Sudan Update 7

Dear All,

We are coming up to our last few weeks before we come home for a summer break, really looking forward to coming home and spending time with family and friends. Here are a few of the things we’ve been doing;

ECS School Building and Feeding

The building work planned for this year at Malakal Primary School is now complete, they now have 4 new classrooms bringing them to a total of 10 including the pre-school.

WFP School Feeding - Malakal diocese has received its food for this term from WFP, we went to view school feeding at Malakal Basic. (Girls between 9 and 11 years receive dry rations as an extra incentive for their parents to allow them to come to school). Unfortunately piped water in Malakal is very sporadic so if no water comes the children do not always get fed that day and the money isn’t available to pay people to fetch it from the Nile. The school needs a water tank and guttering for rain water collection to mitigate this problem – hopefully something for the future.
WFP School Feeding is usually a wheat or lentil mix, children eat this 4 or 5 to each bowl.

The ECS compound in Malakal is being planned out and gradually developed as per the Diocese’s vision, into a combination of church, school and clinic. As well as the primary school and clinic (which is a project the diocese have recently begun) they have been able to start some income generation projects for the church, such as 2 shop spaces which have now been rented out as cafés.

The new ECS school in the small town of Riang just needs its walls mudding and the pit latrine finishing off before the classrooms will be ready to receive their first intake of children. The people are reportedly very excited to have their first ever school opening up and believe that their God, called “Ayangit” (they are largely animists), brought it to them.

Kodok School is just over half way through with currently just the basic framework in place. Simon has been spending time with the Diocesan team going through the finances of the builds ready for them to write their mid-term report to Christian Aid about how the work is progressing.

Other Things

Part of our role here is to help the two diocese build relationships with other NGOs/churches/ministries etc. We have been spending time discussing with them additional projects that would help to strengthen the diocese and its facilities. One of these would be to start some school gardens which would provide supplementary food for the children and a potential extra source of income for the church. I have also been contacting and visiting other NGO’s in the area re: their community outreach programmes, I am hoping the Mother Union might be able to benefit in terms of receiving useful information through training and workshops on subjects such as water and sanitation, HIV/AIDs, Landmines etc as they have a formed network in place that they could use to distribute useful information within their groups and to their family and friends and potentially into schools.

Renk

Renk Diocese are just about to start their building work, extra classrooms at 3 already existing schools. The diocese have taken the decision to close down one of their schools in a place called Wunkur as of this term. This decision was taken as the displaced community that had fled to that area during the war and that the diocese built the school for have been moving back south to their home areas and so it is now felt that the school is no longer serving enough children. This diocese are now considering what they might do with the building.

The diocese have been making visits in the last couple of weeks to Melut, Geiger and Lathbior and have been able to set up committees in those places to speak with the communities about paying school fees. All ECS schools struggle terribly to pay their teachers, many of them are owed months in arrears. They hope these committees will be able to encourage parents to pay a little to the schools when they are able. However the reality is people will never be able to give enough even to pay incentive money to untrained teachers. The only paid teachers are those provided to the schools by the government of South Sudan so the hope is that the government will be able to continue supplying teachers in the future.
The diocese are also encouraging these committees to find the man power to support school feeding through collecting water and fire wood for the school.

Not sure if I’ll manage another e-mail before we’re back but will be in touch with many of you again soon,

Best wishes

Keren