WARRAP STATE, SOUTHERN SUDAN – Aguek Deng is the only doctor at the government hospital in Kuajok, southern Sudan’s newest state capital.
The hospital ward, which serves nearly 1 million people, has just 11 beds, none of which has a mattress. The on-site pharmacy boasts mainly acetaminophen and vitamins; Deng says injections for pain relief, pneumonia and malaria run out too quickly.
In the ward, Atong Akol, who says she doesn’t know how old she is but who looks to be about 15, sits on the edge of a bed frame. In front of her lies her 10-day-old daughter, Akot, who Deng thinks has “some kind of infection.” The odds are stacked against the baby’s survival; according to the United Nations, one in six children in southern Sudan dies before turning a year old.
The state of health services in Kuajok is indicative of health services across southern Sudan, an area the size of Texas that is likely to become the world’s newest nation next year. On Jan. 9, southern Sudanese will vote in a referendum that will mark the final stage of a 2005 peace agreement that ended 22 years of war between the Sudanese government based in Khartoum, in the mainly Muslim north, and rebels based in the mainly Christian and animist south. Southern Sudanese are widely expected to choose independence, freeing themselves from the rule of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Read the rest of the article as it appeared . . .
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