A Healthier Future for South Sudan's Families

“Vicki, there is a woman who was beaten by her husband in the camp and she can’t walk,” an anonymous caller said. “We need you.”

As a gender-based violence case manager for International Medical Corps in Wau, South Sudan, Vicki receives calls like this often. This call was for Sophia, a mother of two living in Wau’s largest refugee camp, which houses over 30,000 refugees and people internally displaced by South Sudan’s four year long conflict. Upon hearing of Sophia, Vicki didn’t hesitate; she rushed to the camp to find her.

Vicki spent that entire day searching from shelter to shelter and only found Sophia the next afternoon, sitting in front of her tented home and barely able to move.

“I greeted her, but she could not even lift her hand to greet me. When I asked what happened, she broke down sobbing. I didn’t know her but I held her as we cried together. I just wanted to show her love and that she is not alone.”

Once she had calmed, Sophia shared that her husband had left her for another woman and would not give her any money or resources. When she asked him one day for money to buy sugar, he accused her of following him and violently beat her, leaving her lying on the ground outside and alone. As Vicki listened, she began to realize that Sophia had not sustained any injuries that required medical attention, but that she in fact had been paralyzed by shock.

“People had to lift me up from the ground and take me back to my house. This is how you are seeing me, Vicki,” Sophia said.

Sophia’s experience illustrates the devastating emotional and psychological toll that gender-based violence can have on an individual. As the country faces crisis levels of gender-based violence, thousands of women in South Sudan will be assaulted and suffer from serious health consequences, unwanted pregnancies, HIV and other infections, as well as the erosion of their dignity and sense of safety. The UN reports that up to half of young women aged 15-24 years in South Sudan have experienced some form of gender-based violence. The situation in refugee camps is even more dire, with a UN survey finding that 70% of women sheltering in UN camps in the capital, Juba, had been raped since the conflict began.

To help address the staggering amounts gender-based violence in South Sudan, International Medical Corps is supporting survivors in Aburoc, Wau, Malakal, Akobo East, Bor South Twic East and Melut with case management services, vocational training, and dignity kit distributions. Over the past three months, we distributed dignity kits, including items such as sanitary pads, clothes, soap, and solar lights to 2,465 women and girls and provided 280 survivors with case management services, one of whom was Sophia.

We are also training community members and establishing task forces to monitor and identify gender-based violence in refugee camps, raise awareness about the services available to survivors and dispel harmful stigmas surrounding sexual violence and assault.  

Vicki visited Sophia every day at her home after her initial visit to do small strength building exercises until she regained her mobility. She then asked four women to continue visiting Sophia each day to assure she had gone to the toilet, that her shelter was clean, and then assist her in reaching the an International Medical Corps women’s safe space center in the camp so that she could interact with other women and participate in the handicraft-making activities that we run.

In two months, Sophia could walk with a cane. In four, she could walk to the women’s center on her own.

“I will never forget the day she walked in the women-friendly center without her cane. All the women shed tears of joy. Sophia also cried, overwhelmed by what she had overcome,” Vicki recalled.

Today, Sophia is one of the most active members of our women’s center. She enjoys dancing with the other women and participates in drama activities and campaigns against violence. International Medical Corps also gave her the support to start a small bakery business, which provides her with a small income to help her take care of herself and her two sons.

“I always tell Sophia it was her own inner strength that made her recovery possible. We just helped her find it again,” Vicki asserts.

Still, Sophia’s experience somberly sheds light on how difficult the road to recovery is for the many South Sudanese women who endure gender-based violence and its consequences alone. Fear of retaliation, the lack of available legal recourse, and a deeply engrained culture of silence towards gender-based violence persistently inhibits victims from seeking the care they need. That is why International Medical Corps invests so heavily in training community members in prevention and response mechanisms, for the road to addressing gender-based violence in South Sudan will be long, but it is the women and communities who have been affected most who will drive its decline.

We thank the GlobalGiving community for their continued support as we work to reach vulnerable individuals and communities in South Sudan. 

Each July 9^th, news headlines remind the world of South Sudan’s independence day. They remind us of the visions of hope which pulsed through the hearts of the South Sudanese people as they declared their sovereignty six years ago and they remind us of the cloud of South Sudan’s civil war, which now, after three years, continues to grow darker and push these visions further out of sight. But the people of South Sudan need no reminder. To them, the conflict and the humanitarian crisis it has caused is something they face every day.

Paulino and Imelda are two people working to address South Sudan’s challenges head on. As second-year students at the Wau Health Sciences Institute, currently run by International Medical Corps, they are training to save the lives of mothers and children by becoming midwives—the main caregivers for women and their newborns before, during and after pregnancy, labor and childbirth.

Paulino was forced to seek refuge in Uganda because of the conflict in South Sudan when he completed high school at 18. In 2013, he bravely decided to move back to further his education so he could begin a career as a midwife. “I hope I will make a difference in the field that is dominated by women and encourage more male midwives to join the profession,” he says.

Imelda had spent ten years working as a community health worker when she realized she wanted to make a bigger impact on her community. At 27 years old, she says, “I feel it is never too late to have a career.” Dedicated to becoming a midwife, she went back to school to take classes in biology, chemistry, and English in order to gain enrollment into the Wau Health Sciences Institute.

For both of them, the task of helping to repair South Sudan’s health care system will be a formidable one. Less than half of the country’s health facilities remain operational due to the conflict, exacerbating South Sudan’s already high maternal and infant mortality rates. The World Health Organization estimates that a mother in South Sudan faces a one-in-seven chance of dying in childbirth during her lifetime, and one-quarter of all children will die of preventable illnesses before they reach their fifth birthday.

These realities can be disheartening, but for those like Paulino and Imelda, it has sparked the desire to fight for a brighter future. According to the UN Population Fund, South Sudan had only eight registered midwives in 2011—today, there are 307. International Medical Corps has graduated 39 of them after reopening the Wau Health Sciences Institute following the war for independence in 2012 and is expecting 25 new first-year students to join the institute in the next academic year.

Since 2012, we have led efforts to develop school curricula, train faculty, and improve key infrastructure and equipment such as providing the students with 600 textbooks, computers, teaching aides such as mannequins and solar panels that give the facility a 24-hour power supply. With your support, more students will have the opportunity to join this new generation of South Sudanese midwives, helping to save the lives of mothers and children in the world’s youngest nation.

We thank the GlobalGiving community for their support as we train midwives in South Sudan towards the goal of reducing maternal and infant mortality.