AID AND CARE, INC

Report from WHO: A combination of war, hunger, disease and poverty have forced hundreds of widows in the besieged south Sudanese town of Wau to give up their children for adoption.The children, who number more than 16,000, have been taken into care by a number of non-governmental organizations (ngos). Unfortunately, there are more than 1 millions orphans still never meet these chances.The children, aged 6-11, have found themselves abandoned as a result of more than 20 years civil wars. These children lost either one or both parents to diseases, famine, and wars. Most of the children stay under trees and in a makeshift bamboo house, with walls covered with wornout sacks, and floor with sand. Those are they lucky ones but many children wonder on the streets, stay under trees, and strangers’ verandas. They get killed by unknown criminals and also die of hungry, diseases, and eaten by wild animals and snakes bites.

At one of the homes, a caretaker, who is a widow, mourns at the slight mention of the three of her children who died of starvation in June this year. “My surviving three sons are not feeling well either. They hardly have enough food and their health is deteriorating so fast. I’m afraid they may die soon,” she says.Her colleague, Mama Alang, shares similar pain. Her child, malnourished, is too weak to chase away the swarm of flies hovering about his face. “He is crying because he did not eat anything yesterday and there is no hope that he will eat today,” says Alang who lost her husband in the war. Her husband, who was a great farmer, was killed in the war. she says: “we had plenty of food and clothes before he joined the war.”

“All that have now gone. The war has brought us to zero. There is no hope for a better life for my family anymore,” Alang says.Alang, who is in her mid-30s, says she also lost two of her children in June. “My three surviving children do not go to school because we do not have near our area here and are hungry,” she says.

Another widow, Mama Awin, who works with the Save the children Fund UK, tells similar tale. “I earn little, hardly enough to feed my children,” she says. Like the rest of the orphans and widows, Awin lives at Ariath, Aweil, one of the most deteriorated areas by warsnin Northern Bhar El Ghazal region. Almost all the children there have no cloth on them, walk bare foot and often go hungry due to lack of food.

More than 7,000 people died of hunger-related diseases in the areas recently occupied by internal and external returnees in June and July. Most of the displaced—who number about 1,250,000—have no access to clean drinking water and have no medicine for preventable diseases like diarrhoea and whooping cough, which cause the death of at least 10-15 children a day in the rural areas.The UN World Food Programme (WFP) says the starvation in southern sudan’s Northern Bahr El Ghazal region, of which Wau is the main town, is threatening the lives of more than 2.6 million people, and that in some areas malnutrition rates has increased to 60 percent.

Despite the hardships, all streets in rural towns in Northern Bhar El Ghazal are full of unaccompanied children from within towns and the rural areas. One boy, aged 12, says his parents died on the way from Waaththok to Aweil and that he has no idea if the rest of his family is still alive in the village. “If I have the means, I will return home. Life is harder in Aweil town than it is in the village,”. Says Garang, one of the orphans.

While South Sudan is placed 5th with the highest mortality rate in the world, the present of diseases in the country is as dangerous as civil war in the country. Many people in any places in South Sudan are not aware of wide and rapid spreading diseases like HIV/AIDs and other related diseases. Aid and Care established a project called THAMPODS which stands for Tuburclose, Heptatis or HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Polio and other related diseases. The goal of the project is to raise awareness and provide treatments and preventions information to un-awared populations in rural and urban areas. The awareness is done through training community health specialisits, help build clinics and empower the exists.

We aim fighting THAMPODS to the end and together. Through donation, giving time and energy, we will fight to end THAMPODS in East Africa. Thampods project will promote its goals through the following sub-projects:

Healthy Village

This program will promote hygiene and sanitation in the villages. Over 99 percent of people in the villages are not aware of diseases that their lives. The program will also train midwives to save pregnant mothers. In the last two years, it was confirmed that about 67 pregnant mothers died with their unborn babies in the villages.

Health Soldiers

This program focuses on training health teams in rural towns and send to rural villages outside the towns.