My friend, Lisa, who is our blogger extraordinaire, is busy for a couple of days, so she urged me to “have at it.” I had a long Thuraya call with Franco today, and wanted to report to the Board on this update from his trip to Sudan:

Traveling in South Sudan is always interesting and sometimes frustrating. Franco had to leave his bags (all of them, including clothes) at the airport in Juba. He paid for the extra cargo weight, since the bag with school supplies alone was way over the allowable 20 kg for luggage. There was “something going on” at the airport, he said, and he had no choice but to leave the bags at the airport. The airline said his bags would be in Aweil on Monday. He is going there tomorrow to wait for them.

While in Juba, Franco had a good meeting with the head of the UN Mission in South Sudan. We met Mr. Gressly recently at Harvard University, where he gave a presentation on the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. We continue our mission to build partnerships with the larger groups doing projects in South Sudan, including the UN and USAID. As our work produces results like the Wunlang School, we will seek to expand our field project delivery through such partnerships.

We were sorry to hear that Kush Resort, the safari tent hotel on the Nile where we stayed last January, is under new management. We will miss the old staff who were so accommodating and hospitable to us, even picking fresh mangos from their trees for us.

In Aweil, Franco has not been able to meet with the Governor because meetings between Dinka and Misseryia groups were in progress. The Governor leaves for Juba then the U.S. in a few days, so a meeting with him is unlikely. When Franco goes to Aweil tomorrow, he will try to meet with others in the administration. Unfortunately, the SPLM office no longer offers Internet. This is bad news for the local population who were taking classes and accessing e-mail when we were there last January. This also means Franco will have to look for another Internet facility to use while he is there.

Much progress has been made to finish the school: plastering inside and out is done; painting has not started because of the rainy season. Floors are still in progress. The building crew ran out of cement again, and as we keep reporting, transporting materials to this remote village is one of the biggest challenges we face in our mission’s focus on remote villages ignored by other development aid groups.

The furniture carpenters are doing a great job. They are from the local area. One of the guys we hired because he has the proper tools and cuts down the trees and makes the lumber. The other is a finish carpenter, and he builds the desks. About 20 desks are made already, and Franco says, "They are beautiful." He will take pictures for us. He also said these guys know how to construct buildings, and we may be able hire them to work for us on another project in the future.

Franco will bring us pictures we have all be waiting for. A classroom with the instructional posters, painted chalk board, completed desks, students, and teachers. We plan to document this well to feature on our web site and in our photo gallery.

Franco closed our call by saying it is extremely hot in South Sudan. We wish him the best for his trip, including a rapid reunion with his luggage and a change of clothes!

Franco left for Sudan from Boston on Sunday afternoon and Tuesday morning we got an e-mail that he had arrived in Juba. We get better at this every time. This trip he flew to Entebbe Airport in Uganda. If we had business in Kampala, he most likely would have stayed with Peter Manyang Malang's family. But this trip, he had a next-day flight booked to Juba, so he stayed at Entebbe Airport Guesthouse, which we had learned about from my daughter's Uganda Studies Programme Director. Franco liked it; he got a room, breakfast, and shuttle service to and from the airport for about $40. "We will use it for years to come," he wrote.

In Juba Franco has several meetings lined up. We are registered as an NGO in Southern Sudan and we just received PVO (Private Voluntary Organization) status from USAid; now we have the credentials to get into some big meetings. Franco has internet access in Juba, so we will provide updates on these meetings as soon as we receive them.

Yesterday I was at Ron's house, delivering some of the supplies we've bought for the Wunlang School. I spent three days on-line revising my order with Teacher Storehouse. I especially love their $1.99 posters. I asked Franco if posters were something schools used, and he replied that the reason they didn't use them is because they didn't have them. So I bought a lot. A good poster can teach a whole class at one time.



I got a wide variety of posters on different subjects at different levels. Math posters range from numbers from 1 to 20 to an explanation of the orders of operation. Science posters include the water cycle, different posters for each class of animal ("What Is a Reptile?"), and photosynthesis. Posters on English language include parts of speech, rules for punctuation and capitalizations, and several ABC posters.



I got dominoes, which are played by the Sudanese I know day and night; dominoes teach numbers and probability and all the social skills that go with playing games. I also included some specialized sets of dominoes where students match fraction pictures to numbers and equivalent fractions to each other. I got big flashcards so a teacher can drill the whole class.



I didn't buy many books because books are so heavy. But from LinguiSystems I got No-Glamour Grammar 2; which Franco was delighted with. "This is laid out very easily. The teachers can teach themselves and then teach the students." I took the first publication of No-Glamour Grammar with me to Wunlang in January, and we used it in teacher training constantly. I like this series very much because it is fairly culturally neutral, and the answers are in the back!

The Wunlang pens came last week. We love them. We see the teachers sitting at their desks, not at a rickety platform of sticks, correcting the exercise books the students had never had before, until we began the Wunlang School Project. All because of you.

Rebecca L. Zimmerman, an early supporter of Village Help for South Sudan, sent us this video:



We have no formal affiliation with the organization that produced this simple, powerful clip. But we stand in solidarity with it. We are committed to educating girls and young women. We will develop enterprises where girls and young women have a stake and a voice. We plan to tackle health care in a place with one of the highest mother/infant mortality rates in the world. We will teach sanitation, and teach how to teach, so the girls and women can teach their famlies and their communities. As we drill more wells, build more schools, open health-care clinics and agriculture programs, educate more girls, the Girl Effect will spread from Wunlang throughout South Sudan.

Although our funding is short to furnish all the classrooms, we were very fortunate to get a grant that will cover furniture expenses for 4 classrooms. Our project to make desks and benches has begun! Using local resources and employing local people from the village, furniture making for the Wunlang School has started by milling the lumber to be used.

One of the few local woods impervious to termites is mahogany. Even though mahogany is a prevalent species in southern Sudan, we considered all the alternatives carefully before deciding on this approach. We consulted with the school committee and government officials in the process. Cutting trees in South Sudan requires special permission of the government. The authorization was granted 2 weeks ago by the Governor of Northern Bahr el Ghazal, then by the Minister of Agriculture, and finally by the Director of Forestry.

Today I heard from Yel that the lumber manufacturing had begun. We are hoping to make some of the desks before the grand opening ceremony. The Governor, Minister of Education, and other dignitaries will attend, and the furniture will provide the finishing touch we have all been dreaming of. Soon we will have pictures of the new School and its furniture.

In order for us to finish the job, however, we are seeking funds to pay for the other 4 classrooms' furniture as well as to furnish the teachers office, the PTA room, shelving for the storage room, and equipment and furnishings for the kitchen. As always, we rely on our generous donors to make the Wunlang School "miracle" a reality for the people of this remote village in South Sudan.

Angelo came to the United States in 2001 - one of the "Lost Boys of Sudan" resettled as refugees by the UNHCR and the U.S. State Department. Angelo says, "I was born in Kargal village in Aweil State. My payam is Wunlang. I was separated from my parents in 1987 by the civil war in Southern Sudan. I was forced by the situation to leave my mother’s home for the safety of my life…”

Angelo fled to Ethiopia, where he lived in a refugee camp from 1987 to 1991. At that time he was forced again back to Sudan, fleeing for safety once again as the situation grew hostile to the refugees in Ethiopia. Angelo continues, “In 1992 the Sudanese government attacked our camp in Pachalla County, and some of the 'Lost Boys' managed to escape… We settled again at Narus, in Kapoeta Conuty between Sudan and Kenya. Narus was also attacked in 1992, and we were forced again to move to Kenya, and we settled in Kakuma Refugee Camp from 1992-2001.” In Kakuma Angelo completed primary and secondary school. When he came to the United States, he settled in Syracuse, New York.

He went to Onondaga Community College, where he studied humanities. His matriculation was cut short by his need to travel back home for his marriage and to reunite with his parents in 2004-2005. While there, he witnessed the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which halted the long civil war in his country and brought peace to the area for the first time in more than 20 years.

Angelo and his wife, Angong Kuol Athian Mawien, now have two children: his daughter, Abuk Ngong Kiir, is 3 years old, and his son, Aleu Ngong Kiir, is 4 months. His wife and children live as refugees in Nairobi, Kenya. With a diploma in Nursing, Angelo has been able to support his family working hospital jobs and now as an office technical assistant. He will graduate in March 2009.

Franco will soon depart for his trip back to Wunlang. Once again, he will use his accrued vacation time from his job as social services case manager to pay another visit to his home village in South Sudan. There is always a lot to do on these short trips, but this trip could not be more important. The School is built, the wall plastering is done - inside and out. Soon the furniture making will begin. While Franco is there, his priorities will be:

• Coordinate the School's opening celebration. With help from the State Minister of Education, we hope the Governor's schedule will permit a brief visit to witness and accept the gift to Wunlang our supporters here in America. Other dignitaries will attend, and the school will be blessed by the village pastor.


• Acquiring and delivering school materials, many purchased from local markets, but some will travel with Franco from this country (see Lisa's blog entry on this topic).


• Meeting with the village Agriculture Committee and planning a sustainable support program.


• Meeting with the village Health Committee and assessing Wunlang's healthcare needs, including water, sanitation, and clinic facility and supplies.


• Meetings in Aweil and Juba for teacher training, family literacy, and partnerships with large NGO's and international donors, such as the UN and USAID.

Ron attended a seminar at MIT recently about energy solutions (as we continue our commitment to provide education and opportunity without a using a lot of diesel) and reported to us. His first point applies to any work we're doing, not just to energy solutions:

"So many large companies are developing solutions they say are for poor villagers, but which simply do not work in the village, because villagers themselves have not been involved in the needs assessment and design of the solutions."

Village Help for South Sudan always tries to remember that. Now, as we are planning for Franco's trip in November, we're planning what supplies he can bring to the teachers and the school. The heaviest and most common supplies -- exercise books and pencils -- we can now buy locally. But what, I asked, did the teachers especially want?

They want pens. This had not occurred to me. But now that they finally have exercise books to correct, they want correction pens, with red ink to mark errors. So Franco's luggage will contain a box of "Tri-Colored Jotters" -- those pens you can click back and forth between red, blue, and black ink -- personalized with the name of Wunlang School and Village Help for South Sudan.

We're shopping for other items, too. I know from talking to the headmaster that Wunlang School teachers need dictionaries and grammar books to improve their own English. I know from meeting with the teachers last January that they're incredibly curious about things they've heard about -- geometry, latitude and longitude ("When we call, why is it night in America and morning here?") -- so I'll be looking for those books and posters. I plan to include a beautiful world map from Raven Maps. We can only fill one suitcase up to 70 pounds, and books are heavy, so I'm shopping carefully. And I'm always trying to listen.

Franco, Ron, and I went to very interesting talk sponsored by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative titled, "Road to Referendum: Prospects for Success of Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement." Moderated by Jennifer Leaning, the co-director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, the speakers were David Gressly, regional director for the United Nations Mission in Sudan, and Alex de Waal, senior fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and co-director of Justice Africa in England.

The three presenters covered a lot of ground in 90 minutes. The history of Southern Sudan, the slowly-growing political structures in Southern Sudan after Comprehensive Peace Agreement (the CPA), the timetable of the 2009 elections and the 2011 referendum, the common features of post-conflict countries, were just a few of the topics discussed. But we were particularly interested in the role of education in the CPA.

Before the CPA, Mr. Gressly noted, around 20 percent of the boys and one percent of the girls of Southern Sudan had graduated from primary school. The current interim period, between the 2005 signing of the CPA and 2011 referendum on whether Sudan should be one country or two, is supposed to be a time when Southern Sudan is rebuilt. That is happening to some extent, but not nearly at the level it should be. Khartoum is not interested in rebuilding the South, Dr. de Waal noted -- it hopes to hold on to power by bribing the southern elite. The government is Juba is trying, but it completely new at this. There was no government in Juba before 2005.

Southern Sudan has fallen off the international radar, both men said. If reporters want to cover Sudan, they will be sent to Darfur -- editors think that situation, and not the situation in the south, will draw readers.

The governments in Sudan are not rebuilding the schools to provide an educated populace. The international community's attention is elsewhere.

So that leaves us. It has became clear that our work is not just something nice for one village, but a key part of rebuilding a shattered country. The more we can do, the greater the prospects that Southern Sudan can live and work and grow in peace.

I just stepped outside onto the plaza that surrounds my office building. The paved 4-lane avenue next to the plaza was busy with fast-moving mid-day traffic. People and vehicles were flowing without major obstruction or delay through this artery amidst the high rises of downtown Boston. Among the vehicles was a large tractor trailer rig with a heavy load. Painted in large letters across the back of the rig were the words “Sand & Gravel.”

Minutes before my noonday break I had called Yel for an update from the village of Wunlang. To finish the floors of the school, more cement was needed. This is the rainy season in South Sudan, so keeping things dry is not easy in this place without storage facilities. Sure, the Wunlang School has plenty of dry storage space, but when it rains in Wunlang, the area floods and the ground turns to mud. All roads to the village are impassible for most vehicles.

The cement is stored safely in Akuem - as far as it could be moved by motorized transport. To get it the rest of the way to the village of Wunlang, Yel has organized a horse-drawn cart. It will require several trips using this mode of transport, but it works. The horses and cart can navigate over flooded and muddy terrain without getting stuck, as a truck would. He will take pictures to send us.

Once again, I am reminded of the remarkable differences between life in Boston and the conditions that exist in the village where lives and livelihoods are just beginning to improve with our help. Thanks to our many generous and caring donors, people are healthier because of the clean drinking water we have provided, and students are learning in the shelter of the bricks, mortar, and metal roof of the Wunlang School.

A fast mode of transportation, however, will have to wait. Village healthcare and a school farm come next in our collaboration plans with the village committees. In the meantime, a horse-drawn cart gets the job done even without paved roads.