 counties according to the UN reports.

The floods came at a time when the country was coming out of Civil war which ended in 2018 with a fragile peace deal that is yet to be implemented.

Attacks by rivaling groups and ethnic cattle raiders are still common, compounding the effects of the floods.

“People are being killed randomly and insecurity is so bad that people were not able to cultivate (their crops) in May,” Moses Athian Paul, coordinator of the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission of Warrap’s Tonj County, said.