Recently I had a chance to take a whistle stop tour through three of five remote districts in Uganda hosting 967,054 refugees from six nations. Quietly and without fanfare, violence, or struggle 1,600 to 1,800 refugees are arriving at the transit sites from South Sudan every day – day after day. They line up quietly waiting for Medical Team International staff, working with translators, to poke at them and their children and determine their bill of health. They sit under trees or on benches for hours, barely talking, waiting for their kit of rudimentary supplies, so they can then be bused to some barren plot to build their own makeshift house and begin their lives as refugees in Uganda. A large percent of them are women and children, having left the men behind to try and farm, to defend their land, or to fight in the ugly civil war ravaging the country side.

Uncomplaining staff from Medical Teams International, United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), World Food Programme (WFP) and many other non-profit organization partners work diligently for hours all clad in their branded t-shirts. There is no time to waste as every day, more refugees arrive and need to be registered, receive their supplies and health screening and get to their small plots of land all within 24 hours. The only hint of a security concern is that the transit site tells us they have sent the small number of Dinka arrivals to a separate and enclosed sleeping quarters – a remaining sign of the ethnic tension being fomented by President Salva Kiir in a desperate bid to stay in power.

The makeshift and temporary health centers are teeming with people, the pediatric wards full of wee ones on drips for malaria. One third of all patients seen have this dreaded disease but once over the border they are treated; I don’t want to think about the ones on the other side without any health services or medicines to keep people from dying. At home in the U.S., this is a completely unknown tragedy. While we fret about Syrian refugees and immigration, the South Sudanese have no hope of jumping across the vast ocean separating our continents. Although far from U.S. shores, we must not ignore the burden that faces countries like Uganda, Lebanon, and Turkey as they take in thousands of extremely vulnerable people every day. In fact, in listening to our news, I’m afraid there are some pretty mistaken notions about refugees, international aid, and our borders, and it’s time to bust these popular myths. To read more, please go here.