People fleeing violence in Sudan find little aid at Chad border

At a transit camp on the Chad-Sudan border, Najwa Isa Adam, 32, hands out bowls of pasta and meat to orphaned Sudanese children from al-Fashir, the site of a recent violent takeover by paramilitary forces in Sudan.

Adam herself is a refugee from the city and arrived in October. While fleeing, she says, she was held captive at gunpoint by four RSF fighters. A man passing by heard her cries and helped her escape.

Now, she buys and prepares food for newly arriving refugee families, using money donated by other refugees living in the border town of Tine.

“People here don’t have anything to eat,” she says. “The only support we get is from the people of Tine.”

Refugee families arriving at the border town are finding little international humanitarian aid available to them. For many, the only source of food comes from donations from other refugees, some who arrived recently and others many years ago, during an earlier conflict in Sudan.

“We haven’t got anything,” said Nawal Abubakr Abdul Wahab, 49, who used to be a teacher in al-Fashir and fled last month during the attack.

“We have no shoes, nothing, no water.”

United Nations Aid Chief, Tom Fletcher said the international community needs to provide more help.

“She (referring to a displaced Sudanese woman in Tawila) said to me, ‘Is there more help coming? And will we be safe?’ and at the human level, I want to say, ‘yes,’ of course I say yes, I want to give her reassurance that help will come, but I know it might not," he said.

"And, I’ve got to keep making that appeal, keep urging the world to respond with more generosity and solidarity to people who want the same things as we all do and have lived through unimaginable horror,” Fletcher added.

A handful of NGOs work in the town, including Médecins Sans Frontières, which has a mobile clinic at the border and a small out-patient department open three days a week in the camp.

On Saturday, the World Food Program restarted limited food distributions to pregnant and breastfeeding mothers and children under age 2 to prevent malnutrition.

But in an effort to encourage refugees to move to safer areas, the United Nations food relief agency has shifted the majority of resources to other camps, further from the border, a spokesman said.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has only 38% of the $246 million it estimates it needs to respond to the Sudanese refugee crisis in Chad, a UNHCR spokesperson said. 

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