Author: AmerFriendSudan

For three decades, the Diocese of Virginia has sustained friendships with the dioceses of Ezo, Renk, and Ayod in South Sudan. Continuing a relationship with the Diocese of Ezo, Rector Weston Matthews together with Jack Mathias and Leslie Siegmund of St. Francis, Great Falls, plan to meet in February in the Diocese of Salisbury, England with Bishop Isaac and Mama Nora of the  Diocese of Ezo. Through the Rev. Joy Warburton, the Mothers’ Union Branch of Trinity Episcopal Church in Arlington, contributes resources for internally displaced persons in Ezo. St. Mary’s, Arlington lay leaders Russell Randle  and Diane and Ed Wright have sent funds to Renk Diocese to support refugees arriving from Sudan and train new evangelists. After the November visit of Bishop Thomas Tut Gany, Anne and Jon Spear of St. Thomas, McLean, have provided resources for a school in Diocese of Ayod, exploring a new relationship. St. Paul’s, Alexandria, has supported a primary school in Renk for 30 years with “Pennies from Heaven,” contributed by their pre-school students. Other Virginia parishes support Hope and Resurrection Secondary School near Rumbek.

Photo: Principal Michael Kiju Paul (in coat and tie) conducts a tour of newly built, still unfurnished, women’s dormitory.

The Kajo-Keji Christian College was established by the Episcopal Church of South Sudan in 1993 and offers programs in theology, education, business, and information communication technology.

CONTACT: www.kcuc.info

by Tom Staal

Photo: ERR volunteers distributing food to those in dire need of assistance.

With the war in Sudan raging now for two and a half years, the suffering of the local population continues to increase. The United Nations estimates that 12 million people have been displaced, 25 million are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, and over 400,000 people have been killed. This is the worst humanitarian disaster in the world today. The intensity of the fighting and violence, and the bureaucratic restrictions imposed by both sides, have severely limited international humanitarian assistance.

Out of this death and dust, the Sudanese themselves have stepped up. The Sudanese have a long-standing tradition of communities coming together as volunteers to help people in need. They have now taken that model to another level. Immediately after the fighting began in April 2023, local community groups set up communal kitchens to provide food to people displaced from their homes, and basic emergency first aid to people who were injured. These are staffed entirely by volunteers and use whatever local resources they have. They called themselves “Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs)”.

The ERRs have quickly spread across the country, in both Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) controlled areas and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) controlled areas. They have expanded their services – based on the need and the resources they have – to include psychosocial support (especially to rape victims), childcare centers, shelter, emergency evacuations. and even some basic infrastructure repair. These volunteers are often targeted by the military groups, their money (what little they have) sometimes stolen, and put in prison or even killed. Yet they continue to work and have organized themselves nationwide. They are often the only source of humanitarian assistance to the people in need. These ERRs are still very limited and not nearly enough to meet all the needs, but being community-led, they meet the people where they are, in a very personal manner. There are now hundreds – maybe thousands – of ERRs throughout the country, with the bigger towns/cities having dozens of them, so they really have a broad reach to the neediest people.

READ MORE: www.mutualaidsudan.org  

As 2026 begins, the situation in both Sudan and South Sudan is deteriorating further.

Sudan remains divided militarily between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), in which Islamist elements appear lately to have gained strength, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which massacred thousands of civilians in December, when it overran El Fasher, largest city in Darfur. The RSF appears to have been gaining ground in Kordofan Nothing more has been heard from President Trump’s and Secretary of State Rubio’s efforts to persuade the Gulf arms suppliers to cease their lethal contribution to the conflict.

In South Sudan, the SPLM/IO (the military element associated with imprisoned former Vice President Riek Machar) appears to have gained ground with defection in Jonglei by the commander and forces from the South Sudan Opposition Alliance (SSOA). One report indicates fighting going on in 10 states.

Meanwhile, courageous civilians are displaying astounding courage and resourcefulness]by staffing Emergency Response Rooms and saving lives in all parts of conflict-ravaged Sudan. Take a look below, where our Board member Tom Staal, a retired Counselor of the U.S. Agency for International Development, describes these ERRs.

AFRECS will do what we can in 2026 to promote a peaceful solution in Sudan, providing emergency assistance to the Episcopal Church there, as it attempts to meet food and shelter needs of the myriad displaced. In South Sudan we hope to reinforce our engagement with the Episcopal University and to expand our program of trauma healing with the Episcopal Mothers’ Union and Five Talents. We will continue emergency aid to Episcopal dioceses in Northern Bahr al-Ghazal and Upper Nile, which serve destitute refugees still pouring south across the border from Sudan.

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Executive Director

Let the rivers flow, the river of life too.

Heaven and earth will testify

That God has taken us into his bosom.

The birds, the creatures in nature testify

That up in the heavens God reigns supreme.

On earth the Sudanese will sing to His praise.

God has been with us for a hundred years!

by Abe Enosa, in Samuel E. Kayanga and Andrew C. Wheeler, “But God is Not Defeated!” Celebrating the Centenary of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan, 1899-1999

He stands 6’7″ tall. In the passenger seat of a Honda Fit, his knees rest on the glove compartment. He is married and the father of seven children, but Bishop Thomas Tut Gany introduces himself by asking, “Have you heard of the Lost Boys of Sudan from the 1990s? I am one of them.”

Tut admired seeing Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde on the internet with her charge to President Donald Trump on the day after his second inauguration: “God requires mercy.” Invited to dinner at her home In Washington, D.C., Tut sought to learn what underlies the split between The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of North America. He does not wish to see his own Episcopal Church of South Sudan separate itself from the worldwide Anglican Communion. He seeks friends – individuals, parishes, or a diocese – who might be companions to the people of the Episcopal Diocese of Ayod in South Sudan. Children in Ayod go to school under trees, learn to write using charcoal on cowskins, with teachers who are untrained and unpaid. Seven years of unusual flooding of the White Nile, compounded by the halt to USAID and United Nations nutritional and medical assistance, have brought the spread of diseases and hunger.

Bishop Tut was making his first visit to the United States, beginning with the triennial New Wineskins Missionary Conference in Black Mountain, North Carolina. With borrowed money for airfare and an Ethiopian passport, he continued making friends in Virginia, South Carolina, New York City, and Nebraska before his return to South Sudan October 31st.

Growing up in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya with a rudimentary education, Tut became a Christian and was baptized in 1995 at the age of eighteen, becoming an active choir singer and eventually an evangelist. In 1999 he suffered a broken leg and dislocated hip and was immobilized for five years without treatment in a remote village of Ayod County. In 2001 he traveled to Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, where he met Bishop Nathaniel Garang, who made him a deacon and then in 2003 a priest. Tut finally received treatment in Nairobi, first at a Coptic mission hospital, then at Kijabe Hospital. The hip was replaced with financial support from the Anglican Communion’s Clergy Emergency Fund. As an evangelist, and, since 2014, as a bishop among his Nuer people in the Upper Nile Region of South Sudan, he has been baptizing more than 1,500 people yearly. Simultaneously he continues his own education through St. Paul’s University in Limuru, Kenya.

Contact:  Rt. Revd. Thomas Tut Gany Tel: +211920 888 555|    +254715 888 555 – WhatsApp* tutgany@gmail.com   https://www.ayod-anglican.org

Meeting in Kampala, Uganda in late October, the seven bishops of the Episcopal Church of Sudan shared their responses to the civil war devastating their people.

Gathering face to face in Uganda for their first time since 2023, the seven bishops of the Episcopal Church of Sudan sent a message on October 29 condemning outside countries’ support of the civil war in Sudan. Calling for humanitarian relief corridors to be opened to refugee encampments and towns including El Fasher, the bishops said, “Fire cannot be quenched with fire: only water can make a difference.” They urged all warring parties to receive the initiatives of mediators.

CONTINUED:  https://www.anglicannews.org/news/2025/10/episcopal-church-of-sudan-makes-urgent-appeal-for-peace-in-sudan.aspx

Daramali Abudigin, a Nuba Episcopal priest shown here in a photo from autumn 2023, remained with his congregation in El Fasher while that western Sudan city endured two years of shelling, drone attacks, and hunger – culminating in massacres.

John Poole, a staunch friend of the Episcopal Church of the Sudans in the UK, had feared for the death of the man called “The Last Pastor” in the besieged city of El Fasher. Wi-Fi and power had been cut off. The horrific news of civilians massacred by the Rapid Support Forces of General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo beginning October 29 made it likely that Daramali Abugidin, the pastor of St. Mathew’s Church in El Fasher, was trapped in the city, or dead.

On November 4, Poole reached Daramali’s father, just returned from Uganda to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. Isamail Gabriel Abugudin, senior among the Episcopal bishops, learned that Daramali escaped on foot to the town of Tawila, thirty-five miles west of El Fasher, where he was helping other refugees to escape across the border into South Sudan.

Daramali Abugidin grew up in the Nuba Mountains and was ordained a priest in 2010. When the current civil war between two Sudanese generals began in April 2023, he was married, the father of three sons, and caring for a congregation in El Fasher. When the war shifted from eastern Sudan to the west, with El Obeid and El Fasher still garrisoned by the Sudan Armed Forces, life in his city of 300,000 became dangerous. Food was scarce, attacks by drones, and shelling destroyed homes and hospitals, and civilians seeking to escape were robbed, beaten, or died from thirst and hunger. Daramali was able to send his wife and sons to safety in the city of El Obeid, but he stayed. When the pastor of a Roman Catholic church was struck by a stray bullet, along with two young men staying with him, Daramali rushed them to a hospital, but the priest died. Daramali told a Kenyan reporter, “There now [sic] no other pastors in Darfur in general. I am the only one in El Fasher, and I usually combine worshippers in one church to save them from random bombings and shootings.”

As has been so often the case in 2025, the news from both Sudan and South Sudan is grim.  The fall of El Fasher, largest city in Sudan’s Darfur region, to the Rapid Support Forces triggered massacres of up to 2000 civilians, including 400 in the only operating hospital.  Those who could have been fleeing 35 miles west to Tawila where Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and the Norwegian Refugee Council are providing assistance.  Videos of a gleeful commander boasting of his killings will be part of evidence collected for war crimes. NBC reported November 6 that the RSF agreed to a truce “to address the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the war,” as demanded by the U.S. and other mediators. There has been no SAF response as of the time of writing.

In South Sudan, where the trial of former Vice President Riek Machar and associates continues fitfully, the government has demanded that UNMISS, the UN peace force, reduce its forces by 70 percent, halt intelligence collection flights, and close displaced persons camps.  That suggests efforts to eliminate a counterforce to more widespread violence by the South Sudan Peoples Defense Force, the renamed SPLA.  The departing Petroleum Undersecretary reports that the Sudan Armed Forces has informed Juba that a “safe shutdown” of the pipeline for its oil exports should be effected because of drone attacks in Sudan on the pipeline.

AFRECS rejoiced in the visit last month by Bishop Thomas Tut Gany of Ayod.  The leading Nuer bishop in the Episcopal Church of South Sudan, Bishop Tut held meetings with the Episcopal Bishops of Washington DC, New York, and Nebraska and formed partnerships with St. Thomas Episcopal Church of McLean, VA and others.  Several AFRECS Board members and AFRECS Advisory Council convener Russ Randle had fruitful conversations with the bishop about future activities.

Two Virginia parishes, St. Paul’s, Alexandria and St. Mary’s, Arlington, successfully transferred funds in July to Bishop Simon Chuang Ayok Deng in the Diocese of Renk to support ongoing training of clergy and lay evangelists to share the Gospel of Christ among the large population who have fled Sudan’s war and settled in that northernmost diocese of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan.

Abraham Yel Nhial, Bishop of Aweil, was installed in August 24 at Good Shepherd Cathedral, Wau, to serve as Archbishop of the Internal Province of Northern Bahr al Ghazal.  Bishop Moses Deng Bol, his predecessor,  now works as a Peace Envoy for the South Sudan Council of Churches.

Despite current severe limits on visas to visit the United States, we have received word that Bishops Thomas Tut of Ayod and Archbishop Abraham Yel Nhial expect to attend the New Wineskins mission conference September 18-21 in Black Mountain, North Carolina.