Author: AmerFriendSudan

Please note this abridged story from the New Humanitarian Feb. 27, 2025. AFRECS is moving emergency funds to the Episcopal Church of Sudan to help its scattered churches purchase food. Please contribute to AFRECS at www.afrecs.org/donate, send a check to PO Box 3327, Alexandria VA 22302, or give to the Mutual Aid Sudan Coalition.

The Trump Administration issued stop-work orders on 20 January. While exemptions have been issued for some forms of emergency aid, they have been difficult to interpret and cumbersome to apply for – particularly amid the attempt to shut down USAID, which provided 44% of the $1.8 billion of humanitarian funding to Sudan last year.

Aid officials and more than a dozen volunteers from emergency response rooms interviewed for this story told The New Humanitarian that the groups have been severely impacted, and that the freeze has escalated the possibility of famine spreading beyond the areas it has already settled.

Hundreds of communal kitchens have gone out of service due to a lack of food supplies.

The emergency response room in the East Nile district of Khartoum doesn’t have enough funds to purchase gasoline to operate a water pump, and has closed almost all of its 300 kitchens. Some 111 kitchens have been shut in Jabal Awliya, which is located south of Khartoum. The number of communal kitchens operating in East Darfur state has dropped from 48 to just two, and they are offering only one meal a day.

Volunteers are trying to fundraise to plug the gaps. Some are running online crowdfunding campaigns on Facebook, while others hope that a dedicated website –the Mutual Aid Sudan Coalition – can bring in more public support.

Volunteers said they are also speaking with new institutional donors, including Gulf states and regional organisations, as well as asking their established international NGO partners for more support. Nothing yet.

The emergency response rooms are having to rethink the model of providing emergency aid.

One group is discussing setting up sustainable, agricultural income-generating projects to reduce its reliance on donor-dependent initiatives like the community kitchens.

We received a recent Situation Update from Wilson Center. Please review here.

The American people strive to be kind and charitable.  We want to see ourselves as people willing to help a neighbor.  The American Friends of the Episcopal Church of the Sudans has engaged with Episcopalians across the United States to partner with the church in the Sudans over more than 20 years.  This has been a friendship that has grown in amazing ways by linking Sudanese and South Sudanese in the Diaspora with American friends to do good work with and for the Episcopal Church in Sudan and South Sudan.

Now we see with growing concern that one of the main institutions offering need humanitarian aid is in grave danger – The United States Agency for International Development. All Episcopalians and people of good will should voice their concern.

Since the end of World War II, our Government has established mechanisms to invest in the rest of the world to rebuild shattered economies, to foster democratic governments, to fight disease and supply food and humanitarian assistance to famine stricken populations as well as those hit by natural disasters.   USAID is one of those mechanisms, established by Congress, funded by our tax dollars.  And yes, it is not only altruistic to help suffering populations around the world but it helps to make the world a more stable place.  A more stable world leads to peace for us too.

Some of the most vulnerable people in the world are suffering and dying during the current administration’s freeze of the miniscule 1% of the U.S. government’s budget allocated to foreign aid. As citizens of the richest country in the world, we have a moral obligation to help these people. Not doing so thwarts the laws passed by Congress, in allocating these funds, and damages Americans’ image around the world as a charitable and caring people.

“The programs that have frozen or folded over the past six days supported frontline care for infectious disease, providing treatments and preventive measures that help avert millions of deaths from AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other diseases. They also presented a compassionate, generous image of the United States in countries where China has increasingly competed for influence,” The New York Times reported on Feb. 1.

In addition to the shutdown of clinics for malnourished Sudanese children, “emergency medical care for displaced Palestinians and Yemenis fleeing war, heat and electricity for Ukrainian refugees, and mpox surveillance in Africa,” the nonpartisan, nonprofit news site, ProPublica.org, reported on Jan. 31.

I ask you now to think expansively about who your neighbors are.   Love one another as I have loved you is our command.

Contact your Congressional representatives and urge that all U.S. humanitarian aid appropriated by Congress be immediately restored. To contact the members of Congress who represent you, go to: congress.gov/members/find-your-member.

Sudan faces the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, according to the US Government – ahead of Gaza, Ukraine, Haiti and Myanmar.  Despite indefatigable efforts by former Special Sudan Envoy Tom Perriello, the United States has failed — along with its African, Arab, and European partners — to make progress toward peace in the war between Sudanese military elements that has been tearing the country apart since April 2023.

The Executive Order imposing a 90-day freeze on expenditures by the U.S. Agency for International Development has abruptly halted many local programs of public health and food assistance to suffering civilian populations in South Sudan as well as Sudan.  USAID had been supplying two-thirds of the support for the Emergency Response Rooms created by brave and resourceful Sudanese to provide one meal per day to starving people.  That support has stopped dead.

AFRECS, through our direct contacts with dioceses and agencies of the Episcopal Church in both Sudans, is still able to transmit some financial assistance to people who are homeless, hungry, and living with memories of mass death and rape.

I invite you to contribute today!

At the same time, AFRECS, along with other faith-based and humanitarian organizations, is appealing to the new U.S. Administration to view the catastrophe in Sudan — the worst humanitarian crisis in the world – with the utmost seriousness. It asks the Administration urgently to pursue with African, Middle Eastern and European partners a prompt end to the fighting in Sudan, a vast expansion of humanitarian assistance, and a peaceful transition to inclusive civilian and democratic rule.

Lord Christ, embolden the leaders of your churches in Sudan and South Sudan to bring hope and promise to the suffering, the discouraged, the poor, and the homeless.  Give them grace to love and to care for your people.  Protect them and guide them to do your will.  All this we ask in the Name of Jesus,  our Lord.  Amen. 

God of the Angel Armies,

You, the Love that Suffers,

You who loved the Creation into being:

How long will you put up with man’s inhumanity to man?

How long must fear and hate and lust infect our tribes, infect our hearts?

Come, Lord Jesus.

Make us clean, or make a clean end of your experiment. 

                                                Richard J. Jones

O Lord, my strength and my redeemer,

 My heart weeps for the suffering of your people and creation, across your created order.

 Hear my prayers for justice, righteousness, truth telling, mercy, and peace.

 Open all our hearts and minds to actions that serve the Way of Love.

 Into Your heart I commend my pleas, O ever faithful One.  

                                                            Susan E. Bentley

On its way out, the Biden Administration declared January 7 that the Rapid Support Forces and allied militias had committed genocide in Sudan.  Secretary of State Blinken imposed sanctions on RSF commander Mohammad Dagalo (Hemedti) for his role in systematic atrocities, particularly in West Darfur. The US also sanctioned seven RSF-owned companies in the United Arab Emirates. 

Little more than a week later the US Government announced that the Sudan Armed Forces had used chemical weapons at least twice against the RSF in remote areas of the country. It expressed fears that could happen again in densely populated areas. It announced sanctions against Gen. Abdel Fatteh al-Burhan for documented atrocities by his troops, including indiscriminate bombing of civilians and use of starvation as a weapon of war. Al-Burhan replied in empty defiance, “We are ready to face any sanctions for the sake of serving this nation, and we welcome them.” 

The State Department has termed the situation in Sudan “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.”

 It remains to be seen whether the Trump Administration will give attention to the catastrophe in Sudan.  AFRECS and other organizations will do what we can to keep Washington’s focus on Sudan and to push for a real solution.

Twenty months after escaping from Khartoum to Port Sudan, where he borrowed an office and restored communications with his five dioceses, Archbishop Ezekiel Kondo, Primate of the Episcopal Church of Sudan, made a front-line pastoral visit to his devastated city at Christmas.

“One hundred seventy-three Christians were confirmed yesterday in one service in Omdurman”, Archbishop Ezekiel Kondo wrote to Dane Smith on Dec. 27th. “It was the Feast of St. Stephen the first Christian martyr, and it was a five-hour service!  … Pastors, Mothers’ Union, and the entire Episcopal Church of Sudan community, including other denominations, came to welcome me and my team. They very much appreciate the little relief food that ECS send them from time to time. They told me, ‘Archbishop ,we thank God for the food you give us’. I told them that the support is from our good friends and partners abroad. Thank you.”

In his public Christmas greeting, Kondo said: “We celebrate the Baby Jesus who is the life of all people. My prayers are with you wherever you may be. This is the second year [the] majority of us celebrate Christmas as displaced and as refugees, because of the war situation which began 15 April 2023. People continue to live in a miserable circumstance. I repeat my appeal to the two warring parties, Sudanese Army and Rapid Support Forces and their supporters: Consider putting the guns beyond use and silence them for peace…. Continuing using guns, there will be no people left to rule over, nor will there be a country called Sudan to live in….. Enough is enough to death. Life is precious in the eyes of God. He has created man in His own image…. Let us abide in Him as long as we live.”

Some 260 South Sudanese in the Mid-Atlantic, including Baltimore, Charlottesville, and Richmond, came together shortly before Christmas at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Annandale, Virginia, in a meeting of the South Sudanese Community of the DMV (SSC-DMV). Youth sang Christmas carols in Juba Arabic, women’s culinary skills brought the flavors of home to life, and many reconnected after long separations. “We encourage everyone to continue participating in community gatherings,” said their President, Lina Ajack. “This fosters deeper connections and the values that make us strong.”

Among those attending were Edward Kenyi, Rita Lako,  Angelina Onika, Noel Kulang,  Lina Ajack (President, SSC-DMV, front row, 2^nd from L),  Amour Isaac, Dombek Yai, Achuil Nhial, Michael Lupai, Emmanuel Hakim, Ester Muding, Angelina Onika, Julius Kori, Sisco Soly, and Kwathi Ajawin.

Tom Prichard, director of Sudan Sunrise in Fairfax, Virginia received word in December from Archbishop Abraham Nhial, who is currently overseeing both his own diocese of Aweil and the Diocese of Wau.  Having seen that girls did not have access to high school education in Aweil, Nhial is now breaking ground for St. Mary’s High School for girls, which will open in a few months, welcoming girls from different tribes and faiths, including many Darfuri girls who have fled the war in Sudan.