Hope and heartbreak in CAR

When neighbours took up machetes and guns against each other in Central African Republic, life changed for many.

Members of the Peuhl community, a minority nomadic group of predominantly Muslim Fulani people, feel this change every day, as they find themselves confined to a camp.

World Vision is coordinating humanitarian efforts in the enclave of Yaloke in Northern CAR where they’re currently staying.

World Vision’s Arlette Yepdjou heads the operations there and shares the complexity, joys and pains of a journey from darkness to light.   

When I asked what I could do for them to make their life better, they told me all they needed were ‘linceuil’ - sheets in which they could bury their dead. I was shocked. I cried.

They did not ask for food, or shelter, not even medicine to treat their sick. Death was so around them that all they could think about was a decent burial for loved ones.

They did not ask for food, or shelter, not even medicine to treat their sick. Death was so around them that all they could think about was a decent burial for loved ones.

When I arrived for work with World Vision at this camp, everywhere I looked I saw sick people, especially young children.  There were about 40 of them bed ridden, looking so thin and coughing.

There was a time when it was so bad that the people at the camp wanted to run away. They feared that there was a curse on the grounds. They did not understand how they were burying someone almost every other day, and on some days two people.

The hardest was when they started burying two people in one grave because the ground was too hard for them to dig several graves. “This is a very bad sign for us,” they said to me.

One day a doctor at the hospital called me about a challenging case with a 10-year-old patient called Youssoufa.

Youssoufa and his six-year-old sister Awahaou were at the camp with an aunt, after they became separated from their mother, who fled to a refugee camp in Cameroon.

Youssoufa had been in the nutrition centre three times.  Each time he went home he came back to hospital with the same challenge - malnutrition.

Youssoufa had been in the nutrition centre three times.  Each time he went home he came back to hospital with the same challenge - malnutrition.  His aunt was finding it hard to look after her family as well as attend to Youssoufa in hospital. 

When I met Youssoufa he had gone three days with no food, because he would not eat anything other than his community’s traditional diet of meat and milk. He refused rice and porridge and had become so thin that he could not stand on his own.

I gave his aunt some money to buy meat and feed Youssoufa for ten days, at a local nutrition unit.

Tragically, before the ten days could elapse, Youssoufa died, leaving behind his distraught sister

Youssoufa died too soon, at a time when efforts by UNHCR to reunite the children with their mother were in advanced stages.

Families in Youssoufa’s community want to eat meat and drink milk, which are not readily available. Some of them want to be reunited with their families across the border. Husbands and wives want to sleep together, as opposed to the current arrangement – dictated by the available facilities - which keep them apart.

A new site is being developed to help solve this, but it is also clear that children and adults in this camp need counselling and psychological support, which we are trying to urgently provide.

There’s still a long way to go, but from the time we started food distribution and supplementary nutrition in August things have started to change.

There’s still a long way to go, but from the time we started food distribution and supplementary nutrition in August things have started to change. The environment has become cleaner and some of the babies that looked like they were dying are looking better.

World Vision and its partners now have people in the camp every day. Local tradespeople who were originally considered hostile to the community now come to sell food, bananas and pineapples in the camp.  

The challenges are still many but there is hope.

As a result of the work by World Vision and our partners, deaths have dropped from an every other day occurrence, to about two in two weeks.

These friends of mine have given me a name that they find easier to relate to – Aissatou.

In my heart I know that people are now willing to live and be happy again.

In my heart I know that people are now willing to live and be happy again, because today they are asking to be with family, demanding meat and milk, and the women send me to bring back lotions and cream when I visit.

It is no longer that initial fatalistic ask for ‘linceuil’ sheets to bury their dead.