As our boat approached the village of Kurenyang, we passed two women collecting the seed pods of water lilies.  Over the day they will harvest dozens.  After drying the pods will be ground into flour to make a porridge or fried cakes.  This is the only sustainable source of food they have.

Kuernyang has become home to over 20,000 refugees.  Heaving rains in September forced people to abandon their homes and find higher ground.  Now they are packed into camps with hundreds of tarped covered homes.  It is a food crisis that is compounded by a lack of clean drinking water.

In the past, the crisis of Kuernyang would get the immediate attention of the United Nations.  But times have changed and funding cuts mean that the crisis they are facing in Kuernyang might never rise high enough to get the attention it deserves.

That is not the case with our work in South Sudan.  As soon as we learned about Kuernyang, we immediately set in motion a response.  First was an assessment.  Along with our South Sudanese team I traveled by motorboat through the swamps to reach the village.  After arriving, we met with the local authorities who told us about the crisis they are facing. A smaller team then set out in canoes to reach the island where the IDPs (internally displaced people) are living.

It was shocking to see so many people living so close.   No sanitation and not a single source of clean drinking water.  We returned to our base in Paguir, South Sudan to map out a response. 

Within one week, our boats returned to Kuernyang with materials to drill three water wells.  Over the next two weeks, with daytime temperatures above 105º our team worked long hours and successfully reached water in all three locations.  The hand pumps were installed on top of flood resilient platforms which means that if floodwaters come to Kuernyang, the wells will still be reachable by canoe and provide sources of clean drinking water.