LAST UPDATE | 25 Nov 2024

THE TOWN OF Renk in northern South Sudan lies on the banks of the White Nile river – it is gripped in a crippling 40 degrees of heat, cut off by floods and in the embrace of anxiety of a looming crisis of hunger and cholera. 

A small hospital is located at the edge of the sprawl and reached across unpaved laneways and roads, through neighbourhoods of primitive wood fenced compounds. 

This is Renk Civil Hospital – the place occupied by humanitarians and declared the stabilisation centre. It is where the sickest refugees come from the nearby border having come close to death on their flight from the war in Sudan. 

It has the feeling of a derelict site.

There are Government employees here but low in number – the regime officials that we met work in the buildings infested by insects and the black mold that covers every wall and ceiling. There is no running water here and electricity can be intermittent because it is coming from across the border in war torn Sudan.

Earlier this month The Journal travelled to South Sudan to report on the forgotten crisis in the Sub-Saharan country where seven million people have fled the war in Sudan. Some of those are Sudanese but also others are returning South Sudanese who originally fled the civil war in the country some 12 years ago.

We accompanied GOAL’s Regional Director John Rynne on a tour of the region – what we found was an aid effort stretched to the point of full capacity. 

Outside Renk there is a red dirt runway where pilots land their Soviet era propeller aircraft. It is here that aid flows in and the humanitarians arrive to take the place of a State so mired in dysfunction that it cannot even muster the strength to maintain the dust trail roads.

The humanitarian organisations are present in numbers – they are noticeable by the fact they drive white all-terrain Toyotas caked in the red dust. 

They are almost exclusively the only people using vehicular transport – most of the local population use donkey drawn carts or simply walk, the supplies they carry balanced precariously on top of their heads. Some of those more lucky ones use motorbikes. 

There are some key makeshift facilities inside the grounds of the hospital – including a centre where feeding is given to struggling malnourished refugees. The sophisticated lifesaving food comes in gel-like high energy pastes or in biscuit form.

Irish aid agency GOAL is here in numbers. Almost all of its workers are South Sudanese people working to help their own country people and the Sudanese refugees – many of whom are gaunt and exhausted from the war raging across the border.

The hospital is staffed by medics from GOAL and other agencies, including Medicines Sans Frontiers or Doctors without Borders. 

The scene inside the ten bed facility is devastating – a tiny baby lies on a bed struggling to breathe, kids with bandaged limbs with infected sores they picked up on the journey.

A child is suffering from malaria, another on a newly arrived oxygen machine close to death with pneumonia. 

There are infants gravely ill with malnourishment – the doctors fighting to save their lives. 

On nearby walls there are signs denoting no weapons in the facility – buckets of fluoride-treated water stand to wash hands. People greet each other by touching elbows – it is the sign that cholera has arrived in the community.  

There are feeding preparation stations, boxes of emergency food supplements and on the wall charts showing the live statistics for those saved and those who died in their care. 

They are a proud group of medics – smiling and welcoming as they explain their efforts to stem the flood of the sick. They also speak of how close they are to full capacity and how they need a major international effort to stop the deaths of the children in their care. 

A Sudanese refugee sits with her gravely ill baby inside the hospital in Renk. Niall O'Connor / The Journal Niall O'Connor / The Journal / The Journal

Dr Amal Dok, is the managing medic – she said they are desperate to get more bed space and also staff to replace her tired medics struggling to keep going. 

“We need more space – we have ward capacity of ten beds and the numbers of admissions are now more than that.

“We need to have another ward and greater space to help us. We are also short occasionally of some items such as a meter to measure patients as some of them have hypoglycemia [low blood sugar] – it is very difficult to manage and we need that machine to help us.

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“We have also patients in need of a blood treatment machines and we also need a TB screening machine – we are diagnosing illnesses on clinical manifestation but this would help 

“Finally we also need more staff here, because are facing problems with giving staff leave,” she said. 

John Rynne, GOAL’s Regional Director for Africa, described the scene and admitted that capacity has reached a critical level. 

“There is zero capacity. There are very sick children in there. There was a number of twins and other premature babies. There was very young children with TB, very serious medical complications.

“There’s no dependable, consistent electricity supply to that facility. We saw, I think, four or five children, probably 40% of the children on oxygen machines that are 100% reliant on mains electricity.

“We saw one very fragile baby on oxygen. And I would really worry about that small baby, that if the power went off a number of hours that she could she could not be saved,” he added. 

Rynne praised the local Ministry of Health official Dr Ayuel Deng and the various aid agencies but said that the ability to help has “fragility as regards the overall ability to cope with the severity of the situation”.

Rynne believes that there are a number of draws to the immediate area, where refugees are getting cash and access to food as well as medical treatment. They are heading south from Sudan where society has collapsed amid the total war level of fighting there. 

This will likely increase Rynne believes as fighting intensifies with the arrival of the dry season in Sudan. 

The hospital in Renk could be the sign of what is to come should there the predicted surge of more refugees, he believes.  

“You can see if one part of it gets confounded because they’ve very large numbers coming across then the whole system grinds to a halt.

“I think that would be the very strong worry that there will be thousands coming across, and they will be stuck in the reception and transit centres with nowhere to go. And then the next day, more thousands are coming across, and you’re really back to square one as well – that’s the big worry,” he added.