Peace, donor aid bring glimmer of hope to southern Sudan

OLD FANGAK, Sudan, April 13 (AFP) — The promise of peace and renewed donor interest have brought a glimmer of hope to aid workers struggling with rudimentary education and languishing health projects in southern Sudan.

Southern Sudanese women sit outside their huts near the town of Rumbek. (AFP).

“We have been very behind in the two sectors, but with peace now, we are seeing change, perhaps which will last,” said Father Antonio Labraca, an Italian Camboni missionary working in this destitute village of small huts.

Three months after Khartoum and the now ex-rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) signed a peace deal ending 21 years of war — Africa’s longest-running conflict — aid groups are returning, and now with money.

On Tuesday in Norway, foreign donors pledged 4.5 billion dollars (3.5 billion euros) for reconstruction projects in pacified northern and southern Sudan, nearly doubling the amount requested in a post-war needs assessment.

Though still faced tremendous hurdles and a dire lack of critical infrastructure, like roads, running water and electricity, aid workers believe that recent developments may put the war-shattered south back on its feet.

“There is renewed, lasting hope of improved social services, including health, in south Sudan,” said a Kenyan doctor in Rumbek, the bullet-scarred town that will serve as the interim capital for an autonomous south.

“Peace has created a conducive environment for the provision of education for boys and girls,” said Ceasar Mazzolari, the Catholic bishop in the diocese of Rumbek.

When Sudan’s north-south war erupted in 1983, some four million people, including school-age children, fled southern Sudan, leaving an already teetering educational system without students or teachers, many of whom became fighters.

Schoolhouses became barracks and targets of war, which means the entire system must now be rebuilt from scratch, aid workers say.

In Old Fangak in Upper Nile state, the village of Malual Kon in neighboring Bahr el-Ghazar and Rumbek in Equatoria state, buildings are being erected to house an expected mass influx of students in the coming months, most of them returnees.

“Since they are returning in large numbers, we are forced to hire Arabic teachers and modify our syllabus to cater for all of them,” Mazzolari said, referring to youngsters who received their primary education in Khartoum.

It is still not clear whether teenage boys will swap firearms for pens amid a continuing threat by militias not covered by the peace deal, but there are signs the importance of education has not been entirely lost.

“We have realised that it is only through books that one can work in an office,” said Peter, a teenager who hopes to be a teacher in Old Fangak.

“There is a sense among the people here that schools are very essential, but they have yet to recover from war trauma,” said an official with the British-based Christian charity Tearfund in Malual Kon.

More problematic, aid workers say is the traditional reluctance, if not outright refusal, of families to educate their female children.

“We still face an uphill task to persuade parents to send their girls to school,” the Rumbek diocese said in a handbook for the region.

Healthwise, clinics are also going up in the south that will soon complement a reliance on traditional medicine and the rare visits of medics to the region, according to aid workers.

“Due to the war, access to health and medical services in southern Sudan has not been optimal,” Mazzolari said, noting that there is currently only one doctor for every 100,000 people in southern Sudan.

But for now, diarrhea, malaria, tuberculosis and Kala-azar (black fever) are the most common diseases and the threat of HIV/AIDS lurks with the return of millions and the deployment of international peacekeepers, they say.

And there is a problem with food shortages.

“The main problem here is malnutrition, which is also the key cause of many diseases,” said a health official in Rumbek, adding that most children have not received even the most basic immunizations.

The current mortality rate is high: 150 deaths per 1,000 live births and one in every nine women dies in child birth, according to the Rumbek diocese.

“This will eventually change,” a UN official said.