Back to school

Dear all,

Since I last wrote, I am now back in Africa.  I travelled through Uganda to South Sudan, narrowly avoiding the Ugandan elections as I arrived in South Sudan just before they began.  What I had not expected was that the Ugandan government would impose a complete media and network blackout for around a week, starting just beforehand.  This hampered communication across the country, so that it was impossible to communicate with anyone in Uganda. The Salesians in Palabek were completely incommunicado so that I was unable to organize my move there.  Even once communication became possible it took weeks for the rector of the Salesians to be able to communicate with his staff and get things up and running again. 

The positive result was that I ended up with plenty of time to hand over to Samuel and visit the two schools in Nimule where my pupils have transferred, Kings Way Academy for the secondary students, and Queensland Primary School for the most needy of my primary students.  I paid all the necessary costs of the secondary school, but ran short when it came to the primary school, although I covered the essentials. 

School in South Sudan began at the beginning of February.  Originally Ugandan schools were due to start at the same time, but the Ugandan government announced that due to the elections schools were to start a week later on 10^th February.  Why this was necessary is beyond me, seeing that the elections were held on 15^th January and all polling was over.  What do schoolchildren have to do with politics?

The South Sudan primary leaving exam results for last year’s primary schools have not yet been released, so first year secondary students are left at home waiting, unable to attend school yet.  Last year, our students had to wait up until April.  The Ministry of Education has promised that it will be quicker this year, but who knows?  Marking only started nationally last week. 

I moved to Palabek at the beginning of February.  It was hard to leave Nimule, where I have lived for over twelve years and have established many friendships.  There are no amenities such as easy public transport, banks and shops in Palabek, so a lot of adjustment is needed. I am still finding my feet here. 

The journey from Palabek to Gulu, which is necessary in order to get funds for all my students in Nimule and the deaf and blind students, is not at all easy.  It involves taking a ‘taxi’ filled beyond capacity with passengers and huge amounts of goods.  The taxi only sets out when completely full with the passengers crushed together and vast amounts of luggage tied to the roof and on people’s knees.  It travels slowly and carefully for 145 kilometres along very rutted tracks to Gulu, stopping along the way to offload and reload.  If the taxi leaves at 8am, it may reach Gulu around lunchtime.  On the way back it is worse because such care is needed by the driver in the pitch-black night.  Last week I made the mistake of taking an afternoon taxi back to Palabek.  It left at around 5pm (I had waited for the taxi to fill up since 3pm) and arrived at 11pm.  There was no onward transport, but fortunately a member of the Salesians came with a motorbike and took me back to the school.  He said that sometimes the taxi doesn’t arrive until 1am.  Never again.  In future if I need to go to Gulu, I will stay overnight and return the next morning.  This description is of travel in the dry season.  In the rainy season, which is immanent, the roads will become as slippery as an ice rink with mud and journeys will become even longer.  Last year on a visit to Palabek I experienced the vehicle being stuck in deep mud for ages, while we unloaded everything and all the passengers pushed until we eventually got out of the mud, covered in mud ourselves.

Some of the deaf students about to travel to school.

Last Saturday Samuel collected all the deaf students, both primary and secondary and escorted them from Nimule to Gulu to meet up with me.  As mentioned in my last post, the primary students were transferring to a new school in Lira to make things easier for Samuel.  He told me that they were clearly delighted to see each other again, exchanging big hugs when they met up and signing a lot to each other.  Life during the holidays is very isolated for these children, who have no means of communication with their families.  My original plan had been to start a deaf school in Nimule.  If that had been possible, we would have taught the families to communicate in sign language.  If only.

I withdrew funds and we spent the afternoon buying all the necessary school requirements at the excellent local market.  I had already partially paid their school fees through a bank on a previous trip.  As with Queensland Primary School in Nimule, the rest is reliant on more funds arriving.  I booked a ‘private hire’ taxi to take all nine students, supervised by Sam, and all their luggage direct to school in Lira early on Sunday morning.  Fortunately for them the road to Lira is paved, unlike the road to Palabek.  Private hire sounds very luxurious but in fact it is very reasonable.  To take ten people complete with five large metal boxes, five mattresses and all their personal belongings and stationery in backpacks and carrier bags 110 kilometres costs a little over £50.  It is a great deal more practical than carrying all the luggage to a bus station, taking a bus to the centre of Lira and then finding means to go to Nancy School for the Deaf, which is about 5 kilometres outside the town.

The two blind students have travelled to their school in Gulu with their parents.  All their school fees and requirements have been paid for.  Bernard and Mary did extremely well at school last year, and I still haven’t got over the joy of witnessing their progress when they returned to Nimule last December.

It is great to have got almost all the students back to school.  As mentioned, it remains to complete their outstanding school fees.  It also remains to see last year’s primary students go to secondary school, which cannot happen until their leaving exam results are released.  I think another £1,500 will cover everything.

Please feel free to contact me on rebeccamallinson1@gmail.com.  I am always happy to answer any questions or give more detail.

Moving on

Dear all,

I am now back in England until mid-January.  The hiatus over my bank account has proved insoluble and is also affecting Opportunity through Education, who are having similar problems.  I am sure that Alan Lion will contact you all separately about a new bank account.  The good news is that the funds are not lost and will be refunded to us.

To update you on the very difficult situation I reported in my last post, the problems I was facing did not go away.  In fact, the municipality ended up threatening to close down any school which did not pay their ‘tax’.  I was forced to the conclusion that starting the deaf school would be too difficult given the complete lack of cooperation from the authorities, not to mention the stress of dealing with a mayor whose sole aim in life appears to be squeezing money out of the whole town. 

I called a parents’ meeting at Liberty and explained the situation.  They were sad but accepting.  I talked about the head-start that their children have had compared to any other Nimule school, emphasizing that both Cece and Liberty taught literacy, which is unheard-of anywhere else.  The literacy rate in South Sudan is around 35%, so they are really very lucky.  I advised the higher level students to look for chances to use their skills, by volunteering their help.  I gave the example of reading the readings at church and interpreting for people without English.

Red Cross to the rescue.

As if there weren’t enough challenges, we faced a water crisis for the first month and a half of the term.  The borehole which is the only water source for the school and for the local community broke down.  Despite the fact that the cholera outbreak mentioned in my previous post is still continuing, the municipality refused to ask their sanitation department to assist.  It really seems that their raison d’être is to bring everything down.  We were left unable to cook, wash hands or drink water, so that the school had to close every lunchtime.  I appealed to the local Red Cross, who stepped in and repaired the borehole, so the school was able to resume the porridge cooking and afternoon lessons.

Future plans

The blind children, Bernard and Mary

What I am trying to do now is to ensure that the neediest as well as the most promising students get a chance to continue to go to school.  I have found a local man called Samuel Okot, who works for the Red Cross as their local director.  I have known him for years and have always found him a very steady, committed person.  Samuel is a qualified social worker and is also trained in trauma counselling.  He has agreed to help me to continue taking the deaf and blind pupils to Uganda as well as liaising with Kings Way Academy, the secondary school attended by my former Cece and Liberty pupils after they had finished primary school.  There are also three very needy pupils who did not get the chance to finish primary school.  One is severely physically disabled in one leg and one arm and is an orphan.  Two others come from a very poor but super-bright family and really need help to continue.  Samuel is going to enroll these three pupils in another local primary school.  I will continue to fundraise for all the above, if donors are willing to continue to support them.  What must be avoided for the future is having a formal entity such as a school in Nimule, who would be pressurized by the mayor.

The trip back from school at the end of the school
year.  Next year, a new school.

I called a meeting with Samuel together with the parents of the deaf and blind children so that they could be introduced to him.  They are all very relieved that their children will continue to go to school.  I am going to move the deaf primary children to Lira from next year to make Samuel’s life a bit easier as it will cut down on the travelling.  The deaf secondary school has a sister school for primary level students in the next compound.  At the end of the school year we visited together so I could introduce Samuel to both primary and secondary headteachers.  I made sure that the deaf students understood through a sign language interpreter and introduced them to him.

I have had to rethink the situation of Alau, who did informal teacher training this year.  He has now finished.  He had expected to start teaching at the new deaf school, which will not now happen.  I was fortunate enough to receive a suggestion that he could start a formal course in Uganda with a sign language interpreter, where he will end with formal teacher qualifications.  Samuel is organizing this on Alau’s behalf.  Alau’s sponsor died a few months ago.  Is anyone willing to come forward to sponsor him for the next year or so?

My own plan is to leave South Sudan and volunteer as a teacher for the Salesians of Don Bosco, who have a mission in a refugee settlement about 70 kilometres away in a place called Palabek in Uganda.  The Salesians’ mission is the education of disadvantaged children, so I will be continuing in a similar vein, although their mission is a lot bigger than mine would ever have been and is better resourced.  I will be able to pay the school fees for the students in Uganda quite easily from there and possibly visit them at school occasionally to see how they are doing.

As Liberty Primary School is no more, I removed the desks at the end of term and transported them to Kings Way Academy, where our remaining students are.  Kings Way has been very short of desks, so this is a real help to them as well as avoiding our perfectly good desks, bought with funds from donors such as yourselves, being misused by gangs.

People in Nimule have said that there will be a very big gap.  This is true unfortunately.  Looking on the bright side, I can remember some of last year’s Primary 8 class discussing how they intended to start a school for disadvantaged children themselves when they have grown up and are working.  It showed that they really appreciate the education that they have been receiving and is also a great sign of hope for the future.  As mentioned, quite a lot of children have literacy skills they would never have acquired otherwise.

I hope you will be willing to continue to help the disabled children who are at school in Uganda, the former Primary 8 students who are now at Kings Way Academy, the three who will transfer to another local primary school and Alau to continue his teacher training. 

Please feel free to contact me on rebeccamallinson1@gmail.com.  I am always happy to answer any questions or give more detail.

Travelling hopefully

Dear all,

This term I have faced some very difficult challenges. Two are particularly serious.  

The first are difficulties caused by new international banking regulations.  I have found my fundraising and personal accounts in the UK blocked as a result.  Unfortunately, £5,000 is sitting in the fundraising account waiting to be sent.  It is proving impossible to sort out the problem from South Sudan.  The bank account website and app are unavailable in South Sudan presumably for security reasons.  Because South Sudan is subject to financial sanctions the powers-that-be are deeply suspicious of any movement of funds in that direction, which could potentially end up in the wrong hands.  I received a phone call from the bank asking me to provide official documentation proving my address in South Sudan.  Unfortunately they will not accept anything without a full first-world style address complete with post code.  These do not exist in the majority of African countries, let alone South Sudan.  As a result I have reached an impasse. Please note that this is my own account, not the Opportunity through Education account.  Your donations go to OTE, who (up until this problem surfaced) sent them on to my fundraising account.  

In the meantime I have been eating into my pension lump sum, which I had intended to use for building the deaf school.  Since the Opportunity through Education £5,000 donation is inaccessible, OTE is now sending money via another account.  I would really appreciate help as my pension lump sum is dwindling and I really need to be able to start the building work for the deaf school.

I plan to make a trip back to England in December and will see if I have any more success in reasoning with the bank face-to-face. 

The other major challenge is that Nimule has changed its status.  It is no longer classified as a town, and has become a municipality.  This means that we now have a mayor.  Unlike most countries, this is not an elected position.  Our mayor has proved to be a very money-minded person, who is using his position to squeeze money out of the local community.  He has his own private militia who accompany him everywhere.  One of his ploys is to categorise as many schools as possible as private school businesses.  He has done this to Liberty Primary School, I suspect because of my white face.  I received a handwritten letter written by the Chief Inspector for Schools on his behalf, demanding a very large, unassessed tax.  I wrote the mayor a letter explaining that Liberty Primary School is not a business and survives on donations sent specifically for the running of the school.  I also explained in my letter that there is an exemption from taxation in South Sudan for all Catholic entities (I am a lay missionary under the Catholic Church).  He summoned me to his office and accused me of insulting him in my letter; it was a perfectly professional letter without a word of abuse in it.  Then he claimed that the word ‘tax’ was a mistake and that the original letter should have said ‘registration fee’.  I believe he was simply trying to find a way around my point about the Catholic Church’s exemption.  In fact, none of it is real taxes, as we would understand them in other countries.  Needless to say, I have not paid and don’t intend to pay.  This is in line with every other Nimule school I know of.  We are all standing together.  

My professional life in the UK was as an administrator.  When I trained as an administrator we were taught that 'if it is not on paper, it does not exist'.  That is my approach.  I responded in writing to the only letter that I have received!

Paling my own troubles into insignificance, the mayor is making himself felt in the town by getting his soldiers to arrest youths.  The idea is to crush the local gangs, but the soldiers are indiscriminate in who they arrest.  Teenagers are going missing.  One sixteen year old boy missed the last two days of term in our school.  When I asked his friends why, I was told that he was arrested at a perfectly peaceful football match where he had been a spectator.  The headteacher and I went to the police station where they had a long list of those arrested.  Frighteningly, his name was not there.

These problems have been causing me to question whether I can still continue.  I decided to consult a visiting priest from the Catholic Diocese.  He reassured me.  He said that the bishop is very excited at the prospect of having a deaf school in his diocese, the only one in the country.  He will speak to the mayor on my behalf to try to give him some understanding of my work in Nimule (which it was clear from my meeting with the mayor, was absent).  He will also contact an organization called Solidarity with South Sudan, which is a coalition of religious congregations from around the world with an interest in developing South Sudan.  They are already active in the fields of agriculture, health, livelihood and teacher training.  The hope is that they will be equally interested in helping with education for the deaf.  If this comes about, it will be a great weight off my shoulders and the school will be far more sustainable over the long term. 

From left to right: Jackline, Jennifer, Alafi,
Vibrant and Joel

In the meantime I am once more in Uganda visiting my primary level deaf students.  They are doing well.  I have been watching them play with hearing children without any communication difficulties, which was good to see.  The youngest, Alafi, was previously quite difficult to manage, but he has improved a lot.  The costs for next term have been very high and I have had to say ‘no’ to a number of things which I have funded in the past, for example, ingredients for making shortbread biscuits to be used as snacks during the next term and replacement items of clothing.  This has been necessary, because with that £5,000 shortfall (even though I hope to get it back eventually), I am having to squeeze my budget.  I have to bear in mind that I still need to pay the fees for the secondary deaf students, the two blind children and those in Nimule who were in my former Primary 8 classes, but are now at secondary school.  I can do it, but there will not be much left over for the running of Liberty for the final school term or for the building work.

P8 class waits for their first mock exam.

Schools closed for the end of term holidays last week in South Sudan.  We held our usual exams.  79% passed, which is an improvement on the first term exams’ 60% pass rate.  Hopefully we will go out on a high note at the end of the school year.  Our Primary 8 class did their mock exams and came out feeling confident, but we do not have their results yet.  

One of our problems last term was a cholera outbreak in the town.  More than one teacher was affected, either directly or because of the need to nurse sick relatives in the isolation unit, which caused problems with timetabling lessons.  We are being ultra-strict about hand-washing, with buckets of water and soap stationed strategically next to the toilets and near the kitchen, where pupils queue for their porridge.  Plumbing does not exist in Nimule.  There was a cholera vaccination campaign which started in the midst of the outbreak.  Cases are now going down.

Another problem has been targeting of our school by gangs of boys.  These are boys of around 10 to 14 years old.  Due to rampant rises in the cost of living a lot of children are now out of school.  These boys have a tendency to get together to make mischief.  We have had several incidents of our pupils being attacked on the way home from school, but the worst incident has been a child who came with a sharp knife and attempted to stab one of our pupils in the school grounds.  Thankfully he was spotted by a teacher, who took immediate action.  We took the boy to the police station, and his grandfather was called.  The grandfather, who is a local chief, was furious.  He pulled rank and insisted that the boy went home to be kept in solitary confinement in his family compound.  According to the grandfather this was the fourth incident of its type.  The issue of gangs is extremely concerning as you will see from the link to this article from Crux.  In the article, the bishop does not mention the huge school dropout rate caused by ever-increasing school fees, or the constant prioritization of girls and marginalization of boys by NGOs.  This leads to a lot of resentment among boys.  In my school we address this by celebrating 'Boy Child Day' as well as Girl Child Day.  It makes a very big difference to our relationship with our boys.

While visiting the deaf students in Uganda, I am also getting the opportunity to see Alau, who is doing his informal teacher training here.  The school is delighted with him.  They are finding him a keen student and very helpful outside school hours too, for example, the overseeing of the boys’ dormitory.  In two weeks’ time he is going to attend a conference for deaf people in the Kampala area, where he is hoping to do some networking and find ways to assist the new school.  This is through his own initiative.  He has now received his Senior 4 exam results (from the exams of November 2024) and I am very happy to say that he passed.

The two blind children, Bernard and Mary, are making good progress.  Bernard has been elected as a class monitor!  He does this entirely by voice recognition as he cannot see.  His main responsibility is to write down the names of any class members he hears speaking in the local language rather than English.  He tells me that he loves reading and writing, which he does using Braille.  Mary is making far more progress than last year.  She has the additional hurdle of foetal alcohol syndrome, which impedes her.

I have to admit that I felt very crushed by the two major challenges mentioned earlier, but I am dusting myself off and ‘travelling hopefully’.  I am continuing preparations for the deaf school.  

Please feel free to contact me on rebeccamallinson1@gmail.com.  I am always happy to answer any questions or give more detail.

News from Nimule

Dear all,

The new kitchen and newly fixed church

I want to say thank you so much for your support.  We fixed the church building, so it is now no longer slanting and much more secure.  The pastor who uses it at the weekends, is also very grateful.

The porridge meals are going very well.  As explained previously this meal is crucial as families are really struggling to feed their children at home.  The pleasure the children take when eating their porridge is almost tangible.

As you will know from the news, humanitarian aid is drying up.  As one person I cannot do everything, but I do the little that I can.  Below are some individual stories of how some students in particular need are getting individual help.

Peter and Taban at the hotel

I have recently returned from Uganda where I travelled with a ten year old boy called Peter who attends Liberty Primary School.  His father, whose legs are both paralysed, came with us.  The father, Taban, works repairing shoes at the roadside in Nimule and is very poor.  Peter has suffered for years from anaemia and has had a total of nine blood transfusions at the local hospital.  Nimule Hospital is poorly equipped and very short-staffed, so people are often referred on for more specialized care, medication or testing to Uganda.  Peter’s father was unable to afford to take his son.  I offered to take them both to Lacor Hospital on one of my regular trips to Gulu.  We arrived last Tuesday and spent six hours queuing in various departments.  When eventually tested Taban was advised to give Peter a good diet.  However, they (like most people) only eat in the evenings.  I did my best while on this trip to make sure they both ate regularly at least while I was with them.  

There is a new boy in our Primary 8 class called Joseph.  He is a very tall, thin Dinka whose father brought him to Nimule, paid his school fees and then disappeared, leaving him with an unrelated family.  The phrase ‘cuckoo in the nest’ springs to mind.  Joseph’s father is a soldier stationed elsewhere in the country and no doubt bullied the family into taking him in.  The ‘foster’ family has not taken it well.  They are simply not feeding him.  Unknown to me, Joseph was surviving on only the school porridge.  Shortly after arriving, he was absent from school for a whole week.  When he finally staggered into school he was in very poor shape.  I was very shocked.  He explained about the lack of food and also that he had been diagnosed with stomach ulcers.  Stomach ulcers are very common here, as a result of many hours a day on an empty stomach.  I have managed to solve his eating problem.  I paid for the necessary medication for ulcers and asked Ayuel, our headteacher, who lives close by, if he could include Joseph in his family meals, which he is doing.  Every day I am bringing Joseph something to eat for breakfast before classes start.  Then he is taking the school porridge at lunchtime.  Thankfully he is in a much better state now and is studying well.  Our headteacher has been so kind and welcoming to Joseph, for which I am very grateful. 

Another teenager, called Kalamam, is a further example of the grim poverty faced by children here.   Kalaman turned up at my door while I was sitting on the veranda one evening.  He is lame in one leg because of vaccine damage (another very common phenomenon here).  This can be caused either by injecting a vaccine into a nerve or muscle instead of a vein, or by being given vaccines with the wrong interval between shots.  The former is caused by inadequately trained vaccinators.  The latter is common because there has been so much displacement due to the civil war.  One leg is completely bent so that the top of his foot is on the ground, not the sole.  Somehow he limps around.  He doesn’t grumble, but it must be very painful.  I hope at some point to take him to Gulu for medical advice.  He comes from a tribe called the Murle who have suffered very much from all the surrounding tribes, so that many have been killed.  That includes both his parents and all other relatives apart from a younger brother, who was shot and severely wounded and is now under the care of the Red Cross in Juba.  The Red Cross were unable to take Kalamam too because of tight funding.  Kalamam managed to find someone who let him share his mud hut here in Nimule.  He then enrolled himself in a local secondary school even though he had no money for any of the requirements.  His visit to me was to beg for help with school fees and all the other school costs.  He had previously passed his Primary Leaving Certificate in Juba with flying colours, so he really needed help to go to the next level.  His ambition is to become a lawyer.  He is obviously highly intelligent to judge both from his previous exam results and from his conversation.  Eating has also been a great problem and he has got by only through begging.  I decided to enroll him in the same school as my former Primary 8 pupils as a boarding pupil.  That way he now has accommodation, three meals a day as well as lessons. 

Now comes the difficult part of this message.

The past year and a half at Liberty Primary School has only been possible through your help.  My partner in the school, who originally agreed to let me move the former Cece Primary students into the school which she originally established, has been almost completely inactive, demanding school fees and yet never passing the funds back to the school.  I have seen that she is only interested in the school as a personal money-making venture, not as a way to serve the community.  She seems blind to the sufferings of the families she is demanding money from.  I have spoken to her repeatedly about this, but there has been no change.  She now wants to buy the school site for a very large amount of money.  Where that money is to come from, she has been very cagey about.  I don’t want to become involved in any sharp practices.  I have prayed a lot about this and discussed the issue with others in my efforts to find a solution.  The general advice has been to discontinue my part in the school at the end of this academic year.  I can’t see any alternative to that.

Instead, from next year I am going to focus on the disabled children in Uganda, those who have already moved on to secondary level in Nimule and the new school for the deaf.  I feel terrible about abandoning the current pupils at Liberty and of course I will do my best to support them in any way I can.

I am currently preparing to start the deaf school.  I have formed a management team consisting of one pastor, the local Catholic parish priest and the headteacher of the secondary school my former pupils and Kalamam are attending.  These members come from different tribes (Nuba, Madi and Acholi), which is something experience has shown me to be very important in the environment in which I am working.  We have devised a vision and mission statement.  The motto will be ‘Rise Up’.  I have taken this phrase from Jesus, when he raised up Jairus’s daughter (Luke 8:54).  It seems very appropriate to a school which hopefully will give deaf children who have been totally isolated a chance to live a more normal life.  My daughter has designed a logo for the school.

Building work is going to start very soon in the grounds of a local government school, with permission of the municipal council.  This new chapter in my time in Nimule will see deaf children in the local area gain an education for the first time.  Pending permission from the local diocese, I am hoping to call the school the Pope Francis School for the Deaf.  My reason for this name is that Pope Francis was very concerned throughout his papacy for the difficulties of South Sudan and also for the most marginalized people.  The school will not be an officially Catholic school, but open to all who are deaf.

I do hope you will be willing to support this change of direction.

Thank you once again for all your help and support.

Please feel free to contact me on rebeccamallinson1@gmail.com.  I am always happy to answer any questions or give more detail.

 

Achievements and Challenges

Dear all,

I think it is time for an update.

The most important piece of news from the school is that we finally received the Primary Leavers exam results.  Last year’s Primary 8 did spectacularly well, even beating the previous year’s class, who were already scraping along the top locally. The average score in 2023 was 367 and in 2024 it was 411. These marks are out of 500.  I have now placed them all in secondary school.  As the problem of late issuing of exam results was a nationwide issue, the secondary headteacher made adjustments to the academic year to cater for the new Senior 1 pupils, so that they started school in late April and will have very little holiday this year in order to catch up on the curriculum for their year group.  Thankfully, the long wait did not faze the students too much.

The church interior in better days.  There are now
a lot of holes in the walls and the room is leaning.

There was a very heavy wind a few weeks ago which is causing the church building we use for classes to lean.  It was very poorly constructed in the first place, made of dried mud and bamboo poles on a poorly constructed wooden framework.  We share the use of this building with a local evangelical church, who have no money to do anything.  Rather than allow the building to collapse on top of our Primary 7 and Primary 8 classes, I agreed that we would assist.  Some new poles are going to be put inside to act as pillars to rectify the leaning structure.  The walls need repair and the part of the roof is flapping loudly whenever there is a bit of wind.  I hope you will agree that this is a way of supporting the school’s neighbours as well as keeping our children safe.  The work will cost around £630 including labour.  I am lucky to have a very good builder, who can be trusted to do a good job.

The major challenge at the school is absenteeism by older pupils, who have far too much responsibility outside school.  This is because of extreme poverty.  An example of this is one of our Primary 8 pupils, who I shall call John, who was absent for a whole week with no explanation.  It was far from a one-off incident.  Eventually I threatened that if his parent did not come to see me, I would demote him to Primary 7 as he is losing too many lessons.  His aunt came and explained that John’s father is dead and his mother remarried, leaving her children behind.  This is a culturally acceptable situation here.  The aunt now cares for the children, but sometimes needs to go away to Juba.  When that happens, John is in charge.  The week that John was absent, he had to work to provide food for the younger children and himself in his aunt’s absence.  I have no solution to this type of problem.  Social services does not exist here.  As time goes on and poverty gets worse, this scenario is becoming ever more common.  I don’t know where it will end, but it does affect the academic progress of a good number of pupils.

Other than that, the first term went smoothly.  It is now the holidays.  Apart from the PLE exam results, the other major achievement was, of course, the advent of porridge.  We are still bathing in the luxury of being able to feed our children.  Thank you all so much.

End of term 1 for Alice, Lillian, Aluma and Paul 
(left to right)

I collected the deaf secondary students from school two weeks ago.  They seem happy and their first term results are very encouraging, especially Lillian, who got ‘outstanding’ for several subjects.  My main worry had been Aluma, because of his multiple disabilities, but he seems to have settled well, with no major fits.

This week I visited the deaf primary students and paid for next term’s needs.  They are doing well.

The blind children are also doing well.  I am especially happy about Mary, who has fetal alcohol syndrome.  She is repeating Primary 1 and is doing far better this time around.  Bernard has been a high achiever from day one last year, and continues on that course.

Alau, the eldest of my deaf contingent, has just finished his first term as a trainee teacher for the deaf at the deaf primary school.  The reason for taking this approach is that we have still not received his Senior 4 exam results.  Rather than holding him up for many months, it seemed more sensible to find an alternative training for him.  The school are very happy with him.  He is a keen student and makes sure he asks if he is uncertain of anything.  He is earning some extra money by teaching ‘remedial’ classes.  (I know – politically correct language does not exist here.)  Every Sunday he travels 25 kms from the school to Mbale to attend a deaf church, together with former friends from his old secondary school, so he is also getting some social and spiritual life.

The new civil war rumbles on in other parts of South Sudan, but is not affecting us directly.  The staff and I all take the attitude that we will be alert for news, but keep going in the meantime.  It would be a terrible shame to let our pupils down by closing unnecessarily.

Please feel free to contact me on rebeccamallinson1@gmail.com.  I am always happy to answer any questions or give more detail.

Feeding the One Hundred and Eighty

Dear all,

Firstly I would like to say a big thank you to all who have sent donations or recently increased their donations.

The very first porridge is cooked

As you will know from my last blog, a charity called St Francis and St Clare came forward to build a kitchen for Liberty Primary School.  The kitchen was completed two weeks ago but the concrete floor needed to dry before we could start.  The following weekend I, another teacher and the cooks got started on buying all the necessary equipment.  Cooking started two days ago.  The children and staff are all so happy.  We have two cooks, one of whom was a cook previously at Liberty (before my time there) and the other is a former teacher from Cece Primary School.  They are doing a great job.  The porridge is delicious and ready on time. 

In South Sudan a cook’s work is far harder than in more developed countries.  It involves chopping up firewood, taking the whole sorghum grain to a local grinding mill on their heads and fetching water in jerricans from the nearest borehole (which luckily is right next to our school compound), before they can even begin to cook.  We are all very appreciative both of the donors and of our hardworking cooks. 

Some of our upper school
pupils with their porridge

The only difficulty now is because of the current situation of the country, which you may have seen on the news.  It looks very much as though we are heading back to full-scale civil war.  There was a very bad incident last week not many kilometres from Nimule in which local villagers were attacked by soldiers.  This is causing a lot of fear.  As firewood comes from isolated areas, it is hard to find people willing to go and fetch it in case of attack.  This has left us making frequent trips to buy small quantities at the local market until we can find a better solution - perhaps somebody selling firewood from a different direction.  Electricity or gas are not options here.

Finally being able to feed our children is a very great achievement, and couldn’t come at a better time.  Life is really desperate for most families.  After last year’s complete lack of school meals, it is so wonderful.

We are now heading towards the end of term exams, and yet our previous year’s candidate class are still out of school due to their results not yet being released.  So far they have missed almost a whole term of secondary school, which is very unfortunate.  As mentioned before, the examiners were paid part of their delayed salaries to get them started on marking the papers.  I suspect that they are sitting on the papers in the hope of getting another salary instalment.  I need to be ready to pay their secondary school fees as soon as the exam results are released.

Government paid teachers were recently paid a paltry amount of backdated salaries.  They were told that it was the salary for January 2024, amounting to 50,000 South Sudan Pounds each, which is the equivalent of around £6.50 at current rates.  To add insult to injury, there was a reduction made of 2,000 SSP for administration costs per teacher.  They are owed for well over a year now.  I am so thankful that our teachers (including some who are officially government paid) are able to receive decent salaries, paid on time thanks to you.  No other school in Nimule is paying regularly or as much.  A teacher's monthly salary in Liberty is around £60, which is a living wage here.  The cooks are paid around £40 a month.  We have 15 teachers and 2 cooks.  

Once the school holidays start I will be visiting the deaf children in Uganda to pay for next term’s school fees and requirements.  This is quite a costly exercise.  If you are sponsoring a child (or would like to do so) please help.  The costs last term came to an average of £250 per child.  Not all the children have sponsors, so some of the funds always end up coming from the school budget.  Please get in touch if you would like to sponsor a child.

Our new kitchen

Please keep South Sudan in prayer.  As I said previously, the situation is very precarious and it is impossible to know whether families will remain in Nimule or flee across the border.  If they leave, they will find the various refugee settlements closing down, so they might not get the help they have come to expect whenever tensions have escalated in the past.  The world is becoming very unwelcoming to refugees.  They are between the devil and the deep blue sea – do they stay and risk possible death, or flee and find the refugee settlements closed?  The last time we were directly affected, we were the only primary school to remain open in Nimule, although with very few pupils and Nimule was livable although difficult.  I hope to do the same again if at all possible.  In the meantime, it is a matter of giving the children as much education as we can.  It may be all they will get.

Please feel free to contact me on rebeccamallinson1@gmail.com.  I am always happy to answer any questions or give more detail.

The New School Year Begins

Dear all,

Group photo at end of last school year celebration

I have now been back in hot, sunny Africa for a month and a half. While in England I met with a good number of donor friends which was a great chance to answer their questions individually. It has been three years since last visiting, so this was a major purpose of my visit. I do appreciate you all so much. Without you, my mission to help all the children whether in deaf or blind schools in Uganda or in school in South Sudan would grind to a halt leaving a lot of children without any chance to continue their education due to their families’ poverty. Thank you so much to those who made donations while I was in the UK and those who continue to assist.

Increasingly, lack of schooling is the trend in South Sudan, as people become ever more desperately poor due to hyperinflation. At the same time school fees have soared to unaffordable levels. Even the more educated people, working in government-paid jobs, have not been paid for around 16 months now. Clearly, none of us are capable of solving the education problems of an entire country, but at least we are able to set an example of what can be done. My mission is fortunate in benefiting from foreign currency donations, which means that the impact of hyperinflation is very much less than on the local population.

As mentioned, civil servants have not been paid for well over a year. This is now impacting on those who did their final exams in November 2024. Last year, the final exam results for secondary pupils were not released until August, leaving leavers unable to provide certificates that they had completed secondary education, and therefore unable to go to further education. This year the problem has widened so that the results of primary leavers are also delayed. The examiners refused to mark until they were paid. The Ministry of Finance has now given them a third of the figure requested, so that marking can begin. This scenario is in spite of the fact that parents across the country paid for the exams at the time of exam registration. Where has that money gone? No prizes for guessing. I am left feeling that the whole education system in South Sudan is grinding to a halt. My P8 class of last year are waiting at home to hear when they will be able to start secondary school, even though teaching is supposed to have started at the beginning of February. Secondary schools across South Sudan have no Senior 1 classes.

The problems caused by the recent wild change of US policy towards humanitarian aid is likely to contribute to the already dire situation. My ‘Rebecca’s eye view’ as a religious person, is that this is the time for alms-giving and volunteering to stand forward. It is very understandable that impersonal giving through internationally-collected taxes, does not bring people any closer to showing real love of neighbour. I shudder when I hear politicians talk about humanitarian aid as though it is all about ‘soft power’ and not leaving space for Russia and China to build their own soft power bases, not about real care. We are apparently living on very different planets.

We are now much closer to having feeding in school. After my plea in my last post, a charity called St Francis and St Clare Charity has very kindly donated £1,500 to build a kitchen. This came completely out of the blue. The Cleary family has also donated towards feeding the children. Please can I ask for an increase in donations so that I can sustainably pay at least one cook and provide the necessary ingredients on a regular basis. Work on the kitchen will start very soon.

The main regular expenses throughout the year are monthly salaries for our teachers and also the termly payments for the deaf and blind pupils in Uganda.

I arrived back a week or so before the beginning of the new school year, and sprang immediately into action. I communicated with the secondary school where my P8 class is to continue their education. I checked on the registrations for Liberty Primary School and the newly secured classrooms (which have been very well done). Ayuel, my headteacher, worked very hard while I was away, supervising the work and communicating with the teachers and education department.

Then I gathered the primary deaf pupils to take them back to school in Uganda, and paid the school fees and travel expenses for the blind children so their parents could take them back to school. Alau accompanied me to the deaf primary school and is now starting his year as a student teacher for the deaf.

I then returned to take the secondary deaf pupils to their school in Lira. I was accompanied by the father of Aluma; Aluma’s health needs made it sensible to ask his father to come and see the school for himself in order to put his fears to rest and talk to the staff personally. Paul will sleep in the next bed to Aluma as they are good friends and Paul is well aware of his needs. The secondary school has a school nurse, as well as matrons for both boys and girls. The original plan was for Aluma to learn tailoring, however, now that the school has assessed him, they believe that he will not be able to do this. Instead they want to teach him to knit sweaters using a knitting machine. The knitting machine will cost around £160. I asked that the machine can be Aluma’s personal property so that it can give him a start when he finishes his course. This was agreed. I have already sent the money, but this has been an unexpected extra expense, so I have robbed the school to do so in the hope that a donor will come forward later on. Paul and Lillian have joined Alice in the academic section and I have been told that they are settling in well.

Once again, a huge thank you for all your generosity. There is no need to wait for years to speak to me or ask about how things are going. My email address is rebeccamallinson1@gmail.com. I am always happy to hear from you.

Rebecca Mallinson