Give me shelter

For the next five months, Jeremiah and three to four thousand others who fled Leer lived on Kok Island, surrounded by swamp.

But even there they weren't safe from marauding gunmen who would show up and shoot at anything that moved.

So Jeremiah dug a hole and hid the medical records, before digging another hole for his clothes.

Then, like the others around him, he waded into the murky reeds until he was deep enough to leave just his mouth and nose above the waterline. He claims that whole days were spent this way.

"We stayed like this for five months," he says. "We were aquatic animals”, living among the "crocodiles, snakes and insects".

In October 2015, Jeremiah made his way to the town of Nyal, where he met an MSF medical coordinator to whom he handed the medical records. Jeremiah then sought safety in the refugee camp on the outskirts of the capital, Juba. It was there that MSF returned him to his job as a counsellor and sent him to work at Bentiu PoC site's hospital, roughly 100 kilometres north of Leer.

To his surprise, he was reunited not only with the medical records he had saved but some of his patients: "They said, ‘Oh, Jeremiah, you're safe!”"

Today, Jeremiah cares for 26 of his original TB patients and four leprosy patients. The saved documents have provided an invaluable record of their medical history and treatment regimens.

* Last name removed at MSF's request to protect local staff identities.

WORDS Colin Cosier PHOTOS & VIDEO Kate Geraghty PRODUCTION Jo Simpson, Jack Fisher MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Matt Teffer