Bill Deans, the president of Mustard Seed International, a missions group working in South Sudan, has said that the standard of life in the area is so far behind contemporary society that it can only dream of reaching actual third world status.
Deans said that continual war over the last three generations has reduced society in South Sudan to below bare minimum.
“There is a great number of orphans, the infrastructure in the South is non-existent, there are no pave roads, thus the ability for the South to sustain itself is not there,” he added.
Deans also stressed that both educational and medical infrastructures are no longer operating.
Sudan is only four months away from a crucial referendum in which the South can vote to break away from the North.
The last 21 years have seen the mainly Muslim North and the animist and Christian South continually battling each other in a savage civil war that has killed millions of civilians and displaced even millions more.
In 2005, however, the two sides signed the Sudan Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the war. This peace agreement laid out plans for a government of national unity to be formed over a transitional period of six years. After this transitional period has been completed, which is January 2011, the South could then vote to be independent. Experts seem to think that the South will indeed vote for independence on January 9, 2011.
The ending of the war allowed organizations such as Mustard Seed International to begin working in the region. They set up the Akot Medical Mission in 2006. The clinic provides the only medical care in an area where only bush surrounds them.
“For us to build this facility was nothing short of a miracle,” says Deans, who noted the only building material on the site was the dirt. Every other material – from cement to nails – for the clinic transported from Kenya or Uganda.
“It is just a miracle that a facility like that can exist in the bush of South Sudan,” he remarks. “The people say it is the best facility in the whole country. But we have nothing to gauge that on because we have not been all over the country.”
In South Sudan, there is an average of one doctor per 100,000 people.
According to a report published by UNICEF in 2004, the infant mortality rate in South Sudan is 15 percent while the child mortality rate is 25 percent. About one in nine mothers die during pregnancy or childbirth and only five percent of births are attended by trained health care workers. The malnutrition rate, meanwhile, stands at 48 percent and severe malnutrition is over 21 percent. A U.N. official recently called South Sudan the hungriest place on earth.
Every year, the Akot Medical Mission provides direct medical attention to more than 30,000 people.