With the Wunlang School nearly complete, I asked Yel to tell us, in his own words, what the school means to the people of Wunlang. Here is what he said:

"There is excitement everywhere."

"We have achieved great things for the people of Wunlang."

"We wish you were here with us. Everyone for miles around knows the names of the Americans who did this for us."

"We have changed the situation in Wunlang forever."

"The village workers are thankful to have jobs and get paid for the first time in their lives. They take their pay to the market and buy sorghum for their families each day."

"I am very grateful to be your Field Manager. Thank you for teaching me how to manage a project like this."

After three attempts to get our photos of Wunlang School construction to computers in America, it's finally happened. (It ultimately involved collaboration between our field manager, the office of the Governor of Northern Bahr-el-Ghazal, and one of Jackson's business colleagues.) The e-mail has been flying as the board members have been discussing them. Truly, when I first saw them, my heart beat a little faster.



The photos are our photo web site, www.wunlang.smugmug.com, under the "School Construction" gallery. You'll see the construction process in chronological order, beginning with the foundation digging photos and videos we brought back from our January trip.

We've had a lot of discussion about the school's foundation. Franco has confirmed with Yel that our foundation is firm -- concrete, made with cement, sand, and stone aggregate, with reinforcing bar. The photos show the first layer of bricks being laid atop the foundation. From there, the walls are built; the roof trusses arrive; the roof is raised and the corrugated iron roofing installed.

There's more to do. Our school will have a smooth cement stucco-like finish and cream-colored paint. Our doors, windows, and classroom furniture are on tap. Franco plans to call our builder to discuss the final details. Jackson will be organizing an inspection of our school to take place before our next trip.

The latrines are also under construction, and those who read my post on World Water Day know how happy I am to see that. The teachers' office is almost complete. We'll also have a kitchen and food-storage area. With latrines and food storage, we can now apply for food aid from the UN's World Food Programme.

It is amazing that a dream -- to build a school in a remote part of Southern Sudan -- has literally, with the help of all our supporters, risen out of the ground. Check out those photos!

We are delighted to add Jackson Garang Ajou to our Board of Directors, by unanimous vote at our last quarterly meeting. Franco had contacted Jackson through the Mading Aweil web site, where the Aweil disaspora all meet. During our January trip, he was a tremendous help to us. Since we've been back, he's been even more. He shepherded our NGO registration with the Government of South Sudan. Now we have tax-free status there and the same organizational standing as the UN, the World Bank,and other big NGOs. He set up our Juba bank account with Kenya Commercial Bank. He really has been Our Man in Juba ("Maybe Jackson can do it," we e-mail each other), and will represent us well to the NGO community and to the Government of South Sudan.


Jackson holds a secondary certificate from Majak Akoon Upper Primary School and a two-year diploma from Cambridge International College. He also holds certificates from Marial Lou Veterinary Institute and Teacher Training Institute in Rumbek. In a world where further education is hard to get, he has completed numerous training sessions with the UN, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization on everything from creating spreadsheets to demobilizing child soldiers. ("I am more practical than academic," he writes.) The SPLA taught him radio operation.

He has worked for the World Bank, the Sudan Joint Assessment Mission, and UNICEF. His first job was supervising 64 Community Animal Health Workers. He most recently has formed the start-up company Hi-Tech Business Solutions to provide computer and media support to the South Sudan community.

Jackson's married, and the troubles in Abyei have touched him personally -- two of his wife's brothers were killed in the recent fighting there. When we sent condolence e-mails, his main concern was that this conflict not deter us from our mission of providing education and opportunity in South Sudan. Now that Jackson has joined our board, we'll have even greater success reaching our goals.

The situation in Abyei --"oil-rich Abyei," the media explains, claimed by the North and the South, the home of the Dinka Ngok -- at this writing, is calm. But this is after the marketplace has burned to the ground and thousands of people have fled. The BBC has a good summary of what has happened.

Abyei is to the northeast of Wunlang, hundreds of miles away. People who are leaving Abyei are not coming as far as Bahr-el-Ghazal. We are watching this situation (as we have with the fighting in Khartoum earlier) closely. We are continuing to build Wunlang School and to make plans for the future. We are showing that the future can be bright in Southern Sudan.

Even casual followers of current events know that Sudan is popping up on the national news again. The Darfur rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) launched, of all things, an attack on Sudan's capital Khartoum; it's been beaten back; prominent opposition leader Hassan al-Turabi is arrested and released; Chad, accused of backing this attack, closes its border with Sudan; cars burn in the capital's streets.

What does this have to do with Wunlang School? Today, nothing. Wunlang is hundreds and hundreds of miles away. We are still making plans to drill more wells. Our school is still being built.

But we keep an eye on political events in our area of Northern Bahr-al-Ghazal, and the semi-autonomous Government of South Sudan, and what goes on "in the North." Far-away politics can have an impact on isolated rural areas. We read the BBC's African news, the most objective source. Allafrica.com and the news pages on Sudan.net require more sifting to determine who's the straight reporter and who's the propagandist. We check with our personal contacts, too. Politics is a strange creature, and we keep up with it to make sure we can press on with our work of bringing education and opportunity to South Sudan.

Ron has e-mailed us:

Jackson tells me that today {May 1} is a holiday in South Sudan, so we should celebrate the hard work of our village and crews working so hard on this labor day! Yel says the second 4 classrooms are now completely enclosed in their walls! Apparently, there have been several days without rain, so great progress has been made.

Since the beginning of March, the first four classrooms have been completed and roofed. With a roof overhead, the crew was able to store the remaining bags of cement in a dry building, a good thing, because it is raining up to 10 hours a day. But as Ron reports, our crew is making hay, or building school, when the sun shines.

Today we made a presentation at the adult forum of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Arlington, one of our faithful supporters. We showed the progress that had been made during our January/February trip. Pastor Goodman asked if we would come back when our new photos arrived. You can be sure the e-mail will be flying when those photos do arrive. If your group has an interest in a presentation, let us know.

Ron talks to our field manager Yel often, and e-mails the other directors a summary. "The three latrines are built," a one-sentence paragraph in his last message, made me leap out of my seat with joy.

When we were in Africa, Ron and I talked about posting a blog called "Adventures in Elimination." We didn't, partly because toilet humor is funny (except for those perpetual middle-schoolers) only in the moment, but mainly because it seemed an affront to our hosts, who keep their dignity and privacy in conditions that boggle our minds.

But there's no place to go. I don't mind going in the bushes, but there are no bushes. Wunlang does not have the thick cover of the New England deciduous forest. And for a remote area, Wunlang has a lot of paths coursing through it. There's not much cover between the paths.

Ron and I only had about four days to figure out what to do. We left just as I was getting the hang of things. And I must say that women have a more difficult time of this. Men may take a "short call" just about where they are standing. Women don't. I was led out at night by Franco's female relatives to an open place where there was no cover, but where my companion served as a lookout.

This year, 2008, is the UN's International Year of Santation. Having good sanitary facilities matters, especially to women and girls. As the UN reports:

Sanitation enhances dignity, privacy and safety, especially for women and girls. It improves convenience and social status. Sanitation in schools enables children, especially girls reaching puberty, to remain in the educational system. Restricted toilet opportunities increase the chance of chronic constipation and is making women vulnerable to violence if they are forced to defecate during nightfall and in secluded areas. Providing improved sanitation facilities is a liberating development for women and girls and is providing substantial benefits for the whole community.

Our latrines are brick; one for boys, one for girls, and one for teachers. There are no seats; there is most likely a concrete floor and a rectangular opening. It's daunting for Americans at first (I first used one in 2004), but, with practice, it's easy to use and easy to clean.

We have plans beyond the simple latrine. We'd like to build composting toilets that produce usable, agricultural-grade compost for our school gardens. But I'm really ready to go back to Wunlang now. We have the only latrines for miles around.

Yel has been taking photos of the building of Wunlang School. You cannot imagine how eager we are to see them. And they are tantalizingly close to viewing. They're on a flash drive in Aweil. The SPLA Computer Center, where I posted a blog entry in January, has the flash drive. It has John Adup, the center's director, who knows all about uploading photos. It doesn't have enough diesel to power the computers' generator.

So what can we learn from this? That patience is a virtue. That we will get the photos, just as we got our money transferred, even though it seemed like the money would never come. And that we are pursuing the right path by not relying on diesel power. Solar power doesn't start up with a reassuring roar of a diesel generator. It's not as popular as diesel generators are in South Sudan. But its availability is not based on the vagaries of OPEC, trouble at the port of Mombassa, trouble at the north/south Sudan border, and trouble with the generator. As Yel and others in Wunlang become more skilled in uploading photos, you can be sure the process will be powered by the sun that shines on Wunlang.

Franco and I called Yel today. We both work full time, so we try to make our calls to Africa on the weekend, even if that takes time from Easter Sunday activities. We are all eager to receive photos of the school under construction, but our field manager has been so busy with project activities in Wunlang, that he has not had time to make the 2-hour (each way) journey to Aweil and back. With the time spent in the SPLA computer center transferring images from camera to the Internet, this will take most of the day. He thinks he will be able to do this on Wednesday.

The estimated completion date for the whole school is predicted to be just about the time this year’s rainy season begins. All the construction materials are currently stacked under the trees and scattered around the village center within easy reach of the building crew. Even if some finish work is still going on when the rains start, there will be ample storage under the roof of the portion that is complete, protecting the materials for water damage.

The major activity Yel told us about today is the demanding task of getting sand and stone to the construction site. You may have seen our video of the men digging the foundation trench when we visited Wunlang in January. Getting sand and stone is more labor-intensive in South Sudan without the luxury of automated machinery used here. The sand comes from one location a short distance from Wunlang. Some men go with the truck to dig and shovel the sand into the truck, and others assist with the shovel-by-shovel unloading when the truck arrives back in the village.

Gravel is very scarce in this part of Southern Sudan, but the aggregate is a necessary ingredient in the concrete mixture. Wherever Franco, Lisa, and I traveled on our trip to Sudan in January, we looked, but did not see, a single gravel stone. Gravel for the Wunlang school is trucked from a much more distant location than the sand. This is by far the most strenuous task the villagers are doing to build their school. Using pick axes and other hand tools, the men break up the stone in this distant quarry and shovel it into the truck. Having worked construction jobs during summers when I was in college, my back painfully recalls the agony of this repetitive “grunt” work. To deliver the hand-chiseled aggregate to the site of the school involves hours of travel time and gallons of expensive fuel for the truck. One load a day is all the pace and distance of this work will allow.

Today I thank God for the blessing of the Wunlang School, but I also thank the hard-working men of Wunlang for contributing the labor that is building the School – their school – one brick at a time and one shovel at a time.

The UN holds a World Water Day every year, to call attention to all those parts of the world that don't have access to clean water. How will you celebrate today?

Here at Village Help for South Sudan, we're making plans to drill a second well. People are walking hours to get to the well we have. A second well should lessen the demand on the well near the school, lessen the chance of breakage, and give relief to the women and girls who are making that long, difficult journey every day.

This year, the UN is pointing out that clean water is the first step to good sanitation. Providing clean, safe drinking water is to Wunlang is our first step. Providing latrines is next. We have plans to train people in the repair of the wells we have, and to upgrade the wells to make them less likely to break down.

Every time we go to the bathroom, wash our hands, take a shower, do a load of wash, turn on the the tap to make coffee and tea, let's remember World Water Day.