This is content for World Vision Australia
They’ve witnessed things no child should ever see. Many have walked for weeks, even months, without possessions or food, alone or at the mercy of strangers. They arrive with eyes still filled with the horrors they fled from.
They ask: have you seen my mum, dad, sisters, brothers? Others, often the very quiet ones, already know what happened to their families.
Like 16-year-old Lina, who saw her father hanged. Or nine-year-old Viola and her brothers and sisters, who came home from school to find their slaughtered parents. In a reality more terrible than any tale, they did what children in frightening stories do: they ran from the monsters and kept on running – sometimes into worse. Eventually, these survivors have crossed the border from their war-torn country, South Sudan, into Uganda.
For the hundreds of thousands of deeply traumatised children fleeing the South Sudanese conflict, a bowl of hot food is the first kindness they’ve received in a very long time. It’s also the first of many they’ll receive at the Uganda settlements offering sanctuary to around 2,000 new refugees a day.
Despite what they’ve endured, many smile at that first mouthful. It’s remarkable how resilient kids can be, say the workers who welcome the little souls.
They’ve seen enough to know; of Uganda’s one million South Sudanese refugee population, a staggering 60 per cent are children, with women and children comprising 86 per cent. Among those, according to humanitarian organisation World Vision, are some 9,000 unaccompanied minors and separated children who have crossed into Uganda since July 2016. These include the most vulnerable of all: the unwell, those with disabilities and others who endured abuse along the way.
“There’s no doubt this is a children’s crisis,” says Moses Mukitale, World Vision Communications Officer for the West Nile Refugee Response.
Mukitale spends much of his time at Bidi Bidi, the world’s largest refugee settlement. Just a year ago, Bidi Bidi was a small grasslands town in northern Uganda. Now, it’s the 250-square-kilometre home to 273,000 people – almost the population of Wollongong and twice as many as Darwin or Cairns. For a year, since the conflict across the border escalated into a hell of killing, raping, pillaging and burning, refugees have been arriving in Uganda at a rate of one per minute, and Bidi Bidi has taken the lion’s share.
Its five sprawling zones are referred to as a settlement rather than a camp, due to Uganda’s uniquely compassionate response to the refugee crisis. The borders of this country, where resources are already meagre, remain open and all refugees are welcomed with food, shelter, support and a plot of land where they can plant seeds, build a house and work towards autonomy.
“Bidi Bidi is not an enclosed camp like in other countries, there are no fences,” says Moses Mutikale. “It is an open door situation and nobody is confined.”
From the start, new arrivals are offered both comfort and dignity. It starts with that hot meal. “Some have been walking for two weeks, even more,” says Mukitale. “They tell us: ‘we had nothing to eat and no clean water,’ and they are very tired, very malnourished. So this food replenishes their energy and helps them just get through to the next day.”
The effects of that simple meal are remarkable, he says. “On arrival the children are very frail and afraid, silent, but once they eat, they begin to play and interact with you and they will tell you how the journey was. Until then, they don’t even have the energy to speak.”
Next morning the refugees are given a porridge breakfast and then introduced to their new home: a 50 by 50 metre plot of land where they can set up a makeshift dwelling. They’ll be provided with materials, cooking utensils, a sleeping mat, and monthly food rations. The elderly, the sick and unaccompanied children are supported to construct a shelter.
It’s a positive start, but it’s heartrending, too. “All of a sudden, the life you had before is gone and you have to start up something new in an open field,” says Mukitale.
All those children need much more, too, and here is where one of Bidi Bidi’s most exceptional initiatives kicks in. All the unaccompanied and separated children are provided by World Vision with foster parents from within the refugee community, scrupulously selected to provide practical care and emotional support.
Mukitale repeatedly sees traumatised children take their first tentative steps back to life in the care of their fosterers. “Imagine how hard it would be for them to be on their own here. Some can’t cook; they don’t know what it means to set up a house. But when they have a parent, they have guidance, and before you know it, a new family.”
The foster parents receive training in child protection, children’s rights and caring for their charges’ special needs. Even in the toughest cases, he says, new bonds form and extraordinary changes occur.
He tells of recent arrivals Grace, 16, and her eight-year-old sister, who arrived after a harrowing two-month journey. They’d set out from South Sudan with their mother, who was seven months pregnant, and their 19-year-old brother. They met an ambush, and Grace’s mother was dragged away by armed men, screaming for the children to run. They did, but at the next ambush, Grace’s brother was shot dead. When the girls attempted to bury him, they were told to go or the same would happen to them, so they had no choice but to leave him in the road. Now alone, they were offered a lift to Uganda by a group of men but when darkness fell, they separated the girls, and Grace was raped. Her sister, in this story’s only mercy, was spared the same ordeal. They were dumped in the bush, and thanks to a group of women who helped them, finally made it over the Ugandan border.
“After Grace was taken to the clinic for her health checks, it was discovered she was pregnant from the rape,” says Mukitale. ‘She now has to cope with having this baby, without her own mother. Her little sister asks her constantly: when are we going to see our mum?” So far, there has been no news.
On their first day with foster parents, the girls were heartbreakingly silent and sad. “But when I went back after two days,” says Mukitale, “the little sister had already been playing with the other children in the home for over an hour. She goes to school now, she is doing well. Even Grace, she’s smiling sometimes, she is positive. She’s been through hell and walked out of it, and she will have all the support we can give her.”
In the refugee settlements a huge amount of effort and resources also go towards tracking down and reuniting separated families. There are broader, long-term projects to facilitate autonomy in Bidi Bidi so that its people can move towards self-sufficiency.
These projects are structured to help the host community, too, because despite its extraordinary generosity, Uganda is one of the least equipped countries to deal with such an enormous influx. Resources are perilously stretched, but the borders remain open and the welcome remains.
Uganda’s kindness to its desperate neighbours has been hailed internationally as a salutary example of humanitarianism. But that admiration has not translated into practical help. In June, Uganda and the UN appealed for $2 billion to support the country’s total refugee caseload of 1.3 million for the next four years. Just $350 million has been raised.
“These are very poor people willingly taking in their fellow men and women and they don’t expect anything in return apart from a little support, a few essential items,” says Moses Mukitale. “The question to ask is: if a refugee with nothing can be a foster parent to another refugee, what can everyone else do? It takes a world to end violence against children.”
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