"The Sudan Sentinel Monthly Update" - MAY 2008
Nic Ramsden's experiences as an USPG EEP volunteer with the Episcopal Church of the Sudan

May has not been nearly as exciting in many ways as April was. Whereas in April I got to be part of the enthronement of the new Archbishop and got my first trip to Wau to begin a new project of school construction, May has really just been a continuation of work started in April and with only smaller church occasions to attend!

I feel like I spent most of May trying to get to places to be honest. My agenda should have taken me to Rokon in the first week, Wau again in the second week to be closely followed by Terekeka in the third week, allowing the forth week to be utilized for follow-up to all the visits, but most specifically so as to get building work started on the school construction around Wau.

Rokon, where the ECS is constructing a new primary school funded by the Edith Jackson Trust of Durham, UK, is only fifty miles from Juba in a NW direction, so in theory one can go and come in a day, having seen what one needs to see to write a report on the progress of the building of a school. However, the Rokon diocesan Toyota landcruiser has been used to drive Bishop Francis of Rokon to Kampala in Uganda from where he embarked on a trip to Chicago for a fundraising conference, meaning that the diocese was without transport to take the Diocesan Secretary Rev. Jackson Aripa, myself, and Engineer Dan Kure to view the site. We were supposed to go and come from Rokon on or around 10th May so that I could leave for five days in Wau with a different engineer, Sam Odwe, a Ugandan, on 12th. In the end neither trip happened, as Rokon couldn't muster a vehicle and the World Food Programme UN Humanitarian Air Service (WFP/UNHAS) didn't seem able or capable of booking Sam and I on a flight to Wau. First they postponed our flight until 14th saying the flight on the 12th was full, but on 13th said the booking account that we had used - that of the NGO World Relief - had been frozen due to late payment of balance and that we couldn't travel. This as you can imagine was highly exasperating as every day of delay in visiting Wau again meant another day of potential school-building before the onset in earnest of the wet season lost.

Still, in the end the delay to the Wau visit meant that I was able to attend and give a presentation at the Budget Sector Working Group meeting of the Ministry of Education Science and Technology, Government of Southern Sudan (in acronyms that's BSWG GoSS MoEST!) on Tuesday 13th May. This was a high-level meeting between the Undersecretary for Education, William Ater, State Ministers of Education, international partners and donors including UNICEF, USAID, DfID, AED and NORAD, and a few NGO and civil society representatives, of which ECS had been invited to attend as one. We were given a ten minute slot to give a presentation on ECS's education budget perspectives for the way forward to 2011 - in other words what the church wanted the government to spend its education budget on over the next three years as well as why investing in education development through the church is the most sensible thing for big donors to do as the churches deliver cost-effective services to the country's previously identified most needy. Whilst I was quite nervous at delivering a presentation to such a high-level group, the event actually went off spectacularly well - I getting several congratulations on the clarity and punchiness of my PowerPoint as well as further questions from DfID and NORAD about how we were able to build such cheap schools. The average donor-funded government school costs between $100,000 and $200,000 per school, whereas the schools I will be building for ECS in the Wau area are coming at around $60,000 a school.

On Friday 16th I was meant to have returned from Wau to continue to Terekeka, a small town about 50 miles north of Juba on the Nile, to look at their ECS primary school, St. Stephen's, and assess how best a grant of £3,500 from Salisbury Diocese in the UK could be best spent there. I had been personally invited to travel with the Assistant Bishop of Juba, Micah Leila, who is widely tipped to be elected as Terekeka's first diocesan bishop later this year when the area is created a full diocese, so as I had no overlap with Wau any more I duly went with the bishop, spending a very pleasant weekend in Terekeka after too long in Juba really. It was fantastic to get back to simple village life of bucket showers and pit latrines, as well as being able to sit out under the stars in one's pyjamas outside the bishop's tukul (mud hut) being treated to the amazing hospitality and service of the people in terms of traditional Sudanese food - meat, beans, the odd potato, and rice. St. Stephen's is a nice little school with a lot of potential and a competent headmaster, and whilst I was there the community decided that the £3,500 should be used to build another two classrooms in the semi-permanent style of tin roof on wattle-and-daub mud walls. A well maintained building like this can last for 20 years. The Sunday I was there was Trinity Sunday, 18th, and I was asked to preach, so I gave them a few thoughts on how whilst on Trinity Sunday we celebrate God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we can also remember the three-fold mission of the church in development - "preaching, teaching and healing", or churches, schools and clinics. It seemed to go down well, especially as I amused the congregation by beginning the sermon counting to three in Arabic: "wahid, itneen, talata".

On my return to Juba I finally managed to book myself and Sam on a WFP flight to Wau for the following Wednesday, 21st, so in the end my Wau visit was delayed by a week and a half. Still, whilst there I got the required work done - Sam assessed all the proposed sites and we together researched the current costs of a lot of the materials that will be required in the construction, in the end having to tweak the proposed budget somewhat to keep the bills of quantity for each of three schools under an overall budget-ceiling of around $180,000 - our grant is only $200,000 and the remainder is required for logistics, administrative and auditing purposes.

Whilst in Wau it was Corpus Christi Day (Thursday 22nd), the thanksgiving for the sacrament of Holy Communion, which the Roman Catholics translate to the nearest Sunday and the ECS (being a much more evangelical and low-church Anglican province) don't keep at all! Still, not to be outdone I attended both the ECS English service and the RC High Mass on Sunday 25th, the latter taking place in the grounds of the basilica-style Roman Catholic Cathedral in Wau. The service was completely in classical Khartoum-Arabic (I suppose like "Oxford English"!) and so if you shut your eyes you would think you were in a Mosque hearing the priest talking of "Allah" and "Yesu al-Mesiir" (Jesus Christ), but then open them again to see an African in gold cope waving a large gold monstrance around! After Mass there was a procession of the Blessed Sacrament under a large gold canopy right out of the Cathedral grounds and through the old residential part of Wau - accompanied by the Rosary in Arabic where the Hail Mary begins "Salaam Alaik Maria..." and excellent singing from the choir. The whole thing was very good, but I had to return to ECS to discuss budget ceilings, so I peeled off half way around the circuit, and after solemnly genuflecting as the Host passed by in full view of the Sudanese policemen watching on, I legged it back to the ECS compound to be greeted by the ECS Wau Diocesan Secretary Rev. David Modi with "so you'll be going to the Jehovah's Witnesses next time will you?!". Perhaps it's just my High Church Anglican upbringing, but it is sad that there is still so much division and misunderstanding between Catholics and Anglicans the world over.

I am now back in Juba and last Thursday 29th finally got a contract with the construction firm for the building of the three schools signed, so that has been a major recent achievement. We are now just waiting for the inevitably slow UN to send us the first tranche of money to pay them when they eventually need paying!

May has been a mixed month domestically. I have a new housemate, Henry Freeman, who is another young Englishman working with the Ministry of Education alongside my other friend and housemate Charlie Goldsmith, so it's great to have some more company and people with inside knowledge of the Ministry that can be used by the church! My maternal grandmother died on 21st, and although she had been ill for a while it has still been a bit of an emotional blow to cope with so far away from home. What made it worse was that I had the opportunity to visit her in March and missed it, so I have had to read many a family email about her declining health, eventual death, and funeral from either Wau or Juba.

A quite fun thing was in Wau I met another Papua New Guinean, Johannes, from Mt. Hagen, the next town up the road in the highlands from where I was born and lived for 4 years, Goroka. He is in Southern Sudan flying planes for WFP/UNHAS having trained with MAF in PNG, so we had fun conversations in Melanesian Pidgin and watched some dubbed Chinese movies together!

June I'm sure will be interesting - there will be the election of two new ECS diocesan bishops, those of Renk and Ibba dioceses, as well as the consecrations of the successful candidates. I also look forward to being able to see the results of the start of the Wau school project building work. Till next time...