Floods are battering South Sudan. This aid worker helps villagers plan for the worst.

Wearing a safari hat against the unforgiving sun, Daniel Anyang leads the way down a single-track dirt path. His task this September afternoon is to ensure that some of the most vulnerable villagers of Panpandiar are following the disaster preparedness plans he has helped them develop. Devastating flooding – the South Sudan region’s worst in 60 years – has been forecast through at least December, and tiny Panpandiar sits in the country’s most flood-prone region.

Mr. Anyang is a disability inclusion facilitator for the global nonprofit Light for the World. One of his weekly site visits on this day is with Angeth Nhial. Her 12-year-old son, Majok Garang, who has a cognitive disability, can’t feed himself and has difficulty swallowing. He sits constantly beside his mother, who has nourished him for his whole life with milk and soft foods like mashed millet and beans, or, when she can afford it, meat pounded very thin.

During record flooding four years ago, the water reached chest level in their thatched mud hut. But Ms. Nhial did not relocate – as many of her neighbors did – to the Mangalla camp run by the United Nations refugee agency. “I stayed because of my son,” she says. “I was worried about him being bullied [in the camp] or running away.”

Looking over the small plot where she grows groundnuts, she says that she’s not sure how bad the flooding will be this year. She hopes to get tarps from Light for the World to form a makeshift tent so she can move to higher ground during flooding.

Starting with a workshop hosted by Mr. Anyang in July, Ms. Nhial has been learning to prepare for flooding, including making evacuation plans. She says that it felt good to convene with other caregivers in the village and speak freely about the challenges of living with family members with disabilities.

“It felt like someone was looking out for us,” Ms. Nhial says.

“Forgotten issue”

The civil conflict that has roiled the region – within and just outside South Sudan’s borders – makes residents vulnerable during climate disasters, aid workers say. Though South Sudan’s civil war officially ended with a September 2018 peace deal, the latest conflict between military factions in neighboring Sudan has led to an exodus of more than 750,000 civilians into South Sudan since April 2023. The influx has strained the South Sudanese government’s already precarious ability to provide services.

Many communities in South Sudan were marooned from assistance during flooding in August. As of mid-December, basic items – tarps, flashlights, blankets – were still in short supply, aid workers said.

“South Sudan has the world’s lowest coping capacity for climate disasters,” says Light for the World’s chief executive officer, Marion Lieser, over a phone call from Berlin. “And we know that when climate disasters strike, people with disabilities are at an increased risk of injury and twice as likely to die.”

Light for the World was founded in 1988 with a mandate to improve eye health care in sub-Saharan Africa, Ms. Lieser says. In the past two decades, the organization has expanded its focus to include education about disability rights.

In South Sudan, at least 1 in 6 people have a disability yet are “lost and excluded” from rescue operations, a U.N. advocate has said. Globally, 84% of people with disabilities lack a personal preparedness plan for disasters, according to the U.N.

Edmund Yakani Berizilious, executive director of the Community Empowerment for Progress Organization, a human rights group based in Juba, the capital, says disability rights is a “forgotten issue” in a postconflict area like South Sudan. “People with disabilities are left out of conversations when they are the ones most in need,” he explains.

Jonglei state, home to Panpandiar, is bifurcated by the White Nile River. For some communities in Jonglei, Light for the World is their sole access to information about flooding and, at times, to mobility devices.

Recognizing last year that the government was not providing meteorological warnings to South Sudanese residents, Mr. Anyang and other workers with Light for the World started running flood evacuation workshops specifically geared toward households with people with disabilities.

“When Light for the World came in, it felt like we had a partner on the scene,” Mr. Berizilious says. “They have been really good about listening” to communities to address their needs.

Channeling trauma into advocacy

Mr. Anyang, who joined Light for the World in 2021, makes weekly site visits to check in with the 800 households that the organization works with across three payams, or subcounties, in South Sudan.

Ms. Lieser says that all of the organization’s disability inclusion facilitators have some form of disability themselves, which helps illustrate to communities that inclusion is possible. Mr. Anyang himself has an inspirational life story. Hailing from a Dinka cattle-
herding family in Jonglei, he defied the odds to escape from the intense conflicts that affected his home region. At age 17, he walked for a month and a half to Uganda with little more than what he was wearing. “At times, I was sleeping in the forest,” he says.

Though he was an older student, Mr. Anyang began his primary school studies at a refugee camp in western Uganda and received a scholarship from the U.N. refugee agency to complete his secondary education in the country’s north. But his life changed in an instant when he was caught in the crossfire of a violent Ugandan political rally in September 2009. Mr. Anyang was hit by eight bullets, which shattered his right tibia and left him with a limp.

He eventually went on to study business administration at Nkumba University in Entebbe, graduating with honors. To finance Mr. Anyang’s education, his father had sold five bulls each semester.

Mr. Anyang says he channels his traumatic lived experience into his work at Light for the World.

“There’s a lot of stigma in these remote places: that disabled people are useless, need charity,” he explains. “We’re trying to change that.”

Tools for coping

At the home of Ayuen Kuol in September, Mr. Anyang checks on how he and his two young children are doing. Mr. Kuol was diagnosed with polio as a child and, for his whole life, has had to crawl to get around – until he received a tricycle last year from Light for the World as part of its pilot workshop in flood preparedness.

“I learned about looking for higher ground to evacuate,” he says. “Previously, I had no other ideas.”

The hut where they sleep now was offered by his cousin after Mr. Kuol’s own home, a few hundred yards away, was inundated in August.

The flooding tends to occur at night. Because tarps and other emergency shelter materials have been difficult for villagers to find, Mr. Kuol and his neighbors look to U.N. agencies.

“It’s hard to evacuate my children with the tricycle,” Mr. Kuol says, suggesting that a motorized vehicle would be better. “It’s not good to always depend on someone else, but I have no other means.”

“When I was young, there was some flooding,” he adds. “But nothing like this.”