Around 1.8 million people have fled South Sudan since fighting broke out in December 2013, sparking what has become the world's fastest growing refugee crisis and largest cross-border exodus in Africa since the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Most have fled south to Uganda, whose open-door refugee policy is now creaking under the sheer weight of numbers in sprawling camps carved out of the bush. In the camps, refugees are already on half their standard food rations of 12kg of maize a month, and now critical services such as health and education are facing cut-backs, UNHCR officials said. UNHCR officials said there is no sign of a let-up in the stream of desperate civilians.
In Bidi-Bidi, the largest of the refugee camps, 180 South Sudanese died in the first six months of the year, nearly half of them small children.
"We came here to hide ourselves from death," said 31-year-old Moro Bullen, standing next to a row of 16 freshly dug graves, mounds of rust-red earth arranged in three neat rows. Half of the graves were only a meter long. "We did not come here to die. We came here to be rescued."
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