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.