Famine-Stricken South Sudanese Hide in Swamps to Escape War
- Civilians battling mass hunger tend crops while gunmen sleep
- Africa nation saw world’s first famine declaration in 6 years
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By day, Mary Nyarac scours swamps for fish and edible water lilies. When darkness falls and South Sudan’s militias retreat to their bases, she and hundreds of others fleeing a three-year civil war slip onto dry land and tend crops to stave off famine.
Prowling hyenas pose a threat during Nyarac’s night-time harvests, but they worry her less than the armed men who can appear in daytime, the 20-year-old said as she sat beneath neem trees in the northern county of Leer, one of two areas in South Sudan where the United Nations in February made the world’s first declaration of famine since 2011. She and other residents are facing a catastrophe that’s being echoed by looming mass food shortages in Somalia, Yemen and northern Nigeria.