Promiscuity, mosquitoes and cuts, the harsh conditions of displaced people in Sudan

June 22, 2023

Fatima Mohammed survived the war in Khartoum. But ten days ago, she succumbed to her illness in a school transformed into a camp for displaced people. Since then, her children have been on their own.

Ithar, 11, Dalal, nine, and Ibrahim, seven, manage as best they can in the courtyard of al-Jeili Salah school, open to displaced residents of Wad Madani, 200 kilometers south of the capital Sudanese.

But with tens of thousands of displaced people leaving like them from Khartoum, in panic, to escape the war that has been raging since April 15, towards this city spared so far from the fighting, space is starting to run out.

Soukaïna Abderrahim, for example, survives with six members of her family in a room in the girls’ dormitory at al-Jazeera University in the east of the city.

“For a family, the accommodation is uncomfortable, there is a lack of space and privacy,” she told AFP.

“We share the showers and toilets with the twenty other rooms on the floor, which each accommodates an entire family”, she adds, while thousands of displaced people survive today in university hostels, schools or local associations in this city nestled in a bend of the Blue Nile.

Access to basic services in these makeshift structures is not always guaranteed in this city of the agricultural state of al-Jazeera, a huge fertile expanse between the Blue Nile and the White Nile, known for its cotton fields. .

“Often, the water and electricity cuts are long,” laments Hanane Adam, displaced with her husband and their four children.

“With the high temperatures and the proliferation of mosquitoes, all my children contracted malaria,” she says.

Malaria wreaks havoc in Sudan every year, recalls the World Health Organization (WHO): 61% of deaths from malaria in the eastern Mediterranean take place in the country.

Today in Wad Madani, finding a doctor is almost a miracle: in one of the town’s camps, the NGO Médecins sans frontières (MSF) was only able to dispatch a single doctor and four nurses to take care of 2,000 displaced persons.

Humanitarians, whose Sudanese employees are exhausted, holed up at home for fear of stray bullets or themselves displaced, and foreign staff still waiting for visas, keep repeating that they are overwhelmed.

Sometimes it’s the food that’s missing.

“We receive food parcels but there is no infant milk in them,” laments AFP Soumaya Omar, mother of five children aged six months to ten years. However, she says, “we do not have the means to buy it” in a country where normally inflation is in three digits and where prices have soared even more since the start of the war between soldiers and the paramilitaries.

In the Abdallah Moussa school, in the west of Wad Madani, neighbors provide the meals.

A small team of young volunteers distributes plates to families unable to cook in buildings without kitchens.

But these local initiatives are not enough in a country where, even before the war, one inhabitant in three suffered from hunger.

A doctor who works in the 13 displacement camps that the city now has, told AFP that “malnutrition is starting to affect children”.

“We are already seeing worrying cases arrive in the dispensaries of the camps for the displaced,” he confides, on condition of anonymity.

According to Unicef, 620,000 Sudanese children suffer from acute malnutrition and half could die if they are not given help.

However, UN agencies and NGOs are short of funds and, above all, unable to deliver their aid across the country, as their trucks are caught in the crossfire.

As for local production, it is dwindling. The agri-food industry, already bloodless after 20 years of embargo under the dictatorship of Omar el-Bashir, ousted in 2019, is now bombarded, as are homes or hospitals.

A month ago, in Khartoum, the Samil factory which produced “60% of nutritional treatments for children in severe nutritional deficiency”, according to UNICEF, was reduced to ashes.