Ottawa aid worker leads vaccination efforts in rural South Sudan

In the impoverished, war-torn and disease-affected rural communities of South Sudan, a toddler still cries when she gets her measles shot.

In that respect, the children there have much in common with children here in Canada, who all squirm and scream when a needle plunges into their arms, not fully appreciating the seriousness of the ailment it prevents. But to children in South Sudan, who have only known a world in which 1.6 million people — half of them children — have been displaced by an ongoing civil war, those vaccines can quite often be a rarity.

In some of the country's rural areas, there are no vehicles or fuel and very few goods. Most buildings have been destroyed or used for livestock while the people sleep outside under mosquito nets. Many of the roads are flooded and the primary health clinics are often half-emptied by looters and vastly overburdened.

The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that more than 4.1 million South Sudanese, almost half the country's population, require humanitarian assistance.

James Terjanian knows well the limited access to health services in South Sudan. The 38-year-old Ottawa native has lived there for more than a year and recently travelled to remote communities in Guit, a county in the African nation's Unity State, to vaccinate children against measles and polio and provide other medical and nutritional assistance as part of the humanitarian group CARE International.

"If there's one place in the world where you need to do this kind of work, it's there," said Terjanian during the second day of a two-week return to Ottawa, where the weather was a relatively cool 30 C.

Wednesday marks the United Nations' annual World Humanitarian Day, dedicated to recognizing the stories of aid workers worldwide.

Terjanian's latest chapter began in the spring of 2014, when the county's protected civilian sites reported two cases of polio. One of the patients had travelled to Guit, an area long overdue for a vaccination campaign. Since then, Terjanian and a team of about 90 vaccinators, supervisors and assistants have vaccinated roughly 20,000 children in Guit.

"Because of the conflict, those places hadn't been reached in quite a long time," said Terjanian.

"You know when someone's been jabbed because the wailing begins, first the child being vaccinated, and then the rest take up the chorus," he wrote on his personal blog journaling his day-by-day experiences. "It's a noisy exercise, in every village we're working."

While he's been to many corners of the globe that have been severely crippled by war or natural disaster, Terjanian said South Sudan is for many an especially gruelling test of will.

"It's one of the poorest places," he said. "It's a professional challenge. You get a gut check every day. People quit all the time. It's rough, rough — lots of different things messing with you."

Terjanian has been doing humanitarian work for about 15 years. He now lives in South Sudan full-time, running the organization's health programs in five counties in the Unity State. He also lived and worked in Kenya since 2004, and has travelled to Afghanistan, Haiti, Sri Lanka and more during times of disaster.

"Every time you go to a different place, you're challenged in a whole lot of different ways," he said, having found himself in a predictable daily routine while in Ottawa. "You have to learn a lot more, you have to understand new cultures, new ways of thinking, and it's kind of exciting when you can get that right and also do small things to help people."

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