The political conflict was further compounded by a prolonged climate exacerbated drought that had increased competition between communities along ethnic lines over dwindling water, food and grazing resources, leading unoccupied and frustrated men to be lured into the fight. As a result of the conflict and ensuing famine more than 2 million people were displaced from South Sudan to neighbouring countries with Uganda hosting the lions share of refugees at 1.1 million registered arrivals.  

Having undergone a security check for weapons and ammunition at the collection centre, refugees are monitored by security supervisors due to concern that violence between the two principal ethnic groups aligned with the warring parties, the Dinka who are aligned with Salva Kiir’s government forces (SPLM) and the Nuer who are aligned with Riek Machar’s SPLM-IO could continue.  Security is also in place to dissuade those who wish to abuse the system by registering as refugees multiple times. Known as “Recyclers”, those who attempt to re-register do so to profit from the sale of rations, core relief items and ration cards, if caught they risk being beaten before being deported back to South Sudan.

Although the reception centres and collection point’s lie within secure fenced compounds and refugees are not able to leave until they are registered, at which point they will be transferred to the refugee settlement where they will live, there is no other time when refugees are held behind barbed wire in Uganda.

The plots, each of which are a fifty square meter tract of unmanaged bush are allocated per household. With the settlement divided into blocks of plots which are demarcated by graded dirt tracks, individual plots are never more than several hundred metres walk from a water point. While those requiring assistance receiving plots with shelters and latrines already erected on them, all other new arrivals must build their own.

For new arrivals like ______, the support of the newly establish community was invaluable. Having lost his leg when he was shot by government forces who were raiding his village for food supplies, ______ relies on neighbours to fetch water because he cannot maintain his balance when carrying a full jerry can. However, even-though ______ was unable to undertake most tasks that involve heavy lifting, he was helping his neighbour, who had recently undergone surgery for and appendicitis, to clear the grass on her plot.

Having been referred from Imvepi Reception Centre to Arua hospital to have an emergency appendicitis, ____ had received strict instructions from Medicine Sans Frontier (MSF) to avoid heavy foods like posho and beans for the next 3 weeks. even-though ____ had been given 20,000UGX (£4.15) to buy rice to eat for those 3 weeks, she had spent most of it on liquid foods whilst waiting to be registered at Impevi Reception Centre because she could not eat the meals of posho and beans that were served there. Although ____ was recovering well from the surgery, her mattress had been stolen from the Imvepi Reception Centre whilst she was in hospital, leaving her to sleep on the hard ground. However, now that she was in Omogo, ____ was receiving help from those that lived around her and she had recently been brought rice by Joseph, the leader of The Refugee Welfare Council in her block, to supplement her rations.  

In order to receive their rations, a representative of each household must queue up in one of ten lines, with each line representing the number of family members in a household from family size 1 to 10+.  The 10 family sizes are then allocated their rations in bulk in groups of 10. When they have received their rations, each group of 10 is then tasked with equally dividing each of the food stuffs between themselves into the containers that they have brought with them. While able body refugees must sometimes wait several hours for their rations, PSN’s (people with special needs) queue separately and receive their rations before the family size groups.

Being denied rations due to lost ration cards or administrative errors, was the single biggest push factor that saw many refugees risk returning to S.Sudan and in some cases rejoining the conflict, which they deemed preferable to going without food in Uganda's refugee settlements.

Each RWC is tasked with setting up water management and market committee and a security council to protect the community and report crimes. Additionally, the RWC is responsible for deciding which relief agency lead interventions, journalists, or researchers the community wished to accept, and for voicing the concerns of the community to the settlements core implementation partners (the relief agencies that carry out regular work in their settlement). Each RWC will also facilitate conflict resolution meetings to mediate between the host population and refugees and disgruntled refugee parties. In this case a meeting was being held between refugees and the host population to discuss the rental of the plot of land on which the Seventh Day Adventist church at Pagarinya Refugee Settlement stood.

The meeting, which was held in the church, concluded successfully. As a result, the local land owners gifted the plot to the members of the church in appreciation of the refugee community's frequent rental of other land for agriculture use and in the knowledge that one day, the church would be returned to the host community when the refugees eventually returned to South Sudan. The dialogue’s success had also been enhanced by the fact that both the host's and refugee's belonged to the same ethnic group: The Madi Tribe. The Madi people, who lived in Pageri County in South Sudan, like those who resided in the districts of Adjumani and Moyo in Uganda, the regions that hosted the majority of Uganda’s South Sudanese refugees, had themselves on numerous occasions graciously received Uganda refugees. Most recently, in the 1980's and 1990’s, South Sudan had received Ugandan refugees when approximately half a million people had fled from the the fallout of the Ugandan Bush War and latterly Joseph Kony's Lords Resistance Army (LRA) which rose up out of the conflict.

The renting of land had been made possible at Pagarinya Refugee Settlement through a high quality of dialogue between refugees and the host community. Although host communities in Adjumani and Moyo district were open to dialogue, those in Arua and Yumbe District were less so, owing to tensions between the impoverished host community and refugee population, as competition for resources such as fire wood and water sparked conflict. The West Nile region of northern Uganda is one of the most disadvantaged areas in the whole country. Following the Ugandan Bush War, during which much of the regions population faced persecution by rebel groups including the National Resistance Army (NRA), the leader of which, Yoweri Museveni, has been the autocratic leader of Uganda since 1986. Far from Kampala and stigmatised by it's history of conflict, the region faces marginalisation from the rest of the country.

For safe drinking water, refugees must fill their jerry cans up at a water point and then carry the water back to their plots. The water points, which can be tanks, solar-powered ground water pumps or hand pumped bore holes, are always in demand leading to long queues of jerry cans waiting to be filled up.

According to the head of the water management committee of block 5 in Palorinya Refugee Settlement, the average amount of water used for domestic purposes by a family of 6 was eleven 20 litre jerry cans per day (approximately 220 litres). Of this water, 1 jerry can was used for cooking, 4 for clothes washing, 4 for showering, and 2 for drinking. On a day when a family did not wash clothes, they would use only 7 jerry cans (140 litres). For agricultural use the amount varied dramatically depending on what type of crop was being grown. According to Christo, from the RWC of Zone 2 in Palorinya Refugee Settlement, a 10x10m water thirsty eggplant bed would need between four or five jerry cans of water (80-100 litres) per day during the dry season.

With water shortages often being caused by tanker delays and overcast days when solar pumps did not work, refugees would  have to walk to water points further away where queues would become even longer than normal as a larger number of households depended on fewer water points. The water-point for village five and eleven in  zone 2 of Bidi Bidi Refugee Settlement had been without water for 3 weeks due to the access track leading to the water tower that fed it becoming inaccessible to  water tankers. The track was only made passable again when women from the two villages water management committees took it upon themselves to haul and break rocks to repair the track.  

With up to 400 households dependent upon one water point, long queues of jerry cans form early in the morning, often long before solar pumps are operational or water has been delivered to a tank.

It took some new arrivals as long as 5 months to build a permanent shelter, even though it often took as little as 3 days to build the structure.

With as many as 52 poles needed to construct the walls of a hut and 18-20 bundles of grass needed to roof it, each costing between 1000-4000UGX ($0.54-1.07 USD). The members of the Refugee Welfare council of village 4, zone 1 in Bidi Bidi suggested that better dialogue with the nationals or an early injection of money for building materials would shorten the waiting time to build and stop refugees from returning to South Sudan.  

Once established refugees were expected to cultivate their land to supplement their rations and generate an income. With lean seasons in East Africa determined by rainy and dry seasons, refugees would prepare for the dry season by sun drying preserves of okra, eggplant, pumpkin, bean leaf, pumpkin leaf, cassava leaf and a variety of leaves from the forest.

However, with rainy and dry seasons becoming increasingly erratic in East Africa, both local and refugee farmers faced greater food insecurity as too much rain damaged or waterlogged crops and dry-spells came at unexpected times or lasted longer than before.

In the Dawut household, which is made up of 12 people and headed by Elisabeth, whose husband had recently passed away, there are 3 PSN’s, all of whom are elderly. Of the Dawut families PSN's, one has tuberculosis and another has Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. Elizabeth described the two greatest challenges that the family faced. The first, that the family was having to sell rations to pay for diabetes medication following shortages at the health centre. And the second, which was the impossibility of separating the PSN with TB from other family members to reduce the risk of spreading the disease, due to the family's reliance on shared cooking, washing and sanitary facilities.

So many extra students placed massive strain on the schools already poor infrastructure. With Itula's latrines having filled up before the summer, the head master Martin Okomo faced the prospect of having to delay the start of the school year because there was nowhere in the district of Moyo for the schools effluent to be taken.