Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, an international medical humanitarian organization on Thursday urged humanitarian organizations to urgently scale up their response to ease the difficulties faced by people fleeing conflict from Sudan to Upper Nile State in South Sudan.
Thousands of returnees have been arriving sick and exhausted at the Bulukat transit center in Malakal, northeastern South Sudan, after traveling almost 72 hours by boat on the White Nile River, according to MSF.
The Bulukat transit center hosts about 5,000 people at any one time, many of them having to wait for weeks for onward transfers. People are without sufficient food, shelter, or healthcare, as they live in temporary tents or out in the open during the rainy season.
“In our facilities in Malakal, we are recording an alarming rise in the number of measles and malnutrition cases, especially amongst children,” says Luz Linares, MSF Head of Mission in South Sudan. “The mortality rate in our facilities is extremely high, as the patients arrive so late and sick that the medical teams at times are unable to save lives.”
“There must be an immediate scale-up of medical and humanitarian response by humanitarian groups for people arriving from Sudan, from the time of entry into South Sudan, until their relocation to the areas of their choice,” she adds.
Out of the total 245,000 people who have entered South Sudan to seek refuge since April, about 198,000 have crossed through Renk, in the far northeast of the country, according to the United Nations. Around 50 percent of these people have expressed their intention to stay within Upper Nile state, an area that is already badly affected by intercommunal conflict and a lack of healthcare services.
According to MSF, the people returning from Sudan, also known as returnees, often arrive at the border exhausted, have no money left to continue traveling further or with which to survive, and rely on humanitarian aid.
“Food is the most significant problem people in Bulukat face. Returnees are given a mere US$14 per person to buy a week’s worth of food, which is very little compared to the high food prices in the area,” the MSF statement said. “Moreover, most of them end up waiting in the transit center for several weeks, sometimes months, without additional assistance for food and supplies to survive.”
“We need shelter, and we also need good living conditions. We do not have food here. We do not have soap. We also need mosquito nets,” says Akuch Deng, who traveled from Sudan with her two children. “The small amount of cash they give here is not enough in the market.”
Since July, MSF has run a mobile clinic in the transit center, providing over 100 medical consultations a day. The medical humanitarian organization says that their teams are seeing and treating increasing numbers of measles cases and an alarming number of malnourished children and that patients requiring hospital care are referred to the MSF hospital in Malakal town.
“What I have witnessed is really terrible, especially the living conditions,” says Apayi Dawa, MSF Nurse Supervisor in Bulukat. “People don’t have shelters. So, when it rains, the shelters are washed away by the water. We have people dying on the boats. They also have very limited food to eat.”
In Renk, MSF teams are providing basic healthcare through two mobile clinics, as well as supporting a pediatric ward and treatment facilities for patients with measles and malnutrition.
“With the rainy season, we can face a big outbreak of malaria if nothing is done in terms of proper shelter and mosquito net distribution,” says Nuru Katikomu, MSF Emergency Field Coordinator in Bulukat. “On top of that, there is a risk of a cholera outbreak in such circumstances. It could be catastrophic. That’s why we have to push all humanitarian groups to do more to prevent a worsening of the crisis.”