Visitors to Rier, in southern Sudan, are welcomed by a large rectangular tank and a freshly-painted sign trumpeting the White Nile Petroleum Operating Company's initiative to supply drinking water.
But the inhabitants of this festering clutter of tumbledown straw huts and rubbish now complain that the promise of peace and progress has not been realised and that oil exploitation only poisoned their lives.
"When we were forced to move here, the oil company made many promises: building a school, building a hospital and providing drinking water," says local administration chief William Malual.
The small town of 2 000 was entirely moved in 2006 from an area a few miles away in Unity state that was requisitioned by WNPOC, a subsidiary of Malaysian oil giant Petronas, for building a central processing facility.
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'The livestock is dying abruptly' "Now people are falling sick and we don't know why. The livestock is dying abruptly because of all these chemicals in the water," says Malual, wearing threadbare black clothes and carrying a Kalashnikov.
"We are very suspicious of the water quality in the region," says Unity state's representative from the health ministry, Peter Majuoy.
Refilling by oil company trucks of the proud steel tank donated by WNPOC is erratic at best and new findings by the German NGO Sign of Hope shows alarming water contamination by salts and heavy metals.
In the filthy alleys of "New Rier", six-foot-tall women with jet-black skin from the local Nuer tribe spend much of their days carving their way through cesspools and waste with jerrycans balanced on their heads to retrieve every drop of WNPOC's chlorine-treated water.
Nobody uses the water from the old wells and boreholes, which Sign of Hope says is packed with cyanides, lead, nickel, cadmium and arsenic and even the local oil company representative admits is unfit for consumption.
'This pump, we never use it'
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