It’s crowded,
but children are learning H
aram Jukin, 10, always wanted to go to school, but poverty and war stood in her way. Last October she finally began classes at a Lutheran World Federation-
run school in Yusuf Batil, a U.N. refugee camp in South Sudan.
At presstime, the ELCA had provided the LWF with $100,000 in 2013, on top of $75,000 in 2012, to help meet the needs of South Sudanese affected by internal conflict and disasters. The gifts of ELCA members pro- vide shelter, children’s education and peace-building for newly arriving refugees from Sudan. The Yusuf Batil camp, a sprawling collection of tents and makeshift shelters, is across the border from Sudan’s Blue Nile State, from which Haram’s family fled in 2012. A simmering insurgency and government counteroffen- sive have displaced more than 110,000 people, mostly children, into four camps in Maban County, part of the newly independent South Sudan’s Upper Nile State. The Jukins left their village after months of aerial bom- bardment by the Sudanese military. “The bombs would fall and we would run to the streams and sleep there,” said Kames Jukin, Haram’s father.
During their two-month trek to the camp, Haram’s
mother, Shaia Hamed, walked with food and a child dan- gling from each end of a pole she carried across her shoul- ders. Her husband usually carried another child. Haram and her brother Sa ddam, 14, walked alongside. The family’s supply of sorghum ran out after several weeks. Eventually they slaughtered the animals they had brought from home. Food grew scarce. “Father would climb trees and pick leaves which we’d boil and then eat. They tasted awful,” Haram said.
They hid frequently in the bush to avoid detection by
soldiers. When they finally crossed into South Sudan, representatives from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees directed them to the camp, where they found
Jeffrey, a photojournalist missionary of the United Methodist Church, wrote this piece for Lutheran World Information.
Lutheran-run schools offer hope in South Sudan Text and photo by Paul Jeffrey
emergency food, a plastic tarp and many former neighbors from Kukur.
More refugees Mairo Retief, head of the LWF Department for World Service Emergency Hub for East Africa, said there’s no end in sight for the violence in the Blue Nile State. Another 30,000 refugees are expected from the border state between Sudan and South Sudan. When Retief arrived in Maban in June 2012, he determined in coordination with U.N. officials and other nongovernmental groups that the LWF would focus on education and child protection. More than 60 percent of the people displaced at the camps are children. Obtaining adequate supplies proved a challenge, as rains slowed deliveries of materials. When the LWF-run classes for more than 1,000 students began at Gendrassa camp in October, teachers initially made do without printed materials. Then, just as LWF, U.N. and com- munity leaders prepared to open a tented school, the first three trucks with tons of cargo arrived, flown in from neighboring Kenya. Inside were tents, furniture, com- puters, student exercise books and pencils, volleyballs for child-friendly spaces and chalk for teaching. The challenges didn’t discourage Haram, who said she is determined to learn despite the late start. Someday, she said, she’d like to be a teacher.
Lutheran-run educational work in the camps includes primary classes, early childhood development groups and “child friendly spaces” that help children to be themselves amid chaotic camp life (see page 35). Retief said the LWF is also helping with existing schools in the host community, which was already swol- len with returnees from the north who fled harassment under the Khartoum regime following the south’s inde- pendence in July 2011.
“Although they’ve welcomed the refugees here, there have been tensions,” Retief said. “They’ve been displaced in the past, so they understand what it’s like to have to live away from home. But there are concerns
34 The Lutheran •
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