It is good to be human

Some of our children used some wild flowers to
 make the local equivalent of daisy chains to bind
themselves together.  (Before the schools closed
or social distancing came into our lives.)

I have been so sad to hear the news of what is happening in the US and my own country.  We seem to have become barbarians.  First the misery of Brexit, with its racist undertones.  Then Coronavirus to stop people interacting and lose human contact.  Maybe this is what has driven people mad.  Now riots based on the whole racist debate and bringing up all sorts of recent and historical grudges.  Do we all hate each other so much?

I come from London, which has been a cosmopolitan city right back to Roman times.  Throughout my school days and my adult life I have been part of a multi-ethnic society, with friends and work colleagues from all over the world.  Yes, I know there have always been problems of racism, but I have always believed that the more educated the person, the less narrow-minded they are likely to be.  This is certainly true in my own family, where there is a massive class and education gap between my father’s and my mother’s side of the family.  For example, my paternal grandmother finished school at 11 years old to help support her desperately poor family.  I loved her dearly, but even as a small child I was deeply shocked by some of her racist statements.  My mother’s side of the family was well-travelled, well-educated and used to other cultures and did not tend to make that sort of judgement.

Tribalism and racism come from the same narrow mindset of ‘them’ and ‘us’.  This is why I jointly founded a primary school in South Sudan, a country with huge problems of tribalism, extreme poverty and illiteracy.  My co-founders are all from the local Madi tribe, but are relatively well-educated.  They understand the importance of bringing peace to the country and of development to combat poverty.  That is why they asked me to help them start a school for the poorest and most marginalized children in the local community.

At Cece Primary School we have children from fifteen different tribes, some of which have a long history of enmity and genocide between them.  When we hold parents meetings, we almost always have tearful mothers from internally displaced tribes thanking us profusely for accepting their children in our school even though they are from elsewhere in the country and fled to Nimule to escape war.

Here is a short poem, written as a class exercise by some of our pupils for African Child Day two years ago which seems very appropriate right now.

We are all one colour, give us love,
We are all one colour give us peace.
No more fighting, no more war,
No more tribalism.
Children of Africa,
The future of Africa.
Do – Not – Kill – Us!!

I think the whole world needs to learn from our children at the moment.  Otherwise humanity will destroy itself.

Below is a quote from Henri Nouwen, “Caring for the Whole Person”.  I seem to be reading a lot of Nouwen at the moment!

One of the greatest human spiritual tasks is to embrace all of humanity, to allow your heart to be a marketplace of humanity, to allow your interior life to reflect the pains and the joys of people not only from Africa and Ireland and Yugoslavia and Russia, but also from people who lived in the fourteenth century and will live many centuries forward.  Somehow, if you discover that your little life is part of the journey of humanity and that you have the privilege to be part of that, your interior life shifts.  You lose a lot of fear and something really happens to you.  Enormous joy can come into your life.  It can give you a strong sense of solidarity with the human race, with the human condition.  It is good to be human. 

I never thought I could be a fundraiser

I have been going through the school’s finances over the years since we began and can only gasp with astonishment at how far we have come.  In 2015 we started very small, with 60 children in a loaned building.  Now we have 247 children in our own purpose-built school and a regular income, which is generally fairly stable.  All this has been done through your help.  First, friends and relatives, then churches and charities started to help too.  The circle has widened through personal contact, not through NGO lobbying.  Most remarkably as I have very little opportunity to visit the UK, almost all my contact has been over the internet, which is very unreliable here in South Sudan.

Our girls' football team just before
winning their first ever match last November.

Cece Primary School owes its continued existence to all of you who have donated to the school and encouraged me to persevere.  I have always had a great antipathy to money, which has made me a most unlikely fundraiser and makes the results all the more surprising.

It is true that right now we are on hold and the school is shut.  The deaf children have also had to return home.  However, eventually this will change.  We will go back and with great relief get cracking again to help our children out of the grinding poverty of their backgrounds, hopefully changing the mindsets of the local community along the way so that children are no longer treated as the lowest thing that crawls, but as valued members of their families. 

Through your help the teachers and cooks continue to be paid.  This will help motivate them to remain loyal to our school rather than finding permanent work elsewhere, which is very important in this difficult time when prices are escalating and food is scarce.  It is also very important that when schools finally reopen, our teachers are able and ready to teach again.  All our staff will also maintain a positive attitude to the school.

Our deaf children on their way home after the
closure of their schools due to Coronavirus.

I can remember in 2013, when Pope Francis had recently taken office, he spoke out against NGOs (including Catholic ones) who broadcast money for their projects from on high with a motivation of publicizing their own greatness.  I have seen for myself here in South Sudan, how short-term their vision can be and how difficult it can be for local people to access the much publicized help.  A lot of the funds get lost along the way due to bureaucratic processes, lack of supervision and corruption.  The money the NGOs give is taken from across the world, often without the expressed wish of those paying, as it comes from governments using their people’s taxes.  There is no care for the individual, just a lot of faceless numbers, with an occasional very sad ‘human story’ to give a feel-good feeling.  It is all about how many millions of children across the world receive this, that or the other.  On the surface it looks humanitarian, but there is a lack of love and care.  The help given is rarely of a type to bring South Sudan into a position of helping itself, but of continuing dependency.

A prime example of this cynical approach is the Girls Education South Sudan (GESS) project, funded by the EU and UKAID.  We are told that the purpose of this project is to encourage teenage girls to remain in education and avoid early marriage.  This is a serious issue in South Sudanese society, driven by poor quality, expensive education, the greed of families for large bride-prices, and the misery of teenage girls in insupportable family circumstances where they are frequently beaten and expected to work like slaves from morning to night.  At school these girls under-perform because they are always late, dog-tired and miserable.  Not surprisingly, a lot of these girls run away or look for a man to take them away from their home situation.  The result is very high teenage pregnancy rates and girls jumping out of the pan and into the fire by becoming neglected or battered wives of polygamous men. 

GESS believes that giving a small sum of money to each girl from Primary 5 upwards will encourage them to remain in school.  Is that really the answer to the situation I have described?  How can it be?  It just makes GESS feel able to report the huge number of girls reached.  The amount of money is only 2,200 SSP per girl, around $8.  It will maybe buy some stationery and a couple of packs of sanitary pads.  That money is nothing compared to school fees or bride-price, so will not motivate parents to keep the girls in school.  The answer to the problem is not money but society change, which is much harder to achieve. 

The problems of teenage girls are addressed at Cece Primary School by setting up a girls’ protection workshop, with a supervising female teacher and peer mentors.  These mentors raise any problems faced by the girls so that the school can talk to parents and local chiefs to help address the individual girl’s situation.  This approach does not take money.  Instead it takes a view that each child matters.  When we show love to our children they will respond, even if not immediately.

I recently read a book called A Spirituality of Fundraising by Henri Nouwen.  I wanted to know how Henri Nouwen could possibly see fundraising as something that has a religious aspect.  Ever since starting the school I have been very worried by talking about or dealing with money; I try to live a religious life and feared the financial side as bringing me down.  I can strongly recommend this book.  When I read it, I realized that without knowing it, I was in fact already following some of Nouwen’s recommendations.  I am now going further by talking to you about the role of supporters as Nouwen sees it, and as I see it too.

Nouwen’s philosophy of fundraising is to create a community of supporters and recipients all in relationship with each other.  In religious terms, each donor or supporter and each recipient should be valued for themselves as children of God’s Kingdom.  The community (in this case, the children, their families and the school staff) is God’s Kingdom on earth.  By donating or interacting in any other way, supporters become part of that Kingdom.  It is supposed to be a community of love.  The fundraiser is a go-between facilitating that community.

I know that some of you are not religious and may find this post difficult.  I apologise if you are offended.  In previous posts I have tried not to rub people’s noses in my religious views while at the same time being honest about the motivation for my work here, whether with the school or the deaf children.

I believe that all of you, our supporters, are passionate about helping the children of our school and also the deaf children going to school in Uganda.  Let us work together.  I know that the distance is huge between the UK and South Sudan, but let us feel our closeness in spirit.

Love is something very thin on the ground in both the UK and in South Sudan right now.  Please continue to help our mission to our children to be a light in the darkness of racism, isolationism, corruption and abuse all of which affect both our countries.