British Embassy Grant

A recent grant from the British Embassy in Khartoum will allow us to train 35 literacy teachers in the Khartoum area. The majority of these will be women, several of whom we hope will be able to set up literacy classes. It seems a miracle, given our present financial crisis, but four of our eight projects continue to function, including University Scholarships for Women, Vocational Training, Women’s Literacy classes and Eye Care Outreach.  However, funding needs urgently to be replenished if we are to continue to support education for Sudanese women in both Sudan and South Sudan.  


Small regular donations help us to plan ahead and are a really effective way of supporting our work.  


Learn how to donate here

South Kordofan Update

Our colleague Saudi from the Together for Sudan office in Khartoum visited Kadugli in late December and reports that he found Together for Sudan watchman Nazar still on duty despite the looting of our office. No usable equipment remains in the building. Our two colleagues visited the landlord who promised to do general maintenance but all equipment will need to be replaced.  Meanwhile, Kadugli remains tense and during Saudi’s visit to the local Commissioner, Together for Sudan was asked to move our upcoming Eye Care Outreach to Talodi – to which some 2,000 people from other areas of South Kordofan have fled seeking safety in recent months. The local Humanitarian Affairs Commission has lost most partners in UN agencies and international organizations. And it was not possible for Saudi to check on the more than 20 solar lighting panels, most in unstable areas, which Together for Sudan had recently set up on schools and clinics. 


See the Nuba section on our website

Eye Care News

News just in of two successful eye care outreaches in the suburbs of Khartoum and Omdurman last month.  A total of 214 patients were seen; 139  were prescribed medicines, mainly eye drops;  51 were referred to hospital for sight tests; and 50 were recommended for operations.  Many thanks to our indefatigable doctors who undertake this work and to Izdihar and colleagues from our Khartoum office who organize the day’s work and provide indispensable support.

We have just collated the eye care statistics for 2011.  5074 patients were seen, just over half of them at 24 day-long outreaches in the Khartoum displaced areas and the rest in the Nuba Mountains.  477 of the recommended operations were carried out, mostly for cataracts, and with an excellent success rate.  The others will be arranged as soon as security conditions permit in the Nuba Mountains.   We are glad to have been able to help so many people but the needs remain enormous and our generous donors - Dark and Light and Light for the World - have been obliged to suspend funding for us in 2012 because of the financial crisis.  Can you help?

Our Eye Care Project web page

This team helped many in the Nuba Mountains early in 2011

News and Developments

Plans To Set Up Closer Ties with Ahfad University for Women.

TfS is currently in conversation with Ahfad University, our first partner, to strengthen the relationship by helping Ahfad improve the English language kills of first year students. President Gasim Badri, a TfS Patron, has made it a policy through the years to include southern and other displaced women, many of whom now remain at Ahfad, to complete their education. We salute Dr. Gasim for his far sighted and humanitarian approach to education as he follows in the footsteps of his grandfather who insisted on the need to educate girls and of his father who founded the school which eventually became Ahfad University for Women.

News from South Kordofan.

The Together for Sudan field office at Kadugli in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan has been closed since early June when widespread fighting broke out between Sudanese government forces and local militias. The area remains insecure and the TfS office closed although some of the looted furniture and equipment has been returned. Office guard Nazar keeps an eye on the situation but TfS Field Coordinator Ibrahim is unable for security reasons to return to Kadugli and now works in our Khartoum office. Sadly, a planed TfS Eye  Care Outreach at Kadugli hospital later this year, using a team of eye specialists from
Khartoum, has been indefinitely postponed.

Eye Care Outreach in Women’s Prison, Omdurman.

During October Dr. Nabila Radi examined 113 women, 17 children and six men in the women’s prison in Omdurman. Appropriate medications as well as eye drops and vitamins were given to 88 people. Thirty seven women in need of corrective lenses were scheduled to be seen by a volunteer refractionist and prescriptions were sent to Together for Sudan to follow up. Three operations – two for bone malformation/obstruction and one for glaucoma – were scheduled. TfS Assistant Project Coordinator Izdihar reports that there are currently 180 children living with their mothers in the prison. The majority of the imprisoned women will have been arrested for brewing beer which is illegal but often the only way displaced and impoverished families can provide for their children. A second TfS Eye Care Outreach involving over 100 people was held by Dr. Shadia Alkhir Alshafia in Haj Yusuf outside Khartoum also in October.

Lillian

WHY SUDAN AND WHY EDUCATION OF WOMEN?

People often want to know how Together for Sudan began. The answer is that TfS was born in Sudan following a request for help from Sudanese women. But what, people ask next, is Together for Sudan accomplishing? And does it work?

These questions are on target and usually result in those of us who know Together for Sudan beginning to speak all at once. It’s true that working in Sudan can be difficult due to the enormous needs of the people, the size of the country, extreme climate and increasingly difficult travel regulations for foreigners. Then there are the many requests for medical, financial and other help which are beyond our mandate, to say nothing of our limited means.

From time to time bureaucracy, misunderstanding and delay have turned into the “Are we really getting anywhere?” feeling, especially when the work which our Sudanese colleagues are doing has been impeded. But that doesn’t last long when we remember what Together for Sudan has accomplished, how we have developed through the years and the opportunities which lie ahead. Finding ourselves now on the verge of starting work in South Sudan as well as continuing in the north, I shake my head and wonder at the audacity — and the privilege — of it all. Working with women to help other women is what TfS is about.

My response to the question “Why Sudan?” is that I was living in Khartoum in the mid 1990s, a time of great neglect of the Sudanese people by the international community, when a group of Muslim women invited me to set up peace dialogue between northern and southern women. About this same time a Christian mother in the Nuba Mountains asked me to put her daughter through university and I agreed to do so because several people, some of them unknown to me, had helped me through university. The work which is TfS grew from those small beginnings, changing many times along the way but always listening to what Sudanese women say they need most: education for themselves and their children. More broadly, what Sudanese women need most – and this is true in both Sudan and South Sudan – is a hand up rather than a hand-out. They can take it from there.

The first project in the work known today as Together for Sudan was University Scholarships for Women. Since then TfS has sent some 200 women through universities in Sudan and currently has 154 women at universities in Sudan and South Sudan. In the late 1990s a number of projects, including a mobile library, a listening service for suicidal and despairing people and a women’s centre, flowered and faded for various reasons.

At present TfS has eight projects, most urgently in need of funding. In addition to University Scholarships for Women, Women’s Literacy Classes, HIV/AIDS Awareness Outreach and Eye Care Outreach, there are also Vocational Training, Scholarships for HIV/AID Affected Children and Solar Lighting Panels for schools,clinics and community centers off the electricity grid. May I ask you to choose one of these projects – perhaps one related to help given to you at a time of need – and send us a cheque? There is joy in sharing!

Lillian Craig Harris

Dear Friends

In recent months there have been major developments in both Together for Sudan’s work and in Sudan
itself. We remain Muslims and Christians working together in service to the poor and dispossessed, women and children in particular. But Sudan’s recent transformation into the Republic of Sudan and the Republic of South Sudan presents us with both difficulties and opportunities. Thousands of southerners living in the north have returned to their home areas and our office in Khartoum has been hard hit. Former Deputy Country Coordinator Victor and former TfS Accountant Minallah are among the thousands of people now living in Juba, capital of South Sudan, many with no proper housing or employment. Meanwhile, a significant number of Together for Sudan university scholars have left the north and re-registered at Juba University, hoping that Together for Sudan can continue to support them.

Arriving in Khartoum in early October, TfS Secretary Alan Goulty and I knew —despite the present TfS funding deficit – that we must answer the question “Should we expand our work to South Sudan?” During a brief visit to Juba, we called on contacts at Juba University, the Episcopal church and various international and local organizations. It was not, however, until we visited a recently set up organization dealing with HIV/AIDS awareness that I realized how well prepared TfS is to work in South Sudan. Editha, former leader of our HIV/AIDS Awareness Outreach in the Khartoum area, is now in Juba and eager to be re employed by TfS – as are Victor and Minallah.

Together for Sudan’s roots go back to a small group of Muslim and Christian women who sought to bring understanding and peace between the two religions and, seeing the number of minarets as well as churches in Juba, I decided that TfS will be right at home there.

With your support we can continue our work in Khartoum and environs and also begin work in South Sudan. To start with, we hope to find funding for more university scholarships as well as for women’s literacy classes and HIV/AIDS outreach. And already the indefatigable Dr. Nabila Radi who heads the TfS Eye Care Outreach in the Khartoum area is talking about an outreach to the South Sudan city of Wau.
November 2011

Lillian Craig Harris

Fr Giovanni Vantini

All friends of Sudan mourn the passing of Father Giovanni Vantini, for nearly 60 years one of the leading scholars in the rich field of Sudanese studies.  TfS Trustee, Herman Bell, has generously launched a fund in Father Vantini’s memory, to support the educational work of Together for Sudan. Contributions will be greatly appreciated. Donate on line here or go to our Donate page for other options. 

Herman has also written the following tribute:

Father Giovanni Vantini was inspired by the extensive history of Christianity in the Sudan and spent most of his life serving the people of the Sudan. He is remembered with affection by his Muslim and Christian friends and students.

Father Vantini was born in Villafranca di Verona on 1 January 1923. He was ordained a priest in 1947, trained in Arabic and sent to the Sudan. There he spent 58 years, teaching in schools established by the Comboni missionaries, working in parish churches and St. Matthew’s Cathedral (Khartoum), engaging in journalistic endeavours such as Assalam [Peace], a bi-weekly journal launched at the time of independence in 1956, and conducting research on the history of the Church along the Nile for most of the past 2000 years. In 2005, he published La Missione del Cuore - I comboniani in Sudan nel ventesimo secolo [The Mission of the Heart – The Comboni Missionaries in Sudan in the Twentieth Century] (Bologna). In spite of ill health in his final years he managed to achieve the publication of Rediscovering Christian Nubia (Khartoum) in 2009. He died in Verona on the 3rd of May 2011 at the age of 87.

His command of Arabic was a vital skill for the production of his Oriental Sources Concerning Nubia (Heidelberg & Warsaw, 1975), an important companion study to the historical and archaeological work in which he was involved at that time in the Nile Valley. He wrote one of his major publications in Arabic: Ta' rikh al-masihiyya fi-l mamalik al-Nubiyya al-qadima wa-l- Sudan al-hadith [The History of Christianity in the Old Nubian Kingdoms and the Modern Sudan] (Khartoum, 1978).

In the colloquial Arabic of the Sudan there is a relevant expression of condolence which is widely used:   al-baraka fiikum ‘Blessing upon you.’ Death reminds us of the great store of blessing that is available to us all. ‘Blessed be those who mourn for they shall be comforted.’

Saint Anna, mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
 Faras Cathedral.

Father Vantini was admired as a scholar and a man of faith. He was also a kind and generous friend. Even though the Canticle of the Creatures was composed almost 700 years before his birth by Saint Francis, the following verses still seem particularly appropriate.

Altissimu, onnipotente bon Signore,
Tue so le laude la gloria e l'honore
et onne benedictione.
………
Laudato si', mi Signore, per sora nostra Morte corporale,
da la quale nullu homo vivente po skappare,
………
Laudate et benedicete mi Signore et rengratiate
et serviteli cun grande humilitate.


Good Lord, most high and almighty,
To thee be praises, glory, honour and all blessings.
………
Be praised, my Lord, for our sister bodily death
From whom no human being can escape.
………
Praise and bless my Lord; thank Him,
And serve Him with great humility.

By Herman Bell - TfS Trustee.