South Sudan: CAFOD warning on Jamam camp
Children carry their family's belongings as they flee fighting in South Kordofan [REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic - courtesy of alertnet]
CAFOD’s Humanitarian Rapid Response Team has warned of the terrible conditions and rising rates of malnutrition and disease facing refugee children fleeing into the Upper Nile region in South Sudan
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The team has just returned from Jamam refugee camp in Maban in South Sudan’s Upper Nile state, where more than 120,000 refugees are living in dire conditions across three camps, as they seek shelter, food and clean water. The camps are approaching full capacity as new refugees arrive on a daily basis.
Leading the CAFOD team was Edema Luke Wilson who gave this report of the conditions he found at Jamam and Yousif Batil camps:
“The refugees are living in terrible conditions. They have set up camp on a flood plain, and so their tents stand in pools of stagnant water made worse by the fact that it is now the rainy season. With no proper working latrines, the rain will only make the hygiene problems worse.
“There is not enough clean drinking water to be found near the camps to sustain the growing numbers of people that arrive each day. The humanitarian standard is 15 litres of water per person per day; the people I met in the camps told me that they are managing to find at best five or six litres a day.
“Health aid workers told me that there is a high death rate amongst children under the age of five because of their exposure to dirty water, which has caused cases of diarrhoea, malaria and respiratory infections to multiply.
“I saw infant children seriously underweight due to malnutrition, and there are a lot of cases of eye and skin infections.
“The influx of new returnees continues and Jamam camp alone will be at full capacity of 40,000 people in a matter of days. There are plans to relocate the returnees to ground away from the floodplains. Several aid agencies currently supporting the refugees will be working together with the United Nations refugee agency (UNCHR) to relocate the returnees to alternative camps.
“Water and sanitation are urgently needed in the Jamam camp and other camp locations, and we urge all authorities and agencies to examine what additional support they can provide.”
