Atiaba, Southern Sudan in July, 2008

Greetings to our friends and family around the world. The last two months have been busy since our school population has doubled with enrollment now at 64. We were without the Hilux truck for five weeks, and it was wonderful to get it back in good repair. We literally walked a mile is our neighbors’ shoes for the five weeks that we were without it and have a better understanding of what it is like to not have transportation like most folks around here.

SCHOOL RULES SOUTHERN SUDAN STYLE - Of course, we started with the usual rules for the school, but then the reality of life in Sudan caused us to be much more flexible in the administering them. One Monday morning very early a student knocked on our door to tell me that he had to miss school that day because he had bought a bull in Rumbek on Sunday and needed to get it home to food and water. Sure enough there was a young bull tethered in the school compound. That request was a light hearted one and it made us all laugh. Most often though, there are requests for permission to miss school for some very serious reasons. A student named Abraham came to me, “Madam Mary, my brother’s wife just passed a baby girl and there is no food. Please give me permission to go to other relatives to see if they will give us food. She especially wants tea.” Well, you can imagine what I said—“I would want tea, also, if I just had a baby. Go and take care of this.” I managed to slip some tea bags and a packet of beans into his hand before he rode off. Many students get malaria and are off to the clinic in another village for medicine and then home for a few days getting well. A shy boy who is handicapped from polio had his head down one day. When I inquired if he was OK, he told me that he had to go to the hospital. I thought it was for himself, but it turned out that he was not sick but sad and wanted to visit his sister in the hospital who had lost a baby the night before. You can see that this is not the usual situation that I am used to for running a school. The students and their hardships that are teaching us in profound ways how it is to be a Sudanese person living in this place.

ACADEMIC PROGRESS AND WRITING IN THE DIRT - I often observe that people write their ideas in the dirt when they are trying to explain something, and that children write their numbers and alphabet in the dirt during church under the tree. The reason is that classrooms are still held outside where the teacher has a blackboard, but the students don’t have paper and pencils and text books. People grow up practicing lessons by writing them in the sandy soil around them. This explains why our students read and write poorly, because the luxury of abundant printed material and the means to write have not been available to them. This has been a challenge for us teachers at Hope and Resurrection Secondary School—offering a secondary curriculum with enough teacher support that they can be successful. In my English classes, we have practiced writing paragraphs for three months and it is just now that everyone can write a topic sentence, a paragraph body and a concluding sentence, and also indent the first word of the first sentence so that the finished product looks like a paragraph. That key lessons are slow going is just a fact of life, and it makes the moment where everyone finally can do it especially good. I have promised the students that we will progress to writing essays when we return from holiday and they are eager to try this. I am grateful to have their desire to do well on my side.

JAMES, THE FIRST YEAR TEACHER - One of the pleasures for me has been watching Jim with the students. He would have been a good teacher, for he is reflective, creative and organized for his physics class. He is at his best one to one after school. Students from the nearby village like to come back and check out text books and read after school. They love to do math and physics problems on the blackboard and this is where Jim comes in, because he coaches them through the problems. Jim is trying some different seeds behind the teacher’s quarters, and this afternoon some students arrived just as he had finished planting some banana squash and pole beans. “Cultivating” as they call it is a way of life here, so they were enthused with his efforts and thrilled when he gave them the left over seed. About four of them just hurried off back to the village with the seeds. Jim said that they were optimistically planning on how they would divide all the harvest.

AN UNUSUAL GIFT – A student gave me a rooster. I have never been given a rooster before, so it was a surprise gift. It is a classic rooster, if there is such a thing, with beautiful rust brown and gold colored feathers. My rooster lives next door with some other chickens and has adjusted nicely. The student told me that he would give me a goat if I wanted it. I declined the offer of a goat because it seemed like too much responsibility for this city girl.

A LUNCH PROGRAM IS UNDER WAY IN THE MIDDLE OF A FOOD SHORTAGE AND RISING PRICES – The World Food Program has denied help to secondary schools, so this last week we have begun our own lunch program. Our students are hungry and this affects their performance. From the story above about the family with the newborn child and no food you can see that food insecurity, as it is called here, is a reality. We began with a trial run of serving porridge and the students were appreciative and pleased. We will continue with the porridge through finals next week and then we will have a holiday. When school resumes in September we would like to have three days of rice and beans and two days of porridge each week. We purchased a large pot and some big stirring paddles. We hired two local women, both widows and the only support for their families so that the blessing of a job goes to those who need it the most. These two women know exactly what to do and gather fire wood and make wonderful porridge and clean up each day so that you would not even know that 50 students just ate bowls of porridge.

The school lunch program is a caring response from the Board of Hope for Humanity in Virginia, and they have taken this expense on even though it was not in the original budget for this year. We think that it will cost about $15 per student per month to feed them lunch, and we have about 50 students who regularly attend--$55 for each student will get us food through the end of the school year in mid December. When Jim and I left home many people said to us “Tell us if you need something.” We do need something, and it is contributions to help fund lunch. If this is something you can do and that touches your heart, the address for Hope for Humanity is on this blog.

VACATION AHEAD – The end of the first term is the end of July. Jim and I will head off to Nairobi to do some school business and then on to Masai Mara which is a wild life park and safari living. We will also be going to Kenya’s eastern coast off the Indian Ocean to a place that is suppose to be pretty and relaxing. We are looking forward to being tourists. Atiaba is small and very quiet and we are ready to kick up our heels a bit. The last five months of beginning the school, have taken concentrated effort and work, and we think that the vacation will refresh us for the second term.

IN CLOSING – As you can imagine, I receive many times over what I give to others in Southern Sudan. The life lesson that keeps reoccurring for me here is that the simple act of being present with others is one of the dearest gifts we have to give—whether in Africa or our own kitchens. I will end with a story which illustrates that lesson. I attended a Saturday ceremony as the representative of our school at a primary school awards function. The ceremony was to honor last year’s eighth graders who are now about 25 of our current students. The primary school headmaster came by and issued an invitation to the entire student body of Hope and Resurrection School. I was pleased to see that almost all of our students attended wearing their Hope and Resurrection School tee shirts and sending the message to all that they now were a part of our school. After many speeches and the program, this is what one of our students said to me. “Madam Mary, many people have asked us who the white woman is, and we say to them that you are our teacher, and we feel so proud that you are here.”

Our love to you all,
Mary and Jim