By Paul Chitnis, Director of Jesuit Missions
Julia’s eyes stare yearningly into the middle distance. On her lap, she cradles her twin four-year-old boys.
Both have cerebral palsy. Farah sits upright, his beaming smile lightening the darkness of the refugee camp. Mubarak is weaker, his head and limbs lolling uncontrollably in his mother’s arms.
They are some of the hundreds of thousands of people forced from their homes in Sudan by a brutal conflict which engulfed the country nearly two years ago.
11 million people have fled their homes in the ferocious fighting between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. Both sides have committed atrocities especially against women.
The conflict in Sudan has led to an “invisible crisis” with 25 million people, more than half the country, now in need of help as they face famine on an unimaginable scale.
Julia escaped with her children to the small town of Renk in the north of South Sudan, a country which is probably the poorest in the world. Here 9.3 million people – more than two-thirds of the population – are projected to require humanitarian assistance this year.
The crisis is deepened by conflict, climate change, corruption, disease and the impact of the conflict in neighbouring Sudan. Over 900,000 people have crossed into South Sudan and a further 337,000 people are projected to arrive in 2025.
Even without the influx of refugees from Sudan, the people of South Sudan are battling to survive. More than two million children under five years are at risk of acute malnutrition, an increase of 26% on 2024.
The UN’s humanitarian appeals are under-funded by $650 million. In Sudan, it is a staggering $1 billion.
These numbers disguise the reality for people, like Julia, caught up in this crisis. She is just 24 years old and has five children. Her twins had a sibling, a triplet, who died within a month of birth.
Julia is morbidly thin. She tells me they have no food and that the children are weak. Cerebral malaria is a daily risk and now there is cholera in the camp.
Her voice drops as she explains how she is mocked by people for having disabled children. She has offended God and is being punished, they say. No wonder she talks about being depressed.
The refugees have travelled for many days, often on foot, carrying a few pathetic belongings when they arrive at the camp.
They are given tarpaulin to construct a shelter to protect them from the burning sun. Essential food and non-food items are provided for two weeks after which they are expected to move to another refugee camp hundreds of miles away.
The refugees also carry with them the sights and sounds of the atrocities they have witnessed. All too often this includes seeing family members killed in front of them. The trauma they bear is unknowable.
Ayuiel lost her sight in 2022 whilst working in a biscuit factory near Khartoum. When the fighting started, she was forced out of her home with her six children and crossed into South Sudan. She clutches a white stick in one hand and, with the other, holds the hand of her seven-year-old son who guides her through the camp.
Ayuiel cannot work, collect firewood or cook for her family. But she is defiant believing that her eyesight is reversible if she can get to a hospital with specialist services.
“Sandwiched between South Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the world, and Sudan, one of the most violent, it is the poorest who suffer most”
Working with our local Jesuit partners, Jesuit Missions is supporting a range of services especially psycho-social and mental health programmes for the many disabled people.
The inexhaustible patience and quiet determination of the physiotherapists is inspiring. In hot, cramped conditions, the refugees queue for hours to see them. But time and few resources mean the physios can see only those in the greatest need.
Sandwiched between South Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the world, and Sudan, one of the most violent, it is the poorest who suffer most.
As I look into the eyes of these people, listen to their stories, observe their struggle to survive, I feel a righteous anger rising inside me.
For thirty years I have been travelling to these countries to meet some of the most impoverished, abandoned people on earth and also many of the most resilient and faithful. It is hard not to ask: where is God?
In this Jubilee year of hope, Pope Francis asks “with all my heart that hope be granted to the billions of the poor, who often lack the essentials of life. Before the constant tide of new forms of impoverishment, we can easily grow inured and resigned. Yet we must not close our eyes…”
With the eyes of faith, what do I see?
I see Farah, Mubarak and their mother, Julia: people, like me yet so unlike, created in the image of God.
And where is the God of Hope? Precisely where God is always present – deep within those camps, crying with the mother who cannot feed her children, wincing with the disabled girl whose every movement is seared with pain, guiding the blind woman and her son, infusing the exhausted workers with energy so that they are the hands and face of God today.
I hear God’s invitation to all of us to open our eyes, to notice, to care and to act.