Waiting for a Life, UN Protection of Civilians Camp

With Family work completed for the morning, the wheelbarrow becomes a toy of the boys.

Water in the Protection of Civilians camps in Juba,
   South Sudan is delivered four times daily by truck from the White Nile.  

     ON the day an agreement was about to be signed, we rode in an International Medical Corps SUV, entering POC 3 through a battered gate, overlooked by Japanese UN Peace Keepers sitting behind a sandbagged bunker wall.

      Protection of Civilians Camp 3, the more organized of the three UN House-compound camps has been home for a varying number of internally displaced South Sudanese people for almost two years. Many had fled in December of 2013, in search of a safe place to survive a new conflict between a number of factions in the nascent country.

      If the peace holds, it is a historic day to be here in the camp for those caught in the middle, their lives interrupted in the infancy of this country's life. If not, it will be more of the same, conflicts exercised by armed disagreement, continued chaos, disruption of basic needs and security, with no end in sight.

                                Water for the morning, POC 1                                    

      Fast-forward a month or so, and the ceasefire has been violated numerous

          Produce stand in a marketplace in POC 3         

times.  The president has discussed plans to tear of the map of states and redraw with twice as many state or districts in the country without consultation with the opposition.  Like politics in many places, they are more complicated that I understand given my short history of more direct engagement in South Sudan. This sort of thing suggests the possibility that this peace agreement may end up at the bottom of one of the many dusty potholes of the deteriorated roads of the capital, Juba alongside many other past agreements.

      Their life in POC 3 is rough.

      Water collection used for all daily needs limited to 11.3 litres, and comes from plastic 2,000 gallon tanks stationed strategically throughout the camp, refilled four times daily by trucks.

      Only women and children are allowed at the taps to minimize conflict and even the potential for conflict and  power games.

     Water drains through the pathways and trenches between the tents, carrying, in theory wash water away, although the odors make you wonder what else may be present.

Emergency School, POC 1

Emergency School, POC 1

People live on top of each other in closely-spaced, dirt-floored, dust-covered tents that are nearing the end of their rated-for two-year life. There are conflicts like in any small city, based on normal daily things, but also on tribal differences.

    What it meant for me while in-country, revolved around concern for potential disruption of the peace and tranquility that seemed to have become the norm in the place I lived and worked for three weeks. To me, it also leads to questions about what happens for people who have been displaced in fear for their lives who do not, like me, have the ability to leave the country and land somewhere safe.

Emergency School POC 3

       With its proximity to the Capital, Juba, food is available, through the many small shops that pepper the camp, and the World Food Program provides vouchers for residents to purchase from their qualified neighbors, reducing the need for food-aid and this supporting local businesses rather than harming them through deliver of food-aid from the outside. That said there is often the presence of malnourishment within the population.

      Through constant vigilance,  groups such as the UN and IMC keep diseases such as Cholera, Malaria and Tuberculosis in check, but they cannot prevent it from making regular appearances in the camp and in the region.

       Babies are born (83 in the past month before I arrive), people die naturally and through violence.

      Children attend emergency schools, from grammar to science taught by dedicated teachers and tented and thatch-walled classrooms, play pool and soccer, wash clothes and sell vegetables and dried fish.

       It is a temporary life with an unknown expiration date in a rough place that no one should have to live.

In one month 83 babies were born
in the POC hospital.

International Medical Corps
tuberculosis patient.

Medical staff discuss recognizing symptoms while working with a tuberculosis and malaria patient.

POC 1 began before the UN arrived, contributing to a more
disorganized landscape than the planned out POC 3

Purchasing roofing repair material in a POC 3 marketplace