March 2008

In December 2007, I was eagerly anticipating my first visit to Leer, in Unity State of southern Sudan. I didn’t actually get there until February 2008. Unlike the preparation I’d received for my first visit to Boma, all the people would ask is, “So, Ingrid, you been to Leer yet?”

Presbyterian Church of Sudan primary school children in Leer.

I wish they’d been more forthcoming about the stark, ruggedness of Across (Ax) Leer Base: the tukuls in various states of disrepair, the flies that ruled by day, the solar power that didn’t work, the truck that didn’t work, the Internet that didn’t exist. Ultimately, no amount of preparation would have kept me from being haunted by Leer: it simply won’t let me go, possibly because I felt most acutely the desolation and staggering needs of the place and its people, especially those of primary school children of the Presbyterian Church of Sudan (PCOS), whose school is under a tree! Thankfully, the Holy Spirit reminded me daily that He was “much more” staggeringly sufficient to meet every need of Leer, including my own!

Nuer teachers in front of training class room, Leer.

Thus, for three weeks, moonlight was my companion, and soaked in its glow, I had the sweetest meditations with the Spirit of the Lord. Then, there were the sea-gulls, and some noisy black birds whose home was the large tree behind my tukul. Settling into sleep, I’d hear them arguing for space in the tree; I’d be awakened by their late-night bickering. Each dusk, they fly in, squawking and carrying on; each dawn, they took off in large numbers; the flapping of all those wings sounded like a mighty rushing wind to me. They too were my companions. Indeed, had it not been for the sporadic nightly voices of the female health trainees next door at the PRDA center, the isolation would have been complete.

Accelerated learning students returning chairs to dining room and kitchen, Ax Leer Base.

Ah, but in the daytime, the base was alive and jumping with people passing through to the hospital or wherever: women carrying 20-liter gerri-cans of water on their heads, or Western Upper Nile Bible Students passing through to practice their English with me.  After lunch, the young adult students of the accelerated learning classes (ALP), which ran from 1:00 to 5:00 every day, would appear: one class had 55 students and the other 64! One tall, lanky student, John, after first addressing me in the few Kiswahili words he knew, and I didn’t respond, queried: “What’s wrong with you? You’re brown, so you’re Kenyan right?” That’s a now familiar start to conversations in southern Sudan. I just told him, “No, I’m not Kenyan” and so on. John and his friend, Moses came almost every day to practice English and talk about the Bible. When he became ill with malaria, and sweat poured down his face as he burned with fever, he still did not miss class. Thankfully, he did not become another casualty of the malaria outbreak that was on while I was there.

John with two other accelerated learning students.

In the mornings, from 8:00 to 1:00 I was in that same ALP classroom with 40 Nuer school teachers for intensive English training. For two weeks, they struggled to learn basic English, even as I struggled to teach it to them. Elizabeth and Martha, the two women who were Arabic pattern learners, hardly spoke any English! Like many others, they wouldn’t even try, but by the end of the training, there wasn’t one who was not speaking English. No doubt, my constant “No grumbling in Nuer, please,” and “Speak in English, please,” and “If you will not practice speaking English here, then where and when?” had something to do with this. Elizabeth, like John, even after becoming ill with malaria, still came to class, lying down in the back during the breaks. This went on until she was just too weak to come at all.

Students taking an intensive Engish test at teacher training workshop in Leer.

Pastor John Rell’s inspiring talk at the opening of the training on the Cushite leader, Ebed-Melech, informed the way I taught these teachers. Using his challenge on the kind of Cushite “warrior-teachers” they’d be in their fight against illiteracy and its attendant ills, I connected our morning devotions to their development as English speaking/teaching, biblical, “warrior” teachers in the classroom and beyond. In honor of Elizabeth and Martha, and the Murle women I’d taught in Boma, and all the other women who attended these trainings, I drummed a call for a combined Cushite male-female effort in their peace-time “war” efforts on illiteracy. To demonstrate the power of women “warrior” leaders, we read about women such as Deborah, Jael, Esther, and Eve, (yes! Eve, the mother of all living beings), who proved to be a most controversial figure, given her status as “the original sinner.” Daily, we reviewed what we’d covered the previous morning; I took every opportunity, in and out of the classroom, to invoke the example of different biblical leaders into this training. By the end of the two weeks, they all knew who Ebed-Melech and Deborah were, and some had even begun to have a different take on Eve!

The sad thing is that the one contract from an agency that Ax has, which supports these teacher and supervisor trainings and ALP classes, expires this year, and so this Leer base will close. Please join me in praying for and seeking other donor(s) to partner with Ax to ensure the base remains open, and develops further to meet the dire needs of Leer. Thank you so much for your prayerful support.

In the rich grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,

The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 10