In January 1994, I became Africa director for Samaritan’s Purse and its medical arm World Medical Mission, and my wife and I moved to Nairobi, Kenya. As an organization at that time we were active in both Somalia and Sudan, and within a few months after our arrival chaos broke loose in Rwanda and we were in the thick of three refugee situations. As a registered non-government organization with the Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) division of the United Nations giving us the logistical support we needed to gain air access to remote areas, we became quite active in Southern Sudan, working with the Nuer people, first in the remote village of Ulang and then in the even more remote Fangok. 

The civil war between Arab Muslims in the north and Black Christians and animists in southern Sudan has been going on since the close of colonial days 35 years ago. In the 1980s there had been a real push by the north to create a total Islamic state and outlaw Christianity. In addition to this war, there was still tribal fighting in the south over cattle and grazing rights, along with two factions within the army of southern Sudan fighting each other. It was a very complicated situation and had resulted in hundreds of thousands of lost lives and millions of displaced persons. It was not the typical refugee camp type situation which actually made care for these people even more difficult. Obviously the medical needs, both physical and spiritual, were great.

We concentrated on two areas in southern Sudan, working among the Nuer tribe in 1993 and 1994. Working in a tent camp along the edge of the Sobat river basin in the village of Ulang, we trained Sudanese clinical health care workers, carried out preventive health care and traditional birth assistance training. With pesticidal dusting and treatment of patients, we were able to almost wipe out the endemic disease, relapsing fever, in Ulang and the immediate surrounding area. The Presbyterian Church is prominent in the region because of extensive mission work done there 50 to 100 years ago. We continued that tradition in our work with whatever churches which still existed.

It usually took two or three days to get into Ulang on UN planes. The first day we would fly from Nairobi into Lokichoggio, as far north as you can get in Kenya. At that location there was a UN tent camp, where we would stay until we could get another charter flight into our camp into Ulang, a village of mostly displaced people. There we were close to a dirt landing strip about 300 miles into the interior of this barren, hot, flat, dusty, and windy land. We usually kept eight to ten people in our little tent compound in Ulang: two doctors, two nurses, two logistics and security people, and several others doing camp work and cooking. Our people kept in daily radio contact with our headquarters in Nairobi.

Unfortunately, on March 4, 1994, we had to evacuate our entire team from Ulang when they radioed that there was tribal fighting and gunfire in the village because of a cattle raid. An emergency UN plane had to rush in and rescue them from bullets flying everywhere. While they were waiting those three hours to be evacuated, we treated many gunshot wounds. Our team handled themselves well but were shaken when, two days later, they finally arrived back in Nairobi. We later learned that the entire village was burned to the ground and our camp looted and destroyed. Such are the risks of working in refugee work with displaced persons.

Later that spring I took on a similar project into an even more remote village, Fangok, several hundred miles west of Ulang. We gave thousands of immunizations, set up a clinic, and trained Sudanese clinical health workers while there in addition to organizing and training a community health committee. We also worked closely with the local Presbyterian pastor and his parish. Again, unfortunately, another team we later sent into Fangok also had to be evacuated quickly because of fighting after being held hostage for twenty-four hours by an unknown force.

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    Between November 2000 and September 2001, approximately 3,800 Sudanese children and young adults were resettled in the U.S. These refugees were from the Kakuma Refugee Camp and are predominantly boys and young men.

During the civil war in Southern Sudan, which began in the late 1980s, approximately 20,000 Dinka and Nuer children were separated from their parents and fled on foot to Ethiopia -- walking more than 1,000 kilometers on the four-month journey. Between 1991 and 1992, this group was forcibly returned to Sudan. They then fled on foot to northern Kenya where they were brought to Kakuma Refugee Camp. Despite years of family tracing efforts by the humanitarian organizations, many of the children have little hope that they will ever see their parents again. Seven thousand have grown up in a system of group care supervised by tribal elders or in informal foster care established in the refugee camp. With war in Sudan continuing, return to a homeland for these children and young adults could mean forced military conscription and/or other danger to their lives.

   

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How Can You Help?
by Ruth B. Walkup

Pray.  Prayer is probably the most important and most needed response for crisis. Pray for the people suffering. Pray for the people and agencies who are in the field addressing the immediate concerns. Pray for policy and decision-makers at all levels of response that they would have compassion and wisdom.

Learn.  Educate yourself and your colleagues on the people who are experiencing the crisis, their history, their culture, their politics, the politics of the nations and groups around them, their livelihoods, the policies and organizations guiding assistance.   Use the resource list in this Forum for additional information.

Give.  Cash donations to an appropriate, qualified NGO are one of the best ways to help quickly, even though the details for response are not known in the early hours or even days following a disaster.  Gift-in-Kind donations can bring valuable resources quickly into play for agencies involved in the various sectors of relief assistance, such as health, water, food, shelter and clothing. It is essential, however, that any gifts-in-kind be specifically requested by the operating organization.