Thieves in Nimule

I have mentioned my own first experience of a burglary here in Nimule in a previous post.  Since the situation broke out in July, thieving has exploded.  This is because so many people have left for the refugee camps leaving their homes and vegetable gardens unattended and vulnerable.  Previously thieves operated under cover of dark, but they are becoming bolder and are increasingly targeting more isolated homes even in the daytime.

As mentioned I have had one successful break-in, which I wrote about previously.  Since then I have had two more unsuccessful ones.  The HUMAES office next to my room has also been targeted unsuccessfully.

Originally I had just one padlock, on the outside of my door.  Now there are two, one inside and the other outside.  The locks were originally fairly heavy duty but standard ones.  Now they are becoming more high-tech. 

In the second attempt, the outside lock was successfully removed by the burglars.  Before tackling the inside lock, they shone a light through the door hatch.  That light woke me so that I shouted out.  Luckily this caused them to run away without attempting the inside lock.

During the latest attempt, the burglars used a master key which broke in the outside lock, so that they could not get any further.  It equally stopped me from being able to unlock the door.  We had to ask someone with a saw to break the lock.  The inside lock was undamaged as they were unable to access it. 

I now have a lock with an alarm, which is on the inside, as I suspect that it is possible to break it (one of the same type was broken on the HUMAES office door).  On the outside is the most difficult and expensive lock so far.  It is a struggle even for the rightful key-holder to open, let alone someone trying to break it.

How has all this affected me?  I find that the first night after a burglary attempt, I wake with every night time noise with palpitations. This calms down with prayer.  I am still determined to stay, so I have had to find means of coping.  For example I find it helps to joke about the need to budget for a new padlock every few weeks as a regular expenditure.

I also pray for the thieves as well as for myself and all who suffer from lack of security even of their own bedrooms.  One thing that has become more evident through my meditations on the thieves is their hopelessness.  I am positive that a root cause of their behaviour is lack of education.  With education come prospects.  South Sudan has an illiteracy rate of around 85%.  This is due to lack of money for school fees, children being orphaned and sometimes left as street children, begging for food, and constant disruption of education due to war. 

Many international NGOs focus on education for girls to the exclusion of boys.  I would point out that if it were as simple as a neglect of girls’ education, the statistics would be around 50%, not 85%.  Boys are particularly at risk of becoming street children and then child soldiers.  Girls are more likely to be married off early.

I have met many young men who are virtually feral due to lack of a family life, lack of the discipline of education, resulting illiteracy and trauma from being forced to be children soldiers where they witnessed and participated in serious atrocities.  They spend their lives drinking, taking drugs, fighting and are almost certainly the same people who are breaking into homes, killing the residents and stealing everything not chained down.

I know teenage boys at severe risk of such a wasted and ruined life.  Surely we must be fair to both boys and girls.  Cece Primary School takes children from the bottom of society, regardless of age or gender.  Although the older children are particularly difficult to education, in the name of social justice we must do our best.

Please can I ask for your help to make our plans a reality.  A small monthly donation will help a lot with our day to day running costs of staff wages, feeding, pencils etc. Larger lump sums will go towards construction costs for our new school buildings.  Please email me on rebeccamallinson1@hotmail.co.uk so I can send you the Gift Aid form.  This applies whether or not you are a UK tax-payer.  You will need to set up a standing order to the Sean Devereux account, whose details are on the Gift Aid form. 

Please circulate this post as widely as possible.  I have set up a Facebook page for the school.  It can be found by searching for @nimule on Facebook.  I try to keep it updated regularly, but this is dependent on internet access, which is sketchy and expensive in Nimule.

Realising future plans for the school

I have been very silent for the last month because I have been in the UK, with a small detour to Ireland, looking for help for Cece Primary School.  During that time, Google refused to recognise me as I was in the ‘wrong place’ and on the ‘wrong computer’, making it impossible for me to edit my blog. 

I have been particularly looking for funding for the construction of a purpose-built school for which a local chief donated a large piece of land.  At the moment the land is a sea of grass as we had not managed to raise the finances to build on it. 

Construction of the new school is very urgent for several reasons. 

1) At the moment we are in a loaned building which only has room for three classes; next year we intend to have four classes and there simply isn’t room.

2) The owner of the current building wants us to leave so he can make use of his building himself. 

3) The chief donated the land to us several months ago and is getting impatient to see action being taken.  He has warned us that if we do not start to build soon he will take the land back. 

I am delighted to tell you that wonders happened, thanks to my former parish priest.  I spoke at all Sunday Masses one weekend.  A collection was taken of over £1000, and several parishioners have been in contact and donated substantially since then.  He also introduced me to the trustees of a charity called the Sean Devereux Children’s Fund.  Cece Primary School fully meets SDCF’s criteria for funding, which is Africa, children and poverty.  After telling them about the school, they kindly agreed to allow us to make use of their charity status so that we can reclaim 25% taxes on donations made by UK tax-payers via the Gift Aid scheme.  This will be done by asking donors to fill in a Gift Aid form and send future donations to the Sean Devereux account instead of my account.  The trustees also decided to make a donation from the fund of £5000 towards the school construction. 

Many thanks to Father John Horn, the parish of St Barnabas in East Molesey and the trustees of the Sean Devereux Children’s Fund.  Thanks also to David Wolton of the Sudan Volunteer Programme was also a valuable support as he helped me to meet some potentially very useful future contacts.  Finally, thanks to Peter and Judith Leonard in Ireland, who have also helped tremendously by donating a directory of potential donors and allowing me to speak to interested people at their home.  They and one of their friends made donations to the school.  The Leonards have been very active in the Nimule area in the past and therefore have a great interest in helping in the area generally.

I also met Pauline, a lady who is keen to come and spend a couple of months at the school helping with teaching the younger children next year.  She said, ‘I have always wanted to volunteer in Africa’.  Pauline is an experienced early years teacher.  This, of course, is highly dependent on what happens here in Nimule in the meantime, as I have no wish to put her in danger.

In short, God smiled on my trip.

I have now arrived back in Nimule.  People have welcomed me with almost literal open arms, starting with the motorcycle taxi driver at the border who drove me back home.  The cry of ‘Welcome back!’ or ‘You were lost!’ greets me at every turn, which makes me feel very much appreciated.

As mentioned in my last blog post, due to the civil war situation which reached new heights in July causing a huge exodus of at least 200,000 people to the refugee camps in Uganda, all schools apart from Cece Primary School closed.  The majority of our own pupils and staff also fled.  We therefore started a temporary Open Door policy to allow those children remaining in Nimule to continue to attend school.  We employed two new teachers and two new cooks to replace those who had left. 

I am glad to say that things are calmer in Nimule now.  People are starting to drift back from the refugee camps.  Schools are gradually reopening, so we are no longer the only school.  I expect the unregistered children taken in through our open door policy to be able to return to their original schools very shortly, leaving space for those children who are formally registered and meet the school’s official criteria of families with HIV/AIDS, other disabilities and orphans, particularly those unable to attend other schools due to lack of school fees.  The school will be able to return to a more normal teaching schedule and start preparing the children for end of year exams in December, although it will be difficult to catch up.

I went straightaway to visit the school on the day I got back.  I found that school numbers had risen to nearly 60, although many children are still from other schools rather than our officially registered ones.  However, it was good to see quite a few of our original pupils who have returned from the refugee camps.

HUMAES (who are a local NGO partnering with Cece) are putting together a final building plan for the new school in consultation with experienced builders and updating our bill of quantity which we originally wrote in January.  We currently envisage a school with several blocks.  One block of four classrooms, another for kitchen, food storage and dining hall (doubling as school hall) and a block for a library and school office.  I have a large number of donated books, which need to be made accessible to staff and children; the library is therefore essential.  We also want to order desks and chairs, which up until now have been a dream too far.  There is a huge amount of space, so we will plant fruit trees, reserve an area for growing vegetables and allocate a space for a football pitch (a much loved sport here).  At a later stage we want to create an outside play area with play equipment and also build another classroom block. 

As I am sure you can tell, I am feeling very positive about the future of the school.  As mentioned in my last two blog posts, the local population are deeply unstable.  They have had to uproot and flee so many times that now they flee almost unthinkingly and out of habit.  There is a serious need to demonstrate stability.  Building our school will send a message to the locals, and particularly to those most impoverished that they should stop running and let their children gain that all-important education so they can help their families and local community in the future.  When they see that we have been building while they were ‘running’, I hope they will stop and think. 

Please can I ask for your help to make our plans a reality.  A small monthly donation will help a lot with our day to day running costs of staff wages, feeding, pencils etc. Larger lump sums will go towards construction costs.  If you have already been donating to the school, please make sure you cancel your payments to my account.  In either case please email me on rebeccamallinson1@hotmail.co.uk so I can send you the Gift Aid form.  This applies whether or not you are a tax-payer.  You will need to set up a new order to the Sean Devereux account, whose details are on the Gift Aid form. 

Please circulate this post as widely as possible.  I have set up a Facebook page for the school.  It can be found by searching for @nimule on Facebook.  I will try to keep it updated regularly, but this is dependent on internet access, which is sketchy and expensive in Nimule.

Refugees or stayers?

You will have seen from the news the terrible events here in South Sudan.  My last post was on the same subject.  The town has seen a mass exodus even though there has been not one single gunshot.  As I have seen on several occasions in the time I've been here, this is the usual pattern.  The refugee camps in Uganda are filling up purely on the basis of events elsewhere and alarmist rumours.  Tragically the cycle of moving to and from refugee camps continues across generations.

The churches and local officials are trying to talk people into staying.  In my view they are completely right.  Everyone has planted their subsistence crops; these crops will now go to waste while their planters live on foreign aid.  Children are wrenched out of school and will learn camp culture rather than a normal social culture.

But what, I hear you ask, has happened to Cece Primary School?  At first I worried that the school would have to close due to lack of numbers, like almost every other school in the country.  Then I had a sudden, and very miraculous, inspiration to open the doors of the school to any primary-stage children still in Nimule.  The numbers attending were right down to six children last week.  Since I announced the open-door policy the numbers are starting to rise.  Yesterday and today we had fifteen children, a third of whom are new faces.  As word gets around I expect the numbers to increase.  This is our contribution to the effort of stabilising the local situation.  Inevitably some of our teachers have left for the camp, but with small numbers this does not matter too much.  We also lost both cooks.  We are about to employ a replacement, as feeding the children is, literally, vital.  I am so relieved that we are able to continue and perform a real public service now that other schools are closed.

Charles Anyanzo, the Director of HUMAES, my local partner organisation, has also had a very good idea.  Like me, he is very concerned about the persistent refugee mentality which, combined with the political situation, completely stops any progress in the country.  He is considering the possibility of HUMAES going into the camps to educate the people on a range of issues; adult education, health, sanitation, conflict resolution and peace-building, to name but a few areas.  For this we would need the permission of the UN and the Ugandan government.  The overall aim would be to heighten awareness of 'nationhood' and to break the refugee mentality so that South Sudan can stabilise.

At the moment we are at the brainstorming stage.  If anyone can think of ways to achieve these aims in practical terms, please let me know.

We have a situation here!

I thought it would be a good idea to publish a post about the current situation here, from my perspective, living in Nimule.

You may have seen on the international news that there is renewed fighting in South Sudan.  It is all too true.  In spite of all international mediation and peacekeeping attempts, the powers-that-be and their respective armies have done everything to thwart those efforts and are now killing each other and many civilians.  So far, the fighting has all been in Juba and other towns at some distance from Nimule.  Nimule remains quiet but with panicky fears among previously traumatized people, who jump at every shadow.  I have lived here for nearly three years now and have ‘seen it all before’, so there is nothing new; however I thought it might be good to describe the effects of ‘situations’ to those in more peaceful countries.

Juba and elsewhere

People living in Juba and other towns are frantically calling relatives elsewhere in the country.  Due to fighting in the streets of Juba they are unable to go outside to work or buy food.  Pascalina told me that her sister is stuck in her home with nothing left to feed her crying children.  We also heard that troops have massacred all patients and staff in a hospital in Juba.  This information came from a nurse who was fortunate enough to be off duty at the time.  

The fighting has also spread to other towns along the Juba to Nimule road and elsewhere in the country.  Working its way in our direction, Kerepi, Pageri and Magwi have all suffered torching of homes and many residents have taken refuge in the bush.

Here in Nimule

Here, we have not suffered any violence.  Soldiers are patrolling day and night.  We are hoping it will this situation will end before getting to us, as has been the case with all the other ‘situations’ so far.

In the midst of the doom and gloom, a family appeared at the local Catholic church.  The husband was a quiet, politely spoken man.  The wife was completely irrational with fear.  ‘Where’s the swimming pool?’ she asked.  It turned out that they had been sent back to South Sudan from Norway, where they had been refugees for years while their family’s application was slowly processed and finally rejected.  Their children are unable to speak their tribal language and are completely at sea.  No wonder the mother has reacted in such a way, coming from peaceful, prosperous Norway to the edge of a war zone, where things are no better than when she left all those years ago.

Roads and travel

The road between Nimule and Juba (the only tarmacked road in the entire country) has been blocked so that it is impossible to travel between towns.  At first the border with Uganda was also blocked against South Sudanese citizens to stop them fleeing to the refugee camps in Uganda, but that has fortunately been lifted through our County Commissioner’s intervention.  Foreigners and Ugandans continue to be able to travel freely.

Phone and internet

As far as I know there have never been any landlines in South Sudan.  Apart from the poorest citizens, most adults have mobile phones which use airtime vouchers bought from one of several mobile phone operators.  The same companies supply internet access, which can be used either on phones or computers.  All these companies operate from Juba.  Some have packed up completely so that there is no longer even a network signal.  This is because the situation in Juba is so bad that nobody can work, as mentioned previously.  Those companies that are maintaining a spasmodic network signal are unable to send airtime vouchers elsewhere because of the road blocks.  

In the case of my own phone, I was lucky enough to have bought airtime the day before the voucher supply was finished.  However my friend Pascalina’s family along with the rest of the local community are receiving frantic calls from relatives who have fled to the ‘bush’ from their destroyed homes begging for airtime so they can communicate.  I have therefore had to send some of my own airtime through the phone electronic system to help out.  The HUMAES office has also been fortunate.  They had the presence of mind to stock up on airtime for a month’s worth of internet use, hence my ability to send this post.

Fuel and electricity

Fuel prices, which had already risen to very high levels because of the ongoing currency crisis, have now risen even higher.  Because of the unresolved conflict over the country’s oil fields and the lack of road access from other countries, all oil is imported through Uganda along our wonderful tarmacked road.  As it is not now possible for fuel tankers to travel through to Juba the situation must be impossible there.  Here, the only ‘public’ transport is by boda boda (privately owned motorcycles which are flagged down in the street).  Up until a few days ago a short trip cost 5 South Sudanese Pounds (SSP).  Now it is 10 SSP.  

Judging by the last time we had a ‘situation’, soon it will be impossible to buy fuel at all.  People may cross the border to buy fuel in Uganda in jerrycans at vast expense because of the unfavourable exchange rate, but due to the poverty here, that is not likely.  Currently one litre of petrol costs 120 SSP.  To give an idea of the enormity of this, I should explain that an average teacher’s monthly salary is currently 500 SSP.  So, a litre of fuel uses a quarter of a month’s salary, which is beyond most people’s capacity.  When I first arrived here, the exchange rate for $100 was 500 SSP.  Now it is more than ten times that amount and rising even within the day.

Electricity is produced using privately owned fuel operated generators.  This is because generators are a lot cheaper to buy than solar equipment.  The fuel crisis will cause a lack of electricity as a result.  Most homes have no power in any case, so it is mainly businesses that are affected.

Education

As those of you who have been following my previous blog posts will know, education here is shaky and substandard at the best of times.  Now that it is such an uncertain time, people worry about sending their children to school.  Who knows if the unrest might not spread here very suddenly as it has elsewhere?  If it does families will need to flee immediately.  We took the decision to close the school this week hoping that things will subside and normalize soon.  I hope and pray that we will be able to sustain the school, which is so necessary for our children’s future.  But what else can we do?  Human life has to be a priority at a time like this.  I don’t like to think of these children living lives like their parents and grandparents, constantly shuttling between mud hut, IDP and refugee camp and back again in an endless, hopeless cycle.

Food

Last year there were widespread crop failures due to a combination of drought and fighting.  This year there have been seed distributions organized by the UN.  Unfortunately after planting there has been very unreliable rainfall.  We had a long spell without rain during which insects ate a lot of the planted un-germinated seeds, although some have survived and sprouted.  The locally produced food is mostly for family consumption so food in the market is largely from Uganda, with the same exchange rate problems as with fuel.

When we reopened the school at the beginning of term we found that quite a few families were missing because they had gone to the camps in search of food.  This situation is likely to escalate now.

Healthcare

In the whole time I’ve been here, medical facilities have been very basic.  There is a hospital funded by Save the Children and various other NGOs, which supposedly supplies the whole area around Nimule, but it lacks staff, drugs and basic equipment.  There is also a clinic run by the Catholic Church which is now completely out of drugs of any kind and is also short-staffed.  Treatment is free at both of these if available.  The alternative is to go to privately run clinics in the town.  Some have equipment such as xray and ultrasound scanner, which are lacking from the first mentioned.  However clinics are also low on drugs.  Like other imports drugs are now astronomically expensive, causing great hardship and even death from easily treatable complaints.  I am told that tetanus is unavailable across the whole country.  

My own situation

As in the previous situations, I am still here.  I will remain and try to keep the school going if at all possible.  It is quite possible that the whole situation will blow over.  I heard that there has already been one ceasefire attempt.  Hopefully another, more successful attempt will follow.

Pascalina’s family is comparatively well off, so we are not in a desperate state.  I am also making a contribution myself towards food.  In my turn, I am receiving a lot of moral support from some sisters who arrived recently from Kenya.  We all support each other.  

This morning, a large convoy of Ugandan tanks, soldiers, police and ambulances, escorted by an aeroplane, rolled through the town.  At first sight my heart sank because in the previous situation the Ugandan government heavily reinforced the government forces here, very likely prolonging and worsening the fighting.  However, I’ve been told that the convoy is a rescue mission for Ugandan citizens trapped in Juba. 

On my way to early morning Mass along an eerily silent and empty road, a soldier on patrol greeted me and asked if I was going to church.  When I said yes, he asked me to pray for him.  Please pray for this poor country and its people.

The Tortoise and the Hare

In South Sudan there are innumerable bank holidays for all sorts of occasions, including such events as World Refugee Day, World AIDS Day, International Women’s Day, Girl Child Day and more understandable ones such as Independence Day and Muslim and Christian festivals.  Education is much disrupted as a result.  To make matters worse, schools rely on the local Education Office informing them of these days.  This rarely happens before the previous day and even then not all schools are informed.  Some get the information secondhand and distorted.

A prime example happened this week.  I met one of our teachers in the street after school on Monday and was told that the next day was a public holiday for Eid.  He had received the information from a teacher at another school.  Exercising all due caution I said that I would discuss it with the school management committee.  Once I had passed the news on, it was decided to go to a bar in the evening to watch the news on tv to see if it was true.  Few people own private televisions in Nimule.  It turned out that our teacher was misinformed; the holiday was to be on Wednesday.

We duly opened the school as usual on Tuesday and were among very few schools which were open that day.  The school was closed on Wednesday for the official Eid holiday, as were all other schools.  We opened again on Thursday, again, almost alone among Nimule schools.  The reason this time was that it was Girl Child Day.  We took the view that as there was no official celebration of this event in Nimule this year, there was no reason to close.

This coming Saturday is Independence Day for South Sudan and it is likely, but not definite, that schools will be closed again on Monday.

All this comes in the midst of a severe financial crisis.  Government teachers, who are very inadequately paid in any case, have not been paid at all since February.  They are leaving the profession in their droves, leaving classes untaught.  Teachers are currently taking strike action, although where the money will be found is anybody’s business.  Teachers are not alone as the Government has no money in its coffers for any purposes.  Even the official Independence Day celebrations are completely cancelled this year.

Thankfully Cece Primary School does not have any government teachers.  Our teachers are all paid regularly through your kind donations.  As a result, our children are being taught most of the time. 

For the last period on Fridays we always have a whole school session consisting of stories and songs.  Last Friday I told the children the story of the Tortoise and the Hare.  At the end I asked the children if they wanted to be the tortoise or the hare.  They were unanimous that they wanted to be the tortoise.

I pointed out that our school is called ‘Cece’.  In the local Madi language ‘Cece’ literally means ‘Slowly, slowly’, or ‘Little by little’ in English.  With motivated and conscientious teachers and not too many days off school, our children will do very much better than their peers at other schools.  We truly are the tortoises.

That said, the financial crisis is causing prices to escalate ever higher and our teachers’ pay seriously needs to be increased.  Please can I ask once again for your regular, monthly assistance with this?

Donations to the school should be made through the Sean Devereux Children’s Fund, who are able to claim Gift Aid on the school’s behalf, which means we can reclaim 25% on top of donations made by UK tax-payers.  Please email me on rebeccamallinson1@hotmail.co.uk so I can email you the Gift Aid form.  This applies whether or not you are a UK tax-payer. 

A small monthly donation will help a lot with our day to day running costs of staff wages, feeding, pencils etc. Larger lump sums will go towards construction costs for our new school.

Any additional money will not be wasted as our school is running on a shoestring and there are many other needs, such as chalk, exercise books, stationery and food.

The rough with the smooth

I am writing this post hurriedly as I am making use of someone else’s computer and have little chance to edit.  Sorry if it falls below your exacting standards!  The reason is explained below.

I have now been living with Pascalina’s family for two and a half months and think it is high time to let people know how things are working out.  Living with a South Sudanese family has taken a bit of getting used to.  Relationships are a bit of a puzzle because culturally they are very wide compared to western cultural norms.  For example Pascalina tells me she is mother to several young people who I now know are simply treating her as a mother.  Some are nieces or nephews, others are not.  Equally she describes various elderly women as her mother or aunt.  Because both her father and husband were polygamous the family ramifications keep getting more and more bewildering.

The meals are a lot more interesting than those at Cornerstone.  We rarely have meat as it is very expensive, but do sometimes have fish, both fresh and dried.  Most of the time we have dishes made with vegetables or various types of beans.  On the whole it is a bland diet, served with posho (the local dumpling-like staple) but there are occasional highlights.  Now it is the rainy season, I have been initiated into white ant dishes.  This was a great deal more palatable than expected.  Two days ago we had a lovely dish of goat’s head and lower legs.  These were leftovers from a local expensive restaurant following the slaughter of a goat, sold off very cheaply.

On the downside, I was robbed a few days ago and lost phone, computer and all my cash.  The thieves broke the lock on my door while I slept.  If I had woken up, I might well have been killed; I come to that conclusion because I found a large stone on my bed.  Thank God.

Nimule continues to get poorer, and people continue to leave for the various camps due to lack of food, including quite a few of the children from our school.  Looting is becoming very commonplace as a result, hence my experience last week.

Living here, I have to take the rough with the smooth.  The school goes smoothly (at least teaching-wise).  I have many friends.  Even complete strangers are very friendly and sympathetic over the robbery, stopping me in the street to say sorry for my experience.  I have no regrets about coming here.

The move from Cornerstone

I have started a new blog to mark a new phase in my life in Nimule, South Sudan.  Previously I lived at Cornerstone Children's Home.  While there, I started a small school for children from families with HIV/AIDS or other disabilities and for orphans who are from families who cannot afford school fees.  The school is run jointly between myself and two local charities, Cece (a support group for people with HIV/AIDS) and HUMAES (a community based organisation which aims to improve life for the poorest people in the town.  You can read more about my experiences up to this point on this link. 

I left Cornerstone Children’s Home four weeks ago, taking a taxi with all my luggage to Calvary Chapel, a mission run by Far Reaching Ministries for the purpose of evangelising the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) through a chaplaincy training programme.  It was a strange shift, moving from an orphanage, full of the noise of children, to a barracks, full of the noise of soldiers and construction work.  It was an almost totally male environment.  Everyone was very friendly but also very busy.  The food was a welcome relief from the monotonous diet at Cornerstone and I put on some much needed weight.

The move to Calvary Chapel was necessary because the pastors at Cornerstone had decided that my help was no longer needed now I am no longer teaching at Cornerstone School.  I have promised to return every weekend to visit and teach the orphanage children, so that they don’t feel that I’ve disappeared out of their lives.  After two and a half years there, it must have been very difficult for the children, particularly the little ones, for whom I was ‘part of the furniture’.  Most of the little ones arrived during my stay there. 

On 19^th March my room in Pascalina’s compound was finally ready after a major refurbishment.  It is newly roofed, with a brand new window and door, and freshly painted.  As soon as I had dropped off my luggage I went out again to buy myself the necessities of life: a plastic wash basin, mattress, sheets and mosquito net.  The bed had to be made specially as there is no such thing as a furniture shop in Nimule.  It arrived yesterday and is locally made of metal with a woven string surface.

After my shopping expedition, I came back to find that a feast had been prepared to celebrate my arrival.  As well as Pascalina’s family, members of HUMAES and Cece and teachers from the school came to help celebrate. 

Since my arrival in South Sudan two and a half years ago, I hadn’t had a chance to cook.  I missed it badly.  I cooked for the whole family for the first time, last Sunday.  It was a fish and lentil risotto, which went down extremely well.  All cooking is on charcoal, so is far less controllable than gas or electricity.  It will take a while to get used to it. 

Like Cornerstone, water has to be carried from a local borehole.  The water is not as good as Cornerstone’s so the family add ‘Water Guard’, a chlorine solution, to water destined to be drunk.  The result is like drinking swimming pool water, but never mind, it is better than getting typhoid or cholera.

The great benefit of this move is that the Cece/HUMAES office is right next to my bedroom.  We will be able to work together much more easily on plans for the school.  The office has electricity for a larger part of the day than at Cornerstone.  There will be no more long uphill walks to get home in the sweltering heat.  It is also closer to the school and church and very close to the local market.  The only downside is the internet access, which is almost non-existent.  However, the school has a good signal, so I will still be able to access it there.

It has been possible to do all my moving at the weekends, so my teaching at the school has not been interrupted.