Update from Dane Smith 

AFRECS joined Five Talents in 2019 to begin trauma healing instruction for savings groups of women and young men in Renk, capital of Upper Nile State.  The project was originally envisioned by the dynamic Bishop of Renk Diocese, Bishop Joseph Garang Atem.  Implementation is being undertaken by Five Talents and the Mothers Union.  Training of trainers has been supervised by the South Sudan Episcopal Justice, Peace and Reconciliation Committee.  AFRECS Executive Director Dane Smith, visiting Renk in February with Five Talents coordinator Anne Figge, came away impressed by the enthusiasm of the groups for the trauma healing element of the training.

During 2020, the project was locked down because of COVID in April, but 15 groups resumed in July, even in the face of severe flooding in the region. Seven more groups are expected to launch before the end of the year.  The groups meet weekly with each participant seeking to add very small amounts of their own savings to the pool.  Typically groups involving women spend their first year focusing on literacy and numeracy before getting basic financial training.  Young men are more likely to be literate and move more directly into learning financial skills.  Trauma healing instruction, with heavy emphasis on group discussion, is integrated into the other kinds of training. Five Talents and AFRECS are fortunate to have working with the groups two highly skilled chief trainers in trauma healing, Amer Deng Ayom and Ajak John Manyang.  Both organizations have worked to adapt the Quaker-initiated trauma healing curriculum initially applied to draw more on the Scripture lessons and Christian rituals familiar to South Sudanese Christians.

There is high demand for more trauma healing training for a South Sudan population that has been devastated by civil war, violence and chronic sexual assault against women.  AFRECS is therefore exploring with Five Talents the possibility of additional programming, particularly in Equatoria, the southern third of the country  Five Talents has recently launched a program for savings groups in the Diocese of Terekeka, a heavily rural and poor area north of Juba, where trauma healing may be appropriate.

In its approach to Equatoria, AFRECS would like to benefit from the experience of Retired Canon Sylvester Thomas Kambaya and his Education and Peace Foundation.  Canon Sylvester has been doing trauma healing work in Mundri Diocese, west of Terekeka, which he topped off in late 2019 with a successful four-day workshop for generals and civilian government officials from the area, including opposition military from SPLA/IO. There were about 90 participants.  The Mundri work has drawn on a workshop curriculum, Healing the Wounds of Trauma: How the Church Can Help, developed by the American Bible Society.

AFRECS is currently consulting with DT-Global, a firm which recently won a five-year $67 million USAID contract to continue conflict mitigation and peacebuilding in South Sudan working with civil society and religious leaders.  One of the foci of the project, which is just getting underway, is trauma awareness.   We will be working to link DT-Global with Episcopal church leaders active in peacebuilding, as project leaders seek to identify key locations for activity.  Ultimately, we are interested in whether the project can provide some support for faith-based trauma healing training.

Executive Director

Condition of Girls in South Sudan

In the African Report on Child Wellbeing 2020, released during the weekend of 21 November 2020, the non-profit organization African Child Policy Forum named South Sudan as one of the three worst African countries in their treatment of girls. The report classified nations according to their care for girls in the areas of healthcare, education and protection under the law.

According to the report, more than 80 percent of girls in the country do not have access to primary education. Child marriage, malnutrition, mental health challenges and human trafficking are also major threats to the welfare of South Sudanese girls. Gender-based violence, affecting both women and girls, has increased in South Sudan during the current coronavirus pandemic, according to the UN Population Fund and the South Sudanese Ministry of Gender, Child and Social Welfare.

(Source: Eye Radio)

Continuing Differences over Pending New Constitution for South Sudan

The South Sudanese National Dialogue Conference closed on Tuesday, 17 November 2020, at which time the delegates issued a communique detailing the resolutions they have adopted. The Conference has endorsed a federal structure, with both federal and state levels of government. The Conference’s resolutions include:

State governments will enjoy a certain level of autonomy. Executive, legislative and judicial branches will exist at both levels. At the national level, the presidency will consist of five-year terms, limited to two terms for each president. The national capital shall be moved to Ramcel. Security and economic issues will be the responsibility of the national government. 32+ states will be established in the country, to be determined according to factors such as population and territoriality.

President Salva Kiir Mayardit has announced that the resolutions established by the Conference will be incorporated in the national constitution. It has been suggested that a select committee be appointed to follow up on implementation of the Conference’s resolutions.

(Sources: Eye Radio, The East African)

Physician, Public Health Specialist — and Author

Sacrifice and other short stories, by Edward Eremugo Kenyi
Reviewed by Richard J. Jones

To our list of physicians who are also writers — including Atul Gawande, William Carlos Williams, and Saint Luke — we can now add the name of Edward Eremugo Kenyi. This entrancing collection of fourteen short stories — published by Africa World Books, which is supported by the British historian of Sudan, Prof. Douglas H. Johnson — lets us taste being Sudanese. We are offered glimpses of children’s village life at home and in after-school adventures, the life of a Southern professional in Khartoum during the 1983-2005 war, con men at work in Juba while Independence Day fireworks are going off, and the search for companionship among the North American diaspora. One story deals with sibling rivalry which threatens the survival of Africans living in space 300 years after Earth has become unlivable. Readers of the Lost Boy genre of autobiography will encounter here something more modest and less hortatory. The diverse narrators of these stories speak with candor, wit, and rue.

Recommended as a Christmas gift for any friend of the Church in the Sudans, and any neighbor of Diaspora residents of North America.

The book was published in 2020 by Africa World Books, with ISBN number 978-0-6488415-8-6. Available from Amazon here.

Signed copies are available from the author at $15 including postage to anywhere in the US. Contact eremugo@gmail.com for details. Kenyi is a physician and currently works in the field of international public health at Johns Hopkins University. He is member of Maryland’s South Sudanese Christian fellowship.

AFRECS ACTS

Larry Duffee Joins Board of AFRECS

Beginning in 2010, Lawrence R. Duffee, MBA, MPA spent three years as a missionary from The Episcopal Church in the USA to the Episcopal Church of Sudan, after initially intending to devote only four weeks assisting with accounting in the the office of the Provincial Secretary in Juba. Thereafter he worked for three years with IMA (Interchurch Medical Assistance)World Health, followed by four years with the British civil engineering firm Mott MacDonald in their program to encourage enrollment and retention of girls in school, all of it in South Sudan.

He returned to the US in March 2020 and resumed working with IMA World Health (now under the umbrella of Corus International) as an International Finance Analyst.  In this role he provides support to IMA’s office in South Sudan and remains engaged with developments in that country. Recently elected unanimously to the Board of AFRECS, Duffee will take over the duties of Treasurer in 2021 from Bradford Langmaid, Jr.. Duffee’s home parish is St George’s Episcopal Church in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He is married with one young child.

Today is Giving Tuesday

As you renew your commitments, and examine your giving, please remember our work in the Sudans – Sudan and South Sudan, supporting faith-based peacebuilding.  Help us continue teaching and caring for the orphans in the United Nations POC3 Camp near Juba.  Help us expand trauma healing training for women and youth.

We, and they, offer our heartfelt THANKS for your gift – large or small!

AFRECS – American Friends of the Episcopal Church of the Sudans 

Board members Frederick E. Gilbert and Gwinneth A. Clarkson contributed to editing this issue.