Voices of Refugee Health, Part 3: Susan Kaji, Mother and Refugee

For more stories of hope, healthcare, and refugee resilience, read the entire special report: ‘On Uganda’s edge, a coordinated effort to improve health for refugee families.’ 

Susan Kaji is a single mother of seven and refugee from South Sudan who has lived in Uganda’s Bidibidi refugee settlement, Zone 5, since 2016.  Zone 5 is the most isolated of Bidibidi’s five residential zones, located about an hour’s drive from the host community of Yumbe. The cluster of villages sits on a low-lying landscape that is highly vulnerable to flooding. Last November, residents of Zone 5 were hit with ferocious flash floods, with water levels reaching over a meter high. In just a few hours, hundreds of homes, pit-latrines, and subsistence gardens were destroyed.

“The aftermath of the flooding was incredibly difficult for us,” said Susan Kaji, a 40-year old single mother of seven children. “For months, we struggled without proper housing. As a woman with no male figure in the house, it was especially challenging. I didn’t have the strength or resources to create a proper drainage system or rebuild the houses quickly, so we ended up staying in homes with water still stuck inside.”

In the months following, residents of Zone 5 worked alongside implementing partners to rebuild structures and rehabilitate farmland. At the same time, they endured outbreaks of disease and malnourishment caused by the floods, according to reports on the ground. Floodwaters created ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes, leading to a surge of malaria cases. These conditions also raised the risk for diarrheal diseases, as many families no longer had pit latrines and were forced to defecate outdoors, which contaminated water sources. Further, a food crisis emerged in the aftermath of the flash floods.

These images were taken in the days following the flash floods that struck Bidibidi Zone 5 in November 2023. Images courtesy of local UNHCR staff.

“Our crops were destroyed by the water, and even now – a year later – we still can’t grow enough food,” said Zone 5 resident Juma Nickson Jack. “So getting food for our children sometimes, it’s still a problem. We are just staying here because UNHCR and others provide us food.”

As a locally-elected leader of the Refugee Welfare Council (RWC), Mr. Nickson Jack played a crucial role throughout the rebuilding process, identifying needs and communicating those gaps to implementing partners. RWC was created by UNHCR and the Ugandan government to give refugees a stronger voice in the community and foster improved relations between refugees and their host communities.

“After the floods came, we checked our community members door to door,” said Mr. Nickson Jack. “Those ones who are in critical conditions, we mobilized them to move to the safe zones, where there was some emergency housing. And all the issues we were having, we were sending reports to the local partners, and they were sending those reports ahead to the district and so forth.”

This report is part of a special initiative, Healthy Start for Refugee Children, that aims to deliver essential health services to one million refugee and displaced children living in Uganda, Ethiopia, and South Sudan. We have launched this initiative in partnership with the UN Foundation’s Shot@Life campaign and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).