For a mum of four, feeding clothing and protecting your children can be hard. When you take in a fifth child (because their parents died), that adds to the strain and cost. When your husband dies in a sudden work accident, leaving you as the sole breadwinner, that’s even harder. And, when, one day soon after his death, you’re forced to suddenly grab anything you can quickly get your hands on, gather up your five young charges and run for the border to seek safety in another country from the violent attacks happening in your own, that’s unspeakably difficult.
And this is Mary’s story. This is what happened to her and her children. They fled their home in Kajo-Keji, South Sudan, to find safety in a refugee camp in Uganda.
‘I was very frightened,’ Mary says. ‘I was thinking about how to take care of my children.’
The difficulty of life in a refugee camp
But, life in the camp was extremely challenging. ‘My family didn’t have enough food,’ Mary explains. ‘I had to work carrying sacks of food when they were distributed [in the camp] to earn some food for my children. I persevered through these difficulties because I had no other way to feed my children. Because of the immense pressure I was experiencing, I started having suicidal thoughts. I felt like dying.’
The local church in Kajo-Keji managed to reach Mary and her family in the camp with some food and counselling assistance, but they were still too far away and then things got even worse. One of Mary’s children became very ill. ‘Pus started flowing through his nose,’ she says, ‘but, l had no one to help me. There was no money for treatment. Then, I became ill. My stomach was swollen, and I was unable to walk. I could only crawl. I received treatment, but it didn’t fully heal me.’
Risking returning home
With nowhere else to turn and desperate for any sort of solution, Mary decided to return home to Kajo-Keji. There, at least, she might be able to feed herself and her children from her cassava plot.
Back in Kajo-Keji, Mary’s cassava plot was doing surprisingly well and she felt relieved and grateful to harvest them. But, everything else the family had owned was gone. Mary’s livestock had been taken from her, her belongings were gone, and her huts had been burnt down. She was reliant on the kindness of others for shelter for her family.
At that time, one of her neighbours introduced Mary to a church nearby. Mary started to go there to pray, and things began to change.
‘The first thing the church did was to provide food to support me,’ says Mary, ‘and then they visited and counselled me.’
