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.