A combination of war, hunger, disease and poverty have forced hundreds of widows in the besieged southern 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.