13th May 2022

I am very thankful to God that I am sleeping particularly well at the moment.  I am working in the HUMAES office, hearing occasional pieces of information about what is going on.  Since this current situation started the border with Uganda has been closed to people trying to flee.  In other words, anybody with luggage is turned back.  As from today the military have taken over from the normal immigration staff and police.  This is most likely because of fears that people desperate to cross will fight with guns.

I have been told that the hospital staff are too scared to work so that there is no service at Nimule Hospital.  What happens to those who are giving birth, especially those with HIV who need specialist care during labour?  What happens to anyone wounded or seriously ill? 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Loveless Society

It is almost ten years since I arrived in South Sudan, specifically Nimule, a small town close to the border with Uganda.  Life has been very challenging but rewarding as well.  I have done things I never dreamt I could do, such as founding a school, fundraising for the school to the extent that we have always been able to keep going, even if the school is basic.  I have also managed to take a growing number of deaf children to special schools in Uganda.  All this, completely independently of any organisation.  It seems like a miracle to me. I have always found the way children are treated abhorrent.  They are beaten for the smallest thing, with no love shown to them at all.  Children are dragged up by fellow siblings, while their mothers do nothing for their children.  Their fathers are generally completely out of the picture.  Children are expected to do all sorts of heavy household chores, leaving them tired at school and with no time to d...
Read more

12th May 2022

I slept well.  When I woke I decided that although I had asked the teachers to come at 10 o’clock, I would go at my usual time to ask children to go back home.  Pascalina told me that police had stayed on our veranda all night and that things had been quiet.  However she did not open her shop.  Things were also quiet on my way to school.  As I had expected very few children had come, but I sent those who came back home.  Then I sat for a while doing a few administrative tasks.  The men who were plastering our classrooms were working, but I could see that the cooks who should have been at the school to cook lunch for them had not come.  I was told later on that the workmen went home.  I walked home, again without incident.  HUMAES continued to work in their office so I joined them. Police and soldiers were out in numbers, trying to keep the town secure.   In the late afternoon, HUMAES heard that two policemen had been shot dead ver...
Read more

3rd May 2022

Image
This week was an increasingly busy one, which is one reason why I haven’t written anything.  Additionally there was no internet because my colleague in HUMAES was attending a workshop in Juba and took the Wifi with him. The situation in Nimule has calmed right down, thank God.   Families are returning from Uganda and schools are functioning.   Each day this week a further twenty pupils reappeared, building up to a total of 130 on Friday.   This is still well below our normal attendance, but at least formal teaching was able to start.   We have been operating only in the mornings in case of security issues, which have tended to happen later in the day.   Workmen have been busy plastering one block of classrooms, which left us with half the normal number of rooms.   That meant that there were only four available classrooms for eight classes.   We had to ‘budge up’ and put two classes in each room.   As a result our normal timetable could no...
Read more