Palabek Refugee Camp, Uganda — It is just after midday and the sun is high up in the sky above this dusty, sprawling settlement of 55,574 people in northern Uganda. Rose Geno with her three children sit inside their grass-roofed mud hut to escape the scorching heat as she prepares a meal of corn and beans.

The 30-year-old South Sudanese refugee said her school-age kids now eat smaller meals more often after she managed to harvest enough crops during the previous season (June-November). She is among thousands of refugees who have received seeds and farming support from the Salesian missionaries and a nun to help mitigate food shortages amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“My life became unbearable when the pandemic hit us,” she said. A lack of funding from international bodies reduced food rations at the camp. “We slept hungry many times because the ratio was cut by 40% at first and it was later reduced to 20%,” she said.

Geno fled from Pajok, a town in South Sudan located 10 miles from the border with Uganda, in April 2017 after fighting intensified between government forces of President Salva Kiir, and forces loyal to the former vice president, Riek Machar. She escaped with her children after her husband was killed by soldiers, walking for three days in the bush before reaching Palabek.

She says the coronavirus and the resulting ration cuts and food shortages threatened their lives more than the civil war in her young country in which more than 380,000 people have been killed and nearly four million people displaced.

“We nearly died from hunger during the peak of the pandemic but thanks to the priests and a nun who came to our rescue in our time of need,” she said.

Sr. Lucy Akera of the Little Sisters of Mary Immaculate of Gulu said they had to act quickly to save the lives of refugees. “We distributed the little food we had in our store to refugees and we quickly realized we had to look for a long-lasting solution to hunger, which was farming,” she said.

Over 1.4 million refugees in more than 14 refugee camps across Uganda bore the brunt of the pandemic after the East African country registered its first case of COVID-19 a year ago.

Catholic groups moved swiftly to provide food, clothing and counseling to thousands of refugees. Salesian Fr. Lazar Arasu, director of Don Bosco Palabek, said his congregation gave packets of food including corns, flour, beans, rice and cooking oil to the refugees and also distributed blankets, dozens of pairs of shoes and clothes.

“When the pandemic hit the world, it came to us as a shock.We were not prepared at all. Everything was closed down and refugees were left for dead,” said Arasu, who is among the five Salesian missionaries living and working in the Palabek refugee camp. “We were forced to share our little food and other essential goods with the refugees to keep them alive amid the pandemic.”

However, Akera had a different way of tackling food shortages in the camp. With the help of the Salesian missionaries, she began providing training, tools and seeds for refugees to plant and harvest crops to support their families in the midst of the pandemic.

She and the Salesian missionaries distributed fertilizers and several hundred kilos (thousands of pounds) of beans, maize, soya beans, simsim or sesame, groundnuts and many assorted vegetable seeds such as collard greens. They also distributed tons of cassava cuttings.

“The only way we could tackle hunger during the pandemic was through farming. So we had to train and support refugees with seeds and fertilizers to plant and harvest enough crops to feed their family,” said Akera, the only nun working at the Palabek camp. She lives in a small mud hut built of sticks, mud and metal scrap. “I also did farming and I planted groundnuts, soya beans and maize. I have enough food which I share some with my neighbors who are refugees.”

Akera, who grew up in a farming family, has been able to transfer her agricultural skills to the refugees. The 58-year-old nun, who comes from Gulu town, 60 miles away from Palabek, said her calling to serve led her to work in the camp despite the hardships, though she sometimes feels lonely.

“I feel happy being in the camp though I’m lonely. No sister wants to come and live in this hardship area,” said Akera, whose congregation is in Gulu. “I was born and raised in a rural area so living in the camp for me is a normal thing.”

The East African country of more than 44 million is celebrated around the world for providing refugees with the land for shelter and agricultural use. Arasu said his congregation has been renting land from the local Ugandans for refugees who don’t have enough land for farming to help them grow enough crops to feed their families.

“I rented some farms from the hosting community. The money I used was provided by the Don Bosco missions and since children were home, they helped their parents in farming,” he said. “God was also faithful; it rained a lot and since the land was virgin land, it produced really well.”

Akera came to the camp in 2018 after the Salesian missionaries requested the Archdiocese of Gulu to ask sisters to come and help serve the people in the camp. Before the pandemic, she tried to provide hope and solidarity to refugees while helping to distribute aid. But she now has a new ministry amid the pandemic: sensitizing refugees on the importance of farming.

“My new ministry is to ensure refugees support themselves through farming because COVID-19 has taught us the biggest lesson of not relying completely on food aid distributions,” she said. “We want to keep on training them on how to plant crops and ensure they have enough harvest.” She began training refugees on farming in May 2020 after the pandemic reduced food rations for refugees. 

Every morning, Akera visits various villages within the camp to train and emphasize to refugees the importance of farming. She recently demonstrated to a group of farmers how to plan their farms from the beginning of the season up to harvest without encountering any problems.

The training involves land preparation, seed selection, planting, weed management, soil fertility management, harvesting, postharvest handling and storage, she said.

https://www.globalsistersreport.org/news/coronavirus/news/refugees-use-farm-training-survive-food-shortages-during-pandemic

Uganda hosts the largest number of unaccompanied child refugees in the world, according to the UNHCR [Portia Crowe/Al Jazeera]

Bidi Bidi refugee settlement, Uganda – Every morning, Rose Inya makes her four younger siblings breakfast and gets them ready for school. In the evenings, the 16-year-old, who is herself still a student, prepares dinner, tends to her vegetable garden, and puts her sisters and brothers to bed.

She assigns them household chores and monitors their homework. When they misbehave, she reprimands them, and when they are sick, she is the one who cares for them.

Inya and her siblings, who are South Sudanese refugees, live alone in Uganda’s sprawling Bidi Bidi refugee settlement. They fled their village of Avumadrichi with their mother in 2016. Their father and eldest brother stayed behind. Six months ago, their mother went back to try to earn some money. They have not heard from her since.

According to the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), Uganda hosts the largest number of unaccompanied child refugees in the world – some 41,200 in 2018 – with the majority less than 15 years old and nearly 3,000 younger than five. Most of them come from South Sudan, which has been mired in civil war since December 2013. 

Coping with the inflows of minors is one of many challenges facing the landlocked East African country, which, despite being one of the less-developed nations globally, is the world’s third-largest host of refugees, with some 1.2 million asylum-seekers in 2018.

Many Ugandans were themselves displaced during Idi Amin’s rule in the 1970s and later during an armed campaign by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group. And while Western nations are increasingly shutting their doors to migrants, the UN and the humanitarian community have praised Uganda’s unique hosting model, which allows refugees to work, farm, and study.

But hosting so many vulnerable people comes with challenges for the government, the UNHCR, and partner organisations in the refugee settlements. Unaccompanied children face a unique set of risks, including sexual exploitation, early pregnancy, and even robbery, according to Johnson Ochan Abic of World Vision International, an aid organisation.

Nassa Yangi was 17 when she fled South Sudan’s capital, Juba, to Uganda in May 2017 with seven of her nieces and nephews, the youngest of whom was only four. She cared for the children in the Rhino Camp refugee settlement until she was able to trace her mother, who was some 80 kilometres (48 miles) away in Bidi Bidi, with the help of the Uganda Red Cross.

“I was the mother and the father – I did everything,” she said.

Yangi said she cried when she heard her mother’s voice over the phone. They were reunited in Bidi Bidi in June 2018, after more than a year apart.

But some children will never see their parents again. Agnes Night’s mother was killed by a stray bullet while they were fleeing the South Sudanese town of Morobo together three years ago. Night, 16, now lives in Bidi Bidi with Asiki Emmanuel, a neighbour from her village that she came across on the road to Uganda who agreed to take her in.

Foster families

When children arrive at the settlement alone, the NGOs seek out volunteer foster families from the same tribes who speak their language and share their customs.

Arikanjilo Lodong, 31, has taken in 11 foster children alongside his six biological children since fleeing fighting in South Sudan’s Equatoria region in July 2016. Four of them are siblings he met on the road to Uganda; they continue to live with him today. Of the seven other children he agreed to foster when he arrived in Bidi Bidi, six have since been reunited with their families.

“I miss them, really, I miss them,” he said of those who have been returned to their parents. “Even when I went there [to visit some of them] last year, one girl said she wanted to come [back with me], but her father refused.”

But not all the children are so happy with their foster parents. Taban Joseph, 17, from the South Sudanese town of Magwi, said his foster father “does not love” him.

“He is rude,” Joseph said, noting he does not always let him go out with friends. He also said his caretakers buy school supplies for their biological children but not for him and their other foster children.

World Vision International has about 70 case workers overseeing some 6,000 unaccompanied children in Bidi Bidi. They also rely on a network of volunteer para-social workers, who are refugees themselves and live in the settlement, as well as community-based child protection committees to monitor for signs of abuse.

Before legally signing children over, the UNHCR and partner NGOs check prospective parents’ criminal records and ask community leaders to vet them. The families must also attend training sessions on positive parenting, child abuse, children’s rights, and how to recognise withdrawal and other symptoms of trauma.

Some say the foster families do not do enough.

“The caretakers, what they do is give them food if it is there, give them basic necessities, but when we look at the psychological status of these children, it’s actually not all that well,” said Seme Ludanga Faustino, a South Sudanese refugee who cofounded the organisation I Can South Sudan, which provides music lessons and other social activities for children in Bidi Bidi.

The organisation also aims to forge friendships between children from different ethnic groups.

Stephen Wandu, I Can South Sudan’s co-founder and a well-known singer-songwriter in South Sudan under the stage name Ambassadeur Koko, fled to Uganda in 2016, becoming a refugee for the second time in his life.

He had previously lived in the Central African Republic as a child during the Sudanese civil war. Wandu’s parents divorced when he was young and his father died when he was a teenager, so he understands how it feels to be alone. That is why he felt compelled to help when he heard of the mass influx of South Sudanese children to Uganda.

On a recent Wednesday at the church where the organisation meets, some four dozen children were rehearsing a song about peace they would soon be recording with the Ugandan singer JM Kennedy. A clear leader in the group was Bosco John, a 13-year-old from the South Sudanese city of Yei who wants to be a lawyer when he grows up.

For John, the music sessions are a chance to forget about life as a refugee. He said his mother has mental health issues and his father stayed behind in South Sudan to look after their land. John fled to Uganda in August 2016 with a neighbour, who he continues to live with, but who, he says, gives him too much domestic labour to do. School is tough too – classrooms are overcrowded and lacking in materials.

But John, normally a gravely serious child, completely transforms when he picks up a ukulele. Practising the new song with his friends, suddenly he becomes all confidence and flair.

“When you sing, you’re able to sing out the issue that is torturing you internally,” Ludanga Faustino said.

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/time-play-childhood-uganda-biggest-refugee-camp-200101080357207.html