Adjusting to the unpredictable

Trucks of cattle leave Nimule

In the past few weeks there has been major disruption in Nimule and its surrounding area.  This has been largely due to cattle raiding by tribes who have followed internally displaced people (IDPs), who are cattle keepers, to our area.  The result has been a lot of killings of both cattle keepers and local people as well as the theft of cattle.  Thankfully the national and state governments sent representatives to calm the situation down and hold meetings with the locals and the IDPs.  They have left extra soldiers to patrol to stop any more disturbances.  The cattle keepers have been ordered to remove their cattle back to their traditional tribal area.  They are doing so, piling the cattle into trucks.

To make matters worse, some people (I suspect they are local gangs) have having what I can only call a murder spree, killing people with either knives or guns.  The killings have been totally random and usually take place in the evenings or overnight.

Younger children playing with duplo

To cut a long story short, the effect of these happenings has been to close the schools and send a lot of people fleeing to Uganda, where they are being refused admission to the refugee camps and sent away.  As from Monday we have reopened although the majority of children are missing.  We have truncated our school hours so that we are only open during the mornings to try to avoid security issues.  It seems from everything I hear that the perpetrators are all late sleepers – at work in the late evenings and overnight but resting in the mornings.

Last week I and some fellow teachers went through all our extra-curricular games and put together a good supply of jigsaws and various games for literacy and numeracy.  Those children who are attending are having a rare chance to learn through play, and the teachers are learning at the same time how to teach by non-formal methods.  It is very hard to get South Sudanese teachers to use anything but 'talk and chalk' methods, so this is a whole new experience for them.  

Stenciling

I am so glad to have been able to reopen.  It must have been very tough on the children at home to have been living in such an atmosphere of fear, so it is good to take their minds off their troubles a bit.  Since Monday we have divided the children between two classrooms, by age.  The small children have wooden blocks, duplo, simple jigsaws, jenga and outdoor play.  The older children have more complicated games such as Scrabble and a lovely 250-piece jigsaw map of the world.  All ages are enjoying dominos.  For the older children we are having slightly more formal lessons in music (learning the recorder) and painting with stencils.  

Some other schools are also reopening, so hopefully those who have gone to Uganda will hear from their relatives and come back.  Then we will be able to resume normal lessons.

In the meantime, a new classroom has been built and one classroom had been plastered before we were forced to shut.  The workmen came back to resume the plastering work yesterday.

Children play on our only remaining
piece of playground equipment.

Feeding two hundred and forty children

Children queue for lunch in 2018

Since I came to Nimule, in 2013, I have seen endless difficulties with school feeding.  The school where I initially worked provided a small plastic cup of very insipid maize porridge to each child at midday, which was paid for by the parents.  It was a fee-paying school.

In the case of Cece Primary School, we have had our ups and downs.  When we first started in 2015, with only 60 children, we were able to afford to make a very nutritious porridge made with millet flour with added sesame paste.  Those were the days!  As numbers grew this became unsustainable.

At one point, a local US-led mission started to provide a full-scale meal of posho (a large dumpling made of maize flour) and stewed beans for every school child in Nimule.  Unfortunately that plan broke down because of the greed of some schools, who enhanced their figures so that they could give food to the families of their teachers as well.  After a warning, which was ignored, the mission cancelled their feeding programme.

Collapse of old kitchen in freak 
weather

We tried to feed our children through donations, but have never been able to manage completely, leaving periods with no school food.  In some cases this has caused children to drop out of school because the poverty of their families is such that they really rely on that meal.

At the beginning of 2019 the World Food Program, with Plan International as their local partners, stepped in to provide school meals.  We were expected to provide a self-contained food store as well as a permanent kitchen, completely without notice.  At that time, neither of these had been built and we had no funds to do so.  Previously we had always stored our food off-site in HUMAES’s store, which was more secure.  Cooking was done in a bamboo shed, which eventually collapsed in a high wind (see picture).  We asked Plan International to deliver the food to HUMAES, pointing out that security was a problem at the school and that several other schools had lost their food to thieves, sometimes at gunpoint.  Plan International refused.  Our inability to instantly provide the desired food store and kitchen meant that Plan International refused to help after an initial three weeks.  We continued to fund food through donations, but it was a very big struggle.  Money we had earmarked for construction work had to be spent on food instead.  Shockingly, I later saw a report in which Plan claimed to have continued feeding our school right through the year and into the Covid year.

Food store while under construction.

During the Covid lockdown we built a new kitchen and food store, so that we would be ready for Plan International if they should come again.  Luckily enough, when school reopened in May 2021, Plan International came back to offer us food again.  This time the food consisted of maize, sorghum, beans and cow peas (which is similar to dhal).  We really basked in the luxury of variety of food.  Predictably enough, this time there was a demand that we construct a firewood store, which we did, and feeding continued throughout the school year.

Cooking 'hobs' in the new kitchen.

Yesterday I called Plan International to ask when they would deliver the next batch of food, as all our food was finished.  I was told that because of the crisis in Ukraine, the donors had decided to pull out of South Sudan and focus on feeding the Ukrainian refugees.  They hadn’t thought to inform the schools.  We are set for another ‘hunger gap’ until we can find a way forward.  We now have 240 pupils, so the need is great.

Please can I ask for regular monthly donations towards food for the school?  Please contact me on rebeccamallinson1@hotmail.co.uk if you would like a gift aid form or have any suggestions of ways in which we can move forward.