Kueaa Darhok is a community elder at the Renk transit camp near the border of South Sudan and Sudan. He was the headmaster of an English language secondary school in Khartoum, where he taught his students texts by legendary African authors like Chinua Achebe. After fighting broke out in Khartoum, he and his family made the terrifying journey back to South Sudan and he has become a community elder at the camp. There are no sanitation facilities, not enough waterproof sheets and not enough food. The UN estimates at least 860 people have been killed since fighting erupted on April 15 between Sudan’s Armed Forces and the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
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With 6,000 people injured across Sudan as of June 3, half a million people have fled the country and more than 1.4 million are internally displaced. At least 800,000 South Sudanese have been driven back by the years of fighting in Sudan. The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Renk, Sudan has been overwhelmed by an average of 1,500 people daily since the fighting began. The UN needs $566 million to respond to the crisis in neighboring countries, with the South Sudan response alone in need of $96 million. International donors have so far only contributed 10% of the total figure, and 15% of the overall Sudan regional emergency response.
On June 19, the UN, governments of Egypt, Germany, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the African Union and the European Union will convene a High-level Pledging Event to support the humanitarian response in Sudan and the region. However, the international community's delayed response has already cost lives, with malnutrition and unsanitary conditions triggering an epidemic of communicable diseases, and every day, a little boy or girl dies. A CNN team visiting the camp witnessed the burial of one boy, not quite two years old, who had died in the early hours of that morning from measles. His mother and grandmother sat in shocked silence as men shoveled earth onto his grave at the local cemetery, pausing to plant a spindly wooden cross before heading back to their own
