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Women and Children In War Zones
Every day, thousands of casualties of war from the Nuba Mountains, Darfur, and the Blue Nile risk their lives to escape political persecution and also the lack of food and water. The situation is so bad that they seek refuge in war-torn South Sudan. Majority of these victims are women and children who end up dying en route to refugee camps.
Soldiers from the genocidal Sudan regime attack the survivors trying to escape. If caught along the way, they are at risk of extremely harsh punishment such as child soldier recruitment, brutal beatings, forced abortions, torture, beheadings, and internment in political prison camps. Some who make it to South Sudan end up hiding their illegal status where their vulnerability leads to exploitation where they are trafficked as sex workers and/or slaves with no recourse to any authorities.
Many of these victims of war and genocide lack food, water, and resources or connections to escape, ergo, our intervention.
Trapped in the War Zone
Dr. Tom Catena, the only doctor in the war-torn Nuba Mountains
Structures in our compounds in the Nuba mountains damaged by a bomb dropped on their location.
The genocidaire regime of Sudan has always followed a similar pattern of systemic ethnic cleansing; i.e., Darfur and South Sudan prior to 2005 and currently the Nuba Mountains. Denial of access to humanitarian aid, ruthless killings, detentions and torture of civilians, looting of civilian properties, and the use of starvation and enslavement have been waged as weapons of war.
The very same leaders currently under investigation by the ICC for genocide, maintain critical positions of power within Sudan; allowing them to continue perpetrating crimes against indigenous communities.
The two sides have been fighting in both Southern Kordofan and the Blue Nile states since separation. Unlawful and terrifying airstrikes by the government on populated areas, along with food shortages, have pushed millions of people into refugee camps in South Sudan and displaced hundreds of thousands more within Sudan.
The victims of genocide not only live under constant aircraft bombing for years without international intervention, but also, live under earnest lack of food, water, and medical care for decades. Millions were ethnically killed leaving more than 5 million currently in the internal displacement camps without access to basic necessities like food and water.
Lack of Food, Water, and Education
Millions of civilians have been displaced from Nuba Mountains/South Kordofan, Darfur, and the Blue Nile and hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost. Some of these victims have fled into different refugee camps in South Sudan while thousands of survivors, mostly women and children are stranded at the border, unable to enter the refugee camps, which are at double their capacity.
Images captured by the Satellite Sentinel Project confirmed the destruction of civilian homes, our schools and the presence of thousands of mass graves in Nuba Mountains/South Kordofan. There's been deliberate burning of villages, heavy armament movement and aerial bombardment in many villages in the South Kordofan region.
The suffering is evident in the outrageous number of people dying en route or shortly after arriving at the refugee camps due to lack of food, water, and health care. There have been continued aerial bombing by the Sudan Armed Forces and militias.
The suffering is on an unbearable scale as there are thousands of emaciated women with babies on their backs getting turned away for trying to complain that there's nothing left for them due to long lines.
Women and children living in mountains because their homes were bombed.
A fire started as a result of explosion from Antonov bombs in the Nuba Mountains.
Children hide in caves to escape the Antonov bombs.
Women and children living in mountains because their homes were bombed.
Victims by numbers:
5.5 million lack humanitarian assistance.
2.5 million lack access to water.
4.6 million are in need of food.
Drought - Climate Change
When people talk about the famine death toll, South Sudan is featured, however, millions of people just over the border in Sudan's Nuba Mountains are facing severe food emergency in isolation.
Survivors who trekked for months to seek refuge in war-torn South Sudan have been constantly turned down due to instability, and overcapacity in the refugee camps. Most are forced to go back to the war-torn Nuba Mountains, where they starve to death as their homes have been destroyed by aerial bombs.
The famine that these survivors are experiencing is not totally due to the cruelty of nature but also man-made.
Climate change has contributed to the change in weather patterns affecting the crops from poor rainy season to floods ruining the little crops that some people were able to plant through irrigation. Casualties of this brutality have mostly been women and children who die on a daily basis.
Our survey found that 90 percent of respondents had no access to food or water in the caves where they've been hiding. 97 percent had, in the previous month, at least all members of the household go for weeks without eating at least once a day.
Unsafe in South Sudan Camps
Thousands of survivors, mostly pregnant women, unaccompanied children, and survivors of torture have been abandoned in refugee camps in South Sudan. Vulnerable people are often crammed into a makeshift tent, with up to 10 or even more people if they're lucky and denied refugee registration if they're not.
The refugee camps mostly cater to the internally displaced South Sudanese leading to rejection of many people from Nuba Mountains, Darfur, and the Blue Nile due to severe overcrowding. For a very long time refugee camps such as Yida have been at more than double their capacity. These camps often lack sufficient access to food, water, sanitation, and hygiene.
Mothers giving birth, survivors of sexual violence and other traumatic experiences are lumped together with the internally displaced South Sudanese where fights regularly break out. People are abandoned in these camps for extended periods of time, they have a lack of information, a lack of interpreters, so they're often very frustrated leads to violence within the camps.
Vulnerable Victims
Chronic understaffing and flawed screening processes for the breakdown of the system intended to identify and protect the most vulnerable survivors of war and genocide has failed so many victims. Vulnerable refugees are subjected to conditions often dangerously overcrowded, squalid, unhygienic and unsafe for people that are already suffering from very traumatic experiences, sometimes mental health illnesses, sometimes physical disabilities
There is a particularly worrying trend of teenagers and survivors of torture being detained after authorities failed to recognize them as vulnerable
Nuba communities are surrounded by battle lines, effectively isolated as delivery of basic services by the Sudanese government and the international humanitarian organizations stopped since 2011.
Our Programs
Food
We address hunger and malnutrition head-on by helping small farmers in the war-torn South Kordofan increase production and sell more crops as the best way to combat global hunger and poverty.
Water
90% of households without access to water rely on collection by women and girls. Many still lack access to safe water & sanitation, often bc of obstacles like discrimination & poverty.
Health
Poverty and health are strongly linked. Health problems can plunge people into poverty or keep them from escaping it, and those in poverty are more likely to suffer disease because of lack of treatment.
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