Thousands of hungry refugees in South Sudan camp - San Francisco Chronicle

Yida, South Sudan --

First they ate leaves. Then they ate roots, soaked for five days and boiled until they were just edible. Now many have eaten the planting seed - and their future with it.

There is no food left in the Nuba Mountains, so the stream of tens of thousands of hungry refugees pouring across the militarized Sudan-South Sudan border has almost doubled in the past two months.

The Yida camp now holds 31,000 refugees and is bracing for thousands more, as desperate families rush to make the five-day trek south from Sudan on foot before seasonal rains arrive, turning the rough dirt road muddy and impassable, and choking off food deliveries for months.

Back in their homeland, the refugees have endured bombardment from Sudanese warplanes and a crisis-level food shortage they blame on Sudan's president. Aid groups say Sudan - a mostly Arab nation - is intentionally trying to starve the black residents of the Nuba Mountains.

Refugees report the deaths of young and old back home.

"There's no food where we live. People are eating the leaves of trees," said Amira Tia, who arrived at the camp last week after walking in green flip flops for four days with her four children.

Sudan does not allow aid from U.N. or international groups to be delivered to Nuba, and no official assessments have been done about the conditions there.

When South Sudan voted to break away from Sudan last year after decades of war, the people of the Nuba Mountains were caught in the middle. They are black, like those of the south, not Arabs like the northerners of Sudan. Now a full-on war is under way in their homeland.

Even once they reach the relative safety of the camp, the threat of war remains. South Sudan's military is on alert in case border skirmishes with Sudan escalate into a full-scale conflict.

The rate of new arrivals has risen rapidly in recent days. Aid workers and Nuba leaders say 15,000 or even 30,000 more Nuba could reach Yida in coming weeks.

With the rains expected to start around June, WFP is rushing to deliver 5,000 metric tons of food. On a recent day, dozens of Nuba men erected large storage facilities and unloaded sacks of food from the U.S. government's aid arm, USAID.

The camp has a dirt airstrip, but the rains threaten to make it unusable. Goods could be parachuted in or dropped by helicopter, but both methods are extremely expensive for a large refugee population.

The United Nations calls Yida a transit camp and wants the residents to move to two camps farther south, but most refugees prefer to be closer to home - and to the tree cover in Yida that provides protection from the merciless sun.

This article appeared on page A - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle