A clinic supported by Christian organisations in Sudan’s Darfur region is one of the last health care centres to remain open as danger escalates in the region.

|PIC1|Global bodies ACT (Action by Churches Together), Caritas Internationalis, and Lutheran World Relief (LWR) are providing care for hundreds of people in the southern Darfur region while surrounding clinics close due to increase danger in the area.

"We stay here, inside the camp and we can't go out," said Fatima, a resident of one of the camps and victim of the ongoing violence and instability in the area. "I feel that I don't have any way to make money. I can't get wood. We are here inside the camps but we don't have work and because of this, we can't buy food. We feel that we are trapped."

In mid- to late-September, the clinic in Mershing – a village 87 km north of the South Darfur regional capital Nyala – was one of the remaining clinics open in the area after increased insecurity.

The clinic is operated by the Sudanese Development Organization (SUDO), a partner agency to ACT-Caritas – the joint response between the two faith-based networks. SUDO has continued to provide medical attention to the sick as violence escalates in the region. According to LWR, at least one other clinic in the area has closed due to security issues, resulting in lack of health resources for people in the Mershing village and for the 5,000 people in the surrounding eight camps.

|TOP|The health care workers in the clinic report that due to the influx of patients at the SUDO clinic, they are running out of medicines, particularly for malaria, dysentery, and vaccination for children.

In the Um Gusein camp in Mershing, which has been home to over 1,000 internally displaced Sudanese for over a year, the medical supplies are running low. One of the medical assistants of the camp, Abdul Rahman Mohammed Abdul Karim, reports that, “after we have seen more than 100 patients, we called ACT-Caritas and the SUDO regional manager and said that we needed extra drugs,” according to LWR.

Furthermore, it was not until Sept. 22 that ACT-Caritas received its first opportunity to send medical supplies to the clinic. When ACT-Caritas sent out Dr. Mohammed Mansour to Mershing by the escort of the African Union peacekeeping force, he said upon arrival that the supplies came just in time because “all of the drugs for the whole clinic were finished.”

For two years, the western region of Darfur in Sudan has been afflicted by conflict that has resulted in what the United Nations labels as one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. Currently there are over two million people internally displaced by the ongoing violence and an estimated 180,000 deaths as a consequence of the crisis.





Michelle Vu
Christian Today Correspondent