AFRECS E-Blast: January 20, 2022

Update from Dane Smith 

A Backward Glance. Although 2021 could not be described as a good year in either South Sudan or Sudan, AFRECS was able to continue strong support for the Episcopal Church of South Sudan.  Glow MAPS (previously known as the war orphan school), led by Bishop John Gatteck at the displaced persons camp near Juba, grew from 350 to 500 students in grades 1-8.  It benefited from construction of new classrooms funded by St. Margaret’s Episcopal of Annapolis MD.  Our trauma healing program, attached to the nurture of saving groups by our partner Five Talents, expanded from Renk, Upper Nile, to Terekeka, Central Equatoria, in part because of a grant from the Gadsden Foundation (Grace Episcopal Church, Lexington VA).  AFRECS was able to finalize an arrangement to fund well drilling, essential infrastructure for the new campus of the Episcopal University of South Sudan.

Planning for 2022.  As the coronavirus and security permit, I plan to visit both Sudan and South Sudan. Hopefully, one or more Board members will accompany me.  AFRECS Treasurer Larry Duffee has been representing us in Juba this month, visiting his wife Suzy and carrying on AFRECS business.  This year we seek to increase support for teachers for the enlarged student body at Glow MAPs, while completing construction of school-related facilities.  Five Talents and AFRECS expect to increase the number of savings groups applying trauma healing curricula to their members in Renk and Terekeka.  We will continue to mobilize financial support for water infrastructure and scholarships for the Episcopal University.  We hope to greet many friends of AFRECS at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Baltimore July 7-14.  I also hope to travel to US churches with Sudanese congregations or ongoing relationships with Sudanese dioceses.

Meanwhile, amid the continuing failure of government to secure peace and law and order in South Sudan, peacebuilding continues to function at the local level.  In the waning days of December the South Sudan Council of Churches (SSCC) facilitated a peace agreement in Eastern Equatoria.  The Ibahure and Lohutuk communities in Lafon Country agreed to end five years of violence, often related to the theft of cattle.  The SSCC and PAX South Sudan (an offshoot of the Dutch faith-based peace organization) brought together elders, women, youth, and local and county authorities to encourage the agreement.  A second three-day peace conference in Pibor near the northeast border with Ethiopia  brought together Murle, Lou Nuer, and Dinka leaders.  They agreed to recommit to peaceful coexistence.

Three other positive signs for peace as the new year begins:  First, UNMISS, the UN peacekeeping force in South Sudan, reported that violence against civilians had decreased by 37 percent during the July-September period by comparison with the same quarter in 2020.  Violence fell sharply in Jonglei and Pibor, although it increased in Tambura in Western Equatoria.  Second, Sant’Egidio, the lay peacebuilding organization attached to the Vatican, reported agreement to renew negotiations among non-signatories to the 2018 peace agreement, including several groups that had previously rejected inclusion. Third, Archbishop Gallagher, the Vatican Secretary for Relations with States, visited Juba December 21-23 to meet with political and religious authorities, possibly laying the groundwork for a Papal visit to South Sudan in 2022.  If it occurs, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby would likely accompany the pontiff.

The political future of Sudan became increasingly uncertain January 1, when Transitional Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok resigned.  His resignation had been expected. Lacking civilian support and apparently unable to exercise the leverage his reinstatement might have given him with the military, he recognized that he did not have a way forward.  His departure eliminates any vestige of legitimacy the post October 25 government might have had, but leaves the future uncertain.  Popular protests are continuing, even as the death count of civilians  continues to rise.  Seven died on January 17 alone. The protests are organized, often relying on neighborhood “resistance committees,” created during the period before the overthrow of Bashir, but still operating.  These committees are now demanding total civilian control of the transition. The military government is reportedly looking for a civilian figure to replace Hamdok, but prospective candidates are being deterred by the likely absence of popular support if they accept the appointment.

The State Department reiterates, “The United States continues to stand with the people of Sudan as they push for democracy. Violence against protesters must cease.” On January 17 Ambassador Lucy Tamblyn, a former director of the Sudan-South Sudan office, was appointed Chargé d’Affaires in Khartoum, pending nomination and confirmation of a new US ambassador to Sudan.

Executive Director

Why Haven’t You Left?
First Executive Director of AFRECS, Nancy Mott Frank, reflects on her decades-long involvement with the people of South Sudan.

Why would a middle-aged Caucasian woman in Rochester, New York become impassioned over South Sudan and with refugees arriving from that place?   Three reasons:  watching Lost Boys cope; taking an anthropology course that helped me see the world through tribal eyes; and an American missionary named Marc Nikkel.

As part-time Outreach Coordinator of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in 1996, I was trying to interest the congregation in the newest group of refugees to settle in Rochester. We are an outer-ring city congregation, long known for refugee work. At my invitation, Marc Nikkel visited our church.  Within a week, he was able to marry Christian faith, Dinka culture, liturgy, humor, history and reflection with our need to serve. My congregation became involved with the Lost Boys of 2000 (including Salva Dut, of Water for South Sudan). As advocates, we helped find housing and cars. We taught cooking and how to navigate government agencies.  We also funded theological education for Sudanese pastors, and provided facilities for study in refugee camps in Kenya.

The Sudanese lived a faith I had never seen before. One Sunday I took a group of refugees to a church in Rochester that they wanted to visit. The offering plate came to me unexpectedly. I was debating the bills in my wallet – “This one is too little; this one is too much.”  Then I watched as the Sudanese ­emptied their wallets into the plate. I learned the young men wouldn’t take good jobs with a local grocery store chain because they wouldn’t work on Sundays. They needed to go to church. I organized carpools to get them there.

I grew to be good friends with Marc Nikkel, who was supported by the Episcopal Church in the U.S. and the Church Missionary Society in the U.K.  I itinerated several of his USA and Irish trips to drum up interest in the issues of Sudan, the refugees there and here, and the Sudanese Church.  In 1998 I joined an exploratory Episcopal Church trip to South Sudan.   It was revelatory to be in an outdoor early morning congregation of 3,000 Episcopalians singing and praying, and to watch youth dancing joyfully. This was not the faith of my youth. This faith was alive — full of energy. It captured me, heart and soul.  It helped sustain my energies back home as I hauled furniture and sorted out bureaucratic snafus for the Rochester Sudanese.

Auditing a friend’s anthropology course gave me more understanding of these young men.  Their almost immediate need to purchase cars was a power symbol, replacing their traditional focus on cattle.  Whereas I carried a purse containing my important things, the Christians in Sudan carried crosses. In the village of Wuningor after a particularly muddy arrival in a dugout canoe , the women welcomed our group with foot washing.  This was not the one-footed, delicate version I have experienced on Maundy Thursday in my American church. This was a thorough, gentle, loving, caring wash.

The faith I saw and experienced through the Sudanese was the center of their lives. It didn’t fit in around their lives. It was their lives. It was in their souls. I could feel that, and it captured me.

It has been 20 years since those early days of Sudanese refugees in Rochester. Many of the Lost Boys brought Sudanese women to the USA to marry. Most moved to the Midwest or West for better jobs to support their families, or to be in a larger community of Sudanese. Families have separated due to domestic violence. Most of the first refugees struggled, but their Americanized children succeed.

I continue to be inspired by several Sudanese.  My job at St. Paul’s put me in contact with Salva Dut in 1996.  He still calls me “Mother”, which he pronounces Moth-ah. His concern for his father, sickened with parasites in Wau, moved him to found Water for South Sudan. He dug his first well in his father’s village. Since 2004 he has dug 500 wells, along with sanitation projects, as well as redoing many other organizations’ wells.

In the early 2000s, a wonderful single-mother family with many young children lived in our church apartment.  I advocated with my alma mater, St. Lawrence University, for one particularly talented child, Ajok (Victoria).  On a generous scholarship, she took advantage of every opportunity for internships, international travel, women’s rights, and racial justice conferences, as well as being published in her major, Spanish and Caribbean studies.  After joining the Peace Corps, she went to the Dominican Republic, was evacuated because of COVID, and currently works for the US Labor Department in Puerto Rico.

I am proud to have been the Executive Director of AFRECS when it was founded in the 2000s to promote companion links between American parishes and dioceses and Sudanese dioceses, then numbering thirty-one.  In that job I made frequent trips to South Sudan and Uganda to represent Americans who had become impassioned with the Sudanese people and Church. It is an honor to view the additional roles AFRECS is playing today in both Sudans.

I look back on this astounding period of my life as a formative one for my own faith. I experience God so much more because of those years, and I am thankful for that.

A Prayer for the Churches of the Sudans 

God of peace, God of love, we pray that your Grace may so strengthen the Churches of Sudan and South Sudan, that they may be beacons of love and forgiveness.  We pray that Gospel preaching may be so inspired that it will lead to reconciliation, enduring hope, and lasting peace.  We ask this in the name of Jesus, our Lord.  Amen.

The Rt. Rev. David Colin Jones
Bishop Suffragan (Retired), Episcopal Diocese of Virginia