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10/1/98
- Subject:
Sudan...
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Please make time to read this, and keep in mind_ "what you did to the least of these you did unto me" Here is some info that I have pulled together as background for this issue, then An article to make sense of how this relates to us now_please take the time to fully consider what is being said. The first known Sudanese Christian was the treasurer of Queen Candace of the Kingdom of Meroe in A.D. 37, and from that point out Christianity became more and more the religion of Sudan's Royalty and the intellectual elite. In fact, the churches there was so tight with the government that often the bishops and priests also held government leadership roles -- it seems, as some scholars have stated, that "there is little historical evidence that the common people were effectively evangelized." So, when the kingdom fell, so did the church. Also, MOST of the church leaders in Northern Sudan were not from Sudan, but from the surounding areas, like Egypt or Greece, so the services were usually held in other languages which the King and leadership in the government were educated enough to understand, but not the common people, and the word of God was not well known to them, since it was rarely available to them in their language. Christianity was the "official" religion of the educated elite, but not of the common Sudanese. Because of the dependance on foreign bishops, when the Muslim armies cut off ties between Egypt and Sudan, Northern Sudan was starved of sufficient Church leadership. Then to keep this part short, the churches were empty and abondoned for years, and Islam slipped in to fill the vacuum. (this took place around 1484-1530 A.D.) Lesson from this -- It's important to keep the truth Christianity understandable to the common people, especially the poor and "the least of these" to whome Christ seems to most often relate, and also...no Government is "Christian" -- people are Christians. If church are aligned to closely with the political power structures, when they fall, so does the church. anyway...I'll continue -- With the incoming Muslims also came slave trade, which eventually sparked conflicts between the British and the Muslim Sudanese in 1881. A revolt against the Christian influence of the British (while attempting to end the Muslim's slave trading) was led in 1882 by a self-proclaim Islamic Prophet, Mahdi Ahmad, who desired to purify Islam and create an independat Muslim commonwealth. Competition between Britian and France for Southern Sudan, which later involved other European powers, and gave rise, as some historians see it, to the seeds that would bring about World War I. On some level or another, It seems that THIS is the origin of many of the problems which we were last discussing. The National Islamic Front has declared a "holy war" against the Christian South -- the constitution of Sudan actual states that "Islam is the guiding religion" and binds Sudans leaders and official to tranforming Sudan into a unified Islamic state that speaks only Arabic. Also, an article in the Washington Post stated that "All sides, especially the government, use the destruction of agriculture and the denial of relief as tactics of war.",(THIS bothers me most -- it's the conflict that I have between waring governments and my personal interest in individual non-violence) and likewise, CNN stated that over 1.5 Million people have died as a rusult of the last 15 years of the latest conflict. And now, the article_ TO LOOK, OR TO TURN AWAY: The United Nations is coordinating the largest airlift in the history of Africa, trying to save more than 700,000 people. Abuk Bol's father starved to death. Then her mother died. Abuk was left with her grandmother, Aweng, to for her. And nothing to eat. Then a rumor reached their village that relief agencies were distributing food in the village of Ajiep, several days' walk away, the measure of distance in a land devoid of the trappings of the modern world. So the old woman slung the child on her hip and set out along the narrow footpaths that crisscross the flat grasslands of southern Sudan. They ate leaves and grass to stay alive. They slept in the open, nothing to shield them from the rains and the cool night air. After days of walking, guided by the trails traveled by predecessors on this desperate journey, grandmother and child reached Ajiep, a once-small village now swollen to an encampment of tens of thousands. There is food here - grain to be mixed with water and cooked into a gruel. Only now, Abuk is in terrible shape. Her ribs protrude. Her shoulder blades stick out like little wings. Her head seems too large for her body. >From her size, you might guess her age at eight months, but Abuk is 4 years old. Aweng sits on the ground under a tree and feeds Abuk the gruel. With a wave of her hand, the old woman tries to shoo away the flies that swarm across the bowl. She worries that the flies will make Abuk sicker, but she is grateful for the food. Without it, she says, "We would die, all of us." A human catastrophe is unfolding in southern Sudan, a land haunted by famine. You see it in the hollow cheeks of infants who suckle at breasts empty of milk and in the hollow expressions of mothers whose eyes are empty of hope. Three million people - nearly 10 percent of the country's population - will need some level of food assistance to make it through the coming year, say U.N. officials in New York. The famine has hit hardest in the province of Bahr el Ghazal in the southwestern part of Sudan, where 770,000 people are threatened with death by starvation. To try to avert a catastrophe even larger than what hit the region in the late 1980s, a huge international relief effort must continue at least through October 1999, said Ted Chaiban, deputy chief of operations for the U.N. relief effort in south Sudan. Flying 15 cargo planes and 10 small passenger planes out of two bases in Sudan and two in neighboring Kenya, the relief program flies tons of food into Bahr el Ghazal every day, if the rains allow it. The biggest airlift in the history of Africa is under way in southern Sudan. The planes bring food from donor countries - such as grain from the American Midwest - to people such as Aweng and Abuk. Officials with relief agencies call the situation in southern Sudan a "complex emergency." It has no single cause. But the disheartening reality is this: The primary cause of all this hunger and misery and death is not the vagaries of weather or any other caprice of nature. It is the utter indifference of some human beings toward the suffering of others. True, scant rains the past two years have reduced harvests and left people in southern Sudan poorer and less healthy. But the main cause of the famine is Sudan's 15-year civil war. Soldiers on both sides have robbed people of their cattle and sent them fleeing from their land, unable to plant crops or support themselves in any way. This famine, officials say, is largely man-made. A fly-covered blanket shrouds the still form of a baby. Then the blanket moves, ever so slightly, rhythmically rising and falling, giving evidence of shallow breaths. There is life yet beneath the shroud, but for how long, no one can say. If the epicenter of the famine is Bahr el Ghazal province, the very heart of the epicenter, the place where one finds the worst suffering in this giant jumble of human disaster, must be a place like the therapeutic feeding center in Ajiep. Here, aid workers treat the baby under the blanket and other children who are not merely malnourished but also starving. This center, run by the Belgian chapter of Doctors Without Borders, an organization that provides medical care in poor countries, treats children 5 and younger - and then only "when the problem becomes a pathology," says Christine Nadori, a nurse from Ottawa who works in the feeding center. But Doctors Without Borders (known internationally as Medecins San Frontieres) estimates that 55 percent of the thousands of children in Ajiep are malnourished. The therapeutic feeding center can accommodate 170 children at a time. How then to choose? How to practice triage? The center admits only children who weigh less than 60 percent of what they should for their height. That means, for example, that a child who is 3 feet 11 inches tall - one who should weigh 48 pounds - can get treatment only if he weighs 29 pounds or less. A 19 -inch baby - who should weigh 7 pounds - will be treated here only if she weighs less than 4 pounds. Children at that level of starvation are susceptible to a host of ailments, including chest infections, eye infections, skin infections, diarrheal diseases and hypothermia, says Nadori. Nadori, clad in a white T-shirt and crisp slacks, strides briskly through the center, keeping order, promoting efficiency. But she is not detached: She says she knows each child and remembers many who have left. Occasionally, she stops to pick up a baby and hold her close. Around her, coughs punctuate the cries that rise over the tent encampment. Flies congregate in infected eyes of children. Larger children with legs like sticks care for smaller children with skin like leather. Mothers offer breasts like prunes to babies with faces like skeletons. This center has one purpose: to feed people. Come nightfall, when the sun sets and the air cools, children and mothers, some of them naked, must leave and find what shelter they can to stave off the hypothermia that can claim the lives of the weak. About 20 children are admitted to the therapeutic feeding center every day, Nadori says. Many have walked four or five days to reach Ajiep. Though the program is designed for children, mothers who are nursing starving babies are fed once a day as well. Each child is dosed with vitamin A, folic acid and antibiotics. Any child that malnourished has some infection, Nadori says. It may not be visible, but it's there. Each child carries a calabash for a bowl and is fed five times a day with a serving of high-energy milk laced with sugar, oil, vitamins and minerals. A child is released to the supplemental feeding program - in theory, a program designed to supplement food somehow being obtained elsewhere - when she reaches 70 percent of her desired weight and maintains it for a week. The average stay is 21 days. Doctors weigh the children regularly and keep notes on their condition and ailments. But the records show, too, that the effects of famine go beyond the physical. A typical notation, this one on the file for a 2-year-old girl named Ayok Tong Akway, says tersely: "Both parents died. Cared for by blind grandmother." Sudan, the largest country in Africa, is about the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River. It stretches from the Middle East to middle Africa, from Egypt in the north to Congo, Uganda and Kenya in the south. And its population is diverse, as one might expect in a country of that reach. The people in the north are mostly Arab and Muslim. The south is predominantly African and tribal; residents generally adhere to either Christian or animist beliefs. Historically, the south was subjected to frequent raids by slave traders from the north. Building on that inauspicious start, relations between the north and south have traditionally been poor. In 1983, the government in Khartoum tried to impose Islamic law. The south resisted. Civil war has wracked the country ever since. Exuberant greetings ring out over the verdant grassland. "Cibak!" "Cibak!" The people in Ajiep are Dinkas, members of a pastoral African tribe. The word, pronounced "she-bahk," is their greeting, the Dinka way of asking, "How are you?" Ajiep used to be a village of 4,000 or 5,000. Now, 21,000 people live clustered around the feeding centers and, aid workers say, if you extend the count to those camped a few hours' walk away, the number is greater than 50,000. It is impossible to walk from one end to the other of this impromptu city - say, from where the U.N. people live in a few tents pitched under a tree, past the therapeutic and supplemental feeding centers and on beyond toward the drop zone - without being greeted dozens of times and shaking dozens of hands. Even amid starvation and death, all is not gloom and despair. The Dinkas follow traditional tribal beliefs. The men carve parallel V-shaped scars into their foreheads. As a manhood ritual, all males have their six front bottom-row teeth pried out with a chisel. While some Dinkas plant crops, such as millet and sorghum, many are cattle herders, almost totally dependent on their cows. They survive on milk, cheese and blood from living cows; sometimes, too, they visit other tribes to trade cattle for grain. With their cattle, Dinkas are in good shape; when their cattle are stolen, they are in trouble. So the condition of people varies dramatically in this newly created Dinka city, depending largely on whether they have been preyed upon by the contending armies and on how many days they had to walk to reach Ajiep. Some people are stick-thin, others relatively healthy. At least so far. This year's crops should be harvested in October. But this year's crops will meet only a fraction of the needs, fill only a fraction of the bellies. This is the rainy season, and the grass on the savanna grows lush and green. This doesn't look like the backdrop to a famine. But the rains came too late for many of this year's crops. Worse, marauding militias drove people from their land during the planting season, preventing seed from being sown. Even if all goes well and peace breaks out and next year's rains come on time, there will be no new harvest until October 1999. Between now and then, even those Dinkas who still have cattle and other livestock to trade will find there is no grain. Except that flown in by relief agencies. So people cluster in Ajiep, lashing empty grain bags to sticks as the roofs of temporary shelters. A few of the thousands of refugees have had the strength and wherewithal to build tukuls, the round huts of thatch in which Dinkas live. Still others live in the open. Over the crowded encampment rises a constant cacophony: the bleating of goats, the braying of donkeys, the lowing of cows, the keening of women, the crying of children. But there is laughter, too. And when night falls and the crying stops and the African sky arches high and black and impossibly full of stars, the sound of singing rises over the camp, joyful enough to break your heart. The boy, tall enough to be 9 or 10, is so thin you can see the entire outline of his pelvis, each flat flange of hip bone showing clearly under his skin. Another boy helps him stand, then clasps him around the waist with both arms and carries him gently to his feeding. Nearby, a young girl cradles a skeletal baby, perhaps her brother. She dips her finger in her porridge and allows the baby to suck it off her fingertip. Here and there stand naked children so cadaverous they seem to have no bottoms, so emaciated their knees are bigger around than their thighs. One child can walk only with the aid of a stick. To look at such suffering is to wonder how any religion or principle, whether Islam or even freedom, could possibly warrant such massive human sacrifice. Who could allow this to happen, let alone contribute to it, and still lay any claim to morality? But it gets worse than that. Some of the fighters, aid workers say, are little more than warlords and bandits, fighting not for principle but for profit. The southern Sudanese people have suffered famine before, notably in 1988 and '89, when an estimated 250,000 people died. Why suddenly again in 1998? Kerubino Bol, a military leader in the Bahr el Ghazal area, began as a rebel leader but later switched to the government side. Early this year, unable to strike the deal he wanted with the government, he switched back and attacked the government-held town of Wau, 40 miles south of Ajiep, igniting a new round of fighting and turning tens of thousands of people into refugees just when they should have been planting crops. The government, uninterested in improving living conditions in rebel-held areas (and with better conditions, perhaps, political support for the rebels), made the problem worse by banning flights into Bahr el Ghazal province. Relief flights could not get through at the risk of being shot down. Under international pressure - in April, British International Development Secretary Clare Short accused the government of Sudan of "deliberately inflicting this starvation on its own people for its own ends" - the government relented. And in July, both sides agreed to a three-month cease-fire in Bahr el Ghazal to allow relief planes to fly food in to the starving. The truce is set to expire Oct. 15. The C-130, droning in the distance, bursts through the clouds over Ajiep. On the ground, Charles Inwani, a muscular and ebullient Kenyan working with the World Food Program, an arm of the United Nations, waits in a Land Cruiser with a large antenna mounted on the front. Working as the air traffic controller, he grabs his microphone and warns the C-130 pilot about a thunderstorm approaching from the south and a small plane trying to land at the nearby patch of mud that passes for an air strip. A few Dinka workers, yelling and waving sticks, chase stragglers out of the drop zone as the C-130 approaches. Then the first-world technological behemoth swoops low over the primitive African landscape, opens its hatch, and 16 tons of grain thunders to the ground, most of it in bags weighing more than 100 pounds each. Later that day, a Russian-built Ilyushin disgorges twice that much food, and then another Ilyushin flies in, and still another. Rain may prevent planes from dropping food here for days, so officials drop grain while the sun shines. It is the largest airlift in the 35-year history of the United Nations' World Food Program. About 35 relief agencies and other nongovernmental organizations, working largely out of a base in northwest Kenya called Lokichokio, are involved - including the Carter Center, which fights guinea worm, and Atlanta-based CARE, which distributes seeds and tools in some areas and also runs feeding centers in the hard-hit town of Wau. The airlift, coordinated by Operation Lifeline Sudan, a U.N. organization created for the purpose, flies more than 11,000 tons of food a month into 75 sites in south Sudan. Two U.N. agencies - UNICEF and the World Food Program - are involved, as are a host of other agencies, such as Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children Fund and OXFAM. Lokichokio, once barely a speck on the map, is now Kenya's third-busiest airport. About 350 relief workers (up from 100 in March) live in a fenced compound of huts, offices, radios and a dining hall. Pilots, who work for private companies, live in an adjacent compound. Single-engine Cessna Caravans take relief workers to feeding stations in Sudan inaccessible by any other method. Planes ferry officials between Lokichokio and Nairobi. And five C-130s rumble off the airstrip every morning, head for south Sudan, then return, usually to take on a second load. In Ajiep, the food will be distributed not only in the therapeutic feeding center for those in the worst shape but also in weekly handouts of small bags of grain to 5,000 more children, who wait for hours under the hot sun in rows delineated by fences made of thorn tree branches. Every other week, 110-pound bags are issued to women with families. There is no doubt that the airlift is saving lives. Food is being delivered to the starving. But relief workers worry that the aid is doing harm as well. Feeding stations draw people off their land, leaving them unable to support themselves. They create what Yohannes Tecle, an Eritrean who is the United Nations' coordinator in Ajiep, calls "ghettos." Thousands of people congregate where there are no sanitary facilities. Flies flit from feces to food. Water pools in putrid puddles. The risk of disease is grave. Some relief workers think, too, that the tribes' traditional survival skills and lines of authority are being altered. "I do believe there has been permanent or semipermanent damage to the society," said Matthew Anderson, a CARE official in Lokichokio, the airlift staging area in northwest Kenya. Without the aid, though, people would die. Officials say the international community cannot maintain this level of effort forever. But no end to the war is in sight.
Adeng Manyuot pours water tenderly over the body of her 2-year-old daughter, washing it clean. Nearby a man finishes digging a small grave. Adeng covers her daughter with a dingy shroud, climbs into the shallow grave and gently lays the body down. Then she climbs out and walks away. The gravedigger fills in the hole. This is not the first time Adeng has buried a member of her family. Her husband died this year. So did her 4-year-old son. It may not be the last time, either. Four of her children live, but they are sick, and she is worried. Nor is this the only burial here today. By nightfall, 13 people will be laid to rest in this field as hunger and disease take their steady toll. Awec Mawyen and her family are from Ajiep. But three years ago, as fighting wracked the area, they moved to Barurud, two days' walk if you're healthy. When the hunger came this year, she tried to get food in Barurud but was turned away. Awec and her husband, Amet Akol Awet, are Dinkas. Most people in Barurud are from the Luo tribe. Add to civil war, late rains and marauding warlords another factor in this complex emergency: tribal rivalry exacerbated by scarcity and hunger. Turned away, Awec and Amet walked from Barurud back to Ajiep as best they could. They were so weak that instead of two days, it took them five. When they arrived, two days ago, they were issued cards by the World Food Program entitling them to food. But the crowd was too big; they could not fight their way through. Yesterday it rained. No food was distributed. This morning Amet was dead. This afternoon Awec must bury him. "I am very bitter about that," she says. "If I see a person from Barurud and I have the power, I will deny that person food from here and say, 'You go back to Barurud.' " Night falls, the air cools and rain sweeps across the land. A woman, walking alone, makes her way into the encampment. Perhaps her family has died along the way, falling beside the narrow footpaths as so many others have. But she perseveres, walking on through the rain, finally reaching Ajiep. Weak, hungry, with little clothing and no shelter, she curls up on the ground not 30 yards from where two American journalists and some aid workers slumber in their tents. She pulls an empty grain bag over herself for protection from the rain and a little bit of warmth. All night the rains fall relentlessly, drumming on the tents, soaking the ground. In the morning, the showers cease. Dawn creeps across the land. Under the grain bag, curled into the fetal position, the woman lies dead. No one knows her name.
How you can help A partial list of U.S. agencies accepting donations to fight the famine in Sudan: American Jewish World Service American Red Cross CARE Sudan Famine Relief Catholic Relief Services Doctors Without Borders MAP International Oxfam America Save the Children The U.S. Committee for UNICEF World Food Programme Other organizations that I support that are in some way or another surely involved; World Vision Inc. if this in the slightest bothers ANYONE,
I love you all, |