Thomas Guest Post from Sudan/South Africa

Thomas wrote an update newsletter from South Africa describing his experiences in Sudan for circulation amongst his many fans. Since several of my readers count themselves as fans of Thomas, I am posting his letter.

However,(ATTENTION AUNT CHRIS!!!) no one is allowed to suggest (EVEN HINT!) that I forfeit my self-bestowed title of the best of the (West) Maffai bloggers. Because 99% of blogging is putting it on the net... and so, without further ado, I give you Thomas' update from South African/Sudan:

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Greetings from South Africa!

I arrived this week to this nation that is buzzing with excitement of World Cup fever and after a month in rural Southern Sudan with the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation. I am still re-adjusting to so many stimuli: paved roads, electricity, real showers, so many options of food. I find myself overwhelmed at making even the smallest of decisions and I long for the quiet simplicity that I have known for the past month.

I lived in a hut, without electricity, near the school campus. Most of the teachers I worked with lived with me. We ate the same meal twice a day, every day, showered with buckets, and played soccer with the students after school. We were a 30 minute walk to the village and my excitement for the week was walking to town on Sunday, market day, to the main road, an unpaved stretch of road bordered by small shops where mostly Darfurian Arabs trade goods from the north. It is the market where the entire village gathers each week to purchase goods, catch up with friends, people-watch, and flirt with potential wives. The elders sit under a tree and argue and laugh and hold somewhat informal court hearings to settle disputes. Men haggle over the price of cattle and goats. Women walk with massive bundles of firewood or large jerry cans of water carried on their heads.

While my time at the school was short, I feel as though I was able to make an impact. This wasn’t really made evident to me until my last day when the school held a goodbye assembly for me in which the teachers and students made speeches and a goat was slaughtered in my name. I worked mostly with the teachers many of whom had only a secondary education themselves. With no teacher training, computers, electricity, and very few textbooks, the teachers tended to provide their students with lessons modeled after their own educational experiences; based almost entirely on rote memorization and simple recall of information. With only one textbook for some courses, some of the teachers deemed it a necessary use of class-time to copy the textbook on to the blackboard and have the students copy this into their notebooks verbatim.

I facilitated daily workshops after school to reinforce basic teaching methodology, targeting the specific challenges of teaching and learning in such a rural area with very few resources. During the school day, I would plan and teach model classes for the teachers to demonstrate the skills we focused on. We set staff goals to use real world examples that the students can connect with, to present material in diverse ways (aside from copying notes on the board), to provide students with positive feedback, give the students many opportunities to practice the skills they were learning. Giving the teachers the tools and motivation to implement activities that encourage critical thinking, and use pertinent real world examples became my focus.

After one week, I was thrilled to see the teachers making an effort to incorporate engaging activities in their lessons. The biology teacher had her students plant bean sprouts to observe the impact of light on plant growth. The chemistry teacher took on a mad scientist persona as he began to walk around the school with his arms full of test tubes and chemicals for daily demonstrations. The English teacher had students stand up with pronouns on index cards, replacing the nouns on the blackboard. They were small steps forward, but as you walked through the outdoor hallways peering through the glassless window frames into the classrooms, the difference was noticeable.

Wanting to also work directly with the students, I began teaching an intensive world history mini-course. With no history textbooks the school was not offering any history curriculum. The students were incredibly motivated and curious and would constantly try to persuade me to come to their classroom during empty periods for more lessons. Every day after class they would rush to the front of the room to get a closer look at the one world map we had, they would ask endless questions. “If Africa is the cradle of civilization, why are we so far behind other continents in terms of development” “Why was Europe able to colonize almost the entire world?” “Why are there more dark-skinned people at central latitudes and lighter-skinned people near the poles?” “Why do African Americans speak English and not their mother tongue?” “Why does the east coast of the Americas resemble the west-coast of Africa?” Their curiosity and drive to learn was staggering.

I find it difficult to share my thoughts and feelings about these past few weeks. Having seen and experienced so much, it is difficult to communicate the importance of certain experiences to others. I thought it would be best to share with you some of the thoughts I wrote down while I was in Sudan.

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First impressions…
I am not one to journal, but being somewhat isolated in this rural village, I am left with few forms of entertainment.

I arrived yesterday… Finally , after over a year of planning, two months of waiting in Egypt, a flight to Nairobi, Kenya, a flight to Juba, the capital of Southern Sudan, a UN-chartered flight to Wau and then another to Aweil, followed by a 2 hour drive in a land cruiser on a dirt road, I finally arrive in Marial Bai. I have never been to a place so rural, so seemingly forgotten by the rest of the fast-paced internet- and caffeine- powered world. Yet the similarities are what really strike me. When I observe a class on abstract nouns or the process of photosynthesis, I could be here, in Marial Bai, or Miami Jackson, or even Redmond High School. The students face an obvious lack of resources but instead of being shocked at how little they have, I am shocked by how much they are able to learn. They have very few textbooks, sometimes only one per class. In 100 degree heat with not even a breeze, the students are crammed into the classrooms, over 40 students to a room with no desks, sitting in plastic chairs. The air is stifling and the students are dripping sweat as the try to concentrate. I am reminded of the days at Miami Jackson, when the air conditioning would break. I remember how sluggish the students and teachers would be and how difficult it was for teaching and learning to happen. But here, where the heat is constant and there is no alternative, the teachers and students push through and stay amazingly focused.

The teachers are up against a lot of challenges and are lacking many skills. But for the most part, they are hardworking and caring and willing to learn. Three of them are Kenyan women who have come to Sudan to teacher here. They live with me on the compound behind the school. The other 5 teachers are Sudanese men who are originally from the area, two of whom are live on the compound with us. They have been incredibly welcoming. The Sudanese help me out with their insider knowledge and insight into Sudan. Several of them are originally from Marial Bai and are only now returning after 11 years in Uganda. They have only a high school education themselves, but their eagerness to learn and hardworking nature is developing them quickly into teachers.

On women and cows…
Part of the school’s mission is to recruit young female girls. We are in the process of completing a girls’ dormitory which will hopefully attract many more, but right now there are very few girls. The women in Dinka culture work very hard. Every morning when I wake up at 7:00 and look over the straw fence, I see the women already at work in the fields. They sit on their knees to dig through the dirt and cultivate enough crops (mostly sorghum) to feed their families. They live in huts made of mud bricks and straw roofs with dirt floors. My hut has a cement floor and a blue tarp reinforcing the thatched roof. As I lie here writing, an early rainy season thunderstorm is raging outside. I wonder how the families whose huts aren’t as luxurious as mine are faring right now. Now that the rains are coming, several of our female students have already been taken out of school by their families to cultivate and tend to the crops. We will also lose several girls each year who are married of and no longer able to attend school. I recently learned that several of our male students are already married and have several wives. Polygamy is common here and a symbol of affluence. Aside from women, cows are the next most important sign of affluence. If you asked my students what they want to be when the grow up, many of them would tell you they want to be cattle-herders. Cattle is the legal tender for paying dowries and the going rate for a new bride is anywhere between 50-200 cattle. The cattle are actually delivered on the day of the wedding and therefore the day’s festivities include inspection of and negotiation for the cattle, sending back the sick or skinny ones. Sometimes, families can even just send their daughter to a man’s house offering her as a bride. If a man sleeps with a woman out of wedlock, he is expected to take her on as a wife. If he chooses not to, he can, instead, compensate the family of the girl with a fine of two cows for taking their daughter’s virginity and thus rendering her useless for fetching a dowry.

On the war…
The site where the school is now located was actually a mass grave a little more than a decade ago. The dead were civilian casualties of the brutal civil war that has plagued Sudan for decades between the mostly Muslim, Arabic speaking north and the mostly Christian south. It is difficult to tell how much of the violence was political; the work of governments and armies, and how much of it arises from a long history of complex inter-tribal conflict. Marial Bai is just south of the north-south border, about 30 miles from Darfur. These hazy borderlands have served for centuries as both a point of contention and one of connection between very different cultures. Arabs traders bring goods and products down from Khartoum in the North and many nomadic Arab herding tribes bring their cattle south during the dry season to graze on the wetter soils of the South. My students speak Dinka, their mother tongue, Arabic the language of the northern government, and English, the colonial language and the language of the future Southern Sudan. Today it is difficult to differentiate between politically motivated vestiges of the civil war and seemingly endless revenge killings resulting form intertribal conflict across complicated and sometimes hazy ethnic divisions. Gun shots were heard this morning and many some suspect that it might be an anticipated revenge of the killing of several Arabs a few months ago.

I am told that many of our students are actually ex-soldiers. As I watch them struggle through math problems, hunched over the papers on their laps as they sit in plastic chairs and straining their eyes to see the faint chalk on the scratched blackboard, I find it hard to imagine them as soldiers with guns.

The students…
The extent to which these students are going to get their education is incredible. The school is not equipped to be a boarding school yet. However there is a small building near the teacher huts that will eventually become a girls dormitory. In the meantime, many of the boys, who come from great distances, have asked to stay there in its unfinished state. It started with just a few but now there are over 30 boys sleeping in the rooms. We are still waiting for more beds to be brought from Uganda so many are choosing to sleep on mattresses on the floor. The rainy season is beginning and the water is driving the spiders and the large black scorpions indoors so it is risky to sleep on the floor but may of the students the only other option is stay at home, out of reach of the school. They eat nothing for breakfast, a bowl of sorghum and beans for lunch and another one for dinner. There are no latrines built yet so the students go to the bathroom in the bush. When it rains, the unfinished roof leaks, they have no electricity and the well from which they drink looks questionable. We informed them that we aren’t yet equipped to be a boarding school but many readily accept the squalid conditions in order to continue studying. Many are sick with stomach problems and diarrhea. In spite of this they are still so focused on school. They are smart and most are very well-spoken in English, their second (or third) language. They are incredibly respectful and appreciative. They often share one textbook per class, they play soccer after school each day, barefooted on the gravel. The boarding students petitioned us to open up a classroom in the evenings so they could have a place to study. Each night after spending all day stuffed into the classrooms, the voluntarily return to the unlit school in the dark to sit unsupervised and study in near silence for two more hours by flashlight.
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Looking back…
I am currently driving across South Africa, hiking and catching a few World Cup games here and there. I am reading What is the What by Dave Eggers for the second time. This is the remarkable story of Valentino Achak Deng and his experience walking from Marial Bai, across Sudan to Ethiopia, spending over a decade in a refugee camp in Kenya, and then his resettlement into my own country. The proceeds from this book, combined with Valentino’s commitment to improve educational opportunities in his home is what has made this incredible school possible. It is strange to read the book again after being in Marial Bai. Valentino is no longer just a character in a book to me. He is my good friend. Sudan is no longer an unknown far-away place. It is a friendly, beautiful place with problems that belong to real people. It is so strange to reread the book after meeting all the “characters” and to realize that their stories are so real. I met hundreds of Sudanese with their own stories incredibly tragic, unfair, gut-wrenching and inspiring.

The atmosphere now in Sudan is hopeful, but cautious. With the referendum just a few months away, the south will vote for either separation from or unity with the north. As always in Sudan, the future is unpredictable, but it is obvious that Sudan is on the precipice of much transformation. I have not met one person who plans to vote for unity with the North. The students place so much value on their education. They see it as their only shot at improving their own personal future, but they also see it as their responsibility in the nation-building process of the New Sudan. I feel fortunate to have seen this country now, at such a formative moment for both the country and myself. I will return next month to the United States to begin grad school with new perspective on people and the world.

Thank you to everyone for your support. During my work, I depended on the kindness and receptiveness of the Sudanese, but it was my family and friends who provided me with the love, encouragement, free medical advice, on-the-ground connections, financial donations, thoughts, and prayers that got me to Sudan in the first place and I am grateful. It is truly inspiring to be the link between the community in my home country and the community in Sudan. On behalf of the students and teachers with whom I worked, thank you for your support. They, as I, are grateful.


Thank you,

Thomas

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From the forward of What is the What, written by Valentino:

“My desire to have this book written was born out of my faith and beliefs in humanity; I wanted to reach out to others to help them understand Sudan’s place in our global community…I am blessed to have lived to inform you that even when my hours were darkest, I believed that someday I could share my experiences with others. This book is a form of struggle, and it keeps my spirit alive to struggle. To struggle is to strengthen my faith, my hope and my belief in humanity. Since you and I exist, together we can make a difference!”