Mid

First, the ministry at the Renk Theological College, which goes quite well. We have 15 full-time boarding students who truly work very, very hard to talk all their classes. At the moment, we are teaching 10 different classes: Worship & Liturgy (with a focus on Baptism); English (with Individual English Study Plans for each student); Pentateuch; General Church History II; Biblical Hebrew; Systematic Theology; Arabic; Romans/1st Corinthians; Synoptic Gospels; and Homiletics. We also have computer classes daily for six students (the rest will get to learn that in turn). Our school day begins at 7:30 with devotions, runs through the morning and afternoon with classes (with appropriate breaks for tea and breakfast), and then ends with evening devotions at 5:30. It's a long and quite arduous day, but these students are, for the most part, quite devoted to their studies. During breaks, I often see them wandering around our small campus with study books or papers, and am asked several times each day what a particular word might mean.

I am responsible for teaching Systematic Theology and English. I help with the Baptism course, and have just picked up the Homiletics course when our part-time lecturer had to quit because he had too many other things to do for the Diocese. And since our students' English abilities are all over the place, from barely understanding me some days to quite advanced, I've devised an individual plan for each student, concentrating on their greatest needs. All of them need to work on pronouns, which is true for anyone living and working in a foreign language. Some students will get advanced classes in the Perfect and Conditional Tenses; others are still struggling to figure out Simple Present and Simple Past. And because Arabic does not have a present tense for the verb To Be, most of the students are confounded by that verb in particular. What I've done is assigned each student one of my novels (thanks to all of you who have contributed them over the last three years!), and to work on one page at a time, identifying whatever it is they need to work on ("Find all uses of all pronouns and identify"). So in addition to study papers, the students now wander about with mystery novels, romantic novels and collections of short stories!

As chaplain to the students, I also spend a lot of time with them daily, trying to hear them out on their wants and needs (and we have a hard time with THAT differentiation as well). We still do not have enough money to run this school; truly, it is an act of faith alone that keeps it -- and us -- going. But somehow, we get the bills paid and feed the students and pay the teachers (not what they should be making, but the do receive some pay). We need more dormitories, we need to work on the few dormitories we have; we need more classrooms and classroom supplies. And yet ... the studies continue, and next year at this time, I will be writing about our first graduating class and how sad I will be to see these students move one.

The uncertainty about our funding has caused some problems for the students, who have a tendency to ask (and sometimes demand) that we give them more money for their allowances, or for the food we serve them. And to be honest, there are times when I have a hard time understanding what's going on. The students do no pay any money for their education; neither do their parishes nor their dioceses. All money for this college is raised in the United States, with a small helping from Great Britain. So when the students declare they will not help with something (it took a week of discussions to get them to agree to mud the houses; see below), I get a bit fed up. But usually, after everyone airs their grievances, we can work something out.

In addition to teaching, the Rev. Abraham Noon Jiel, Dean of Studies, and I are also overseeing four construction projects (and some days, we wonder if that is not our TRUE calling!). We are building underground water cisterns on the chapel at the College, cisterns that I designed and to which some of you contributed, and we hope to have these done before the rains come next month. Already, we are being teased by rains -- nothing huge, but the weather is completely out of whack right now. Thankfully, our contractor is very excited by the work we are doing, and so shows up daily and works for hours and hours at a time. The man who dug the first two holes, John, has to be the best hole-digger I've ever seen -- perfectly straight lines vertically, perfectly round horizontally, to the exact measurements of two meters by two meters. John has to be in his 60s -- he's not the fastest, but he's consistent, patient and a very hard worker. He's off doing two more jobs, and will return, we pray, on Monday to dig our other two cistern holes. Mohamed, the contractor, is very exacting in his work as well, and has laid the bricks for the walls with great care and beauty; truly, we have been blessed. Tomorrow, we starting pouring the concrete lid, an event for which I must be present, since I am the designer, and we all want to make sure we have a lid strong enough to keep any child from falling through (we know the kids are going to climb on the water cisterns, so we are almost over-engineering these things). With God's help, we'll have water in the first cistern by the end of the week -- clean, cool water. Our hope and prayer is that once these are done, other people will want to have permanent water cisterns in their homes and at their businesses, thus providing us with some income (we hope to form a company eventually to do all this work). If we can raise the funds from partners, we hope to build up to 10 cisterns, either below ground or above, depending on the design that is chosen, at the Cathedral of St. Matthew, which has thousands of square feet of zinc roofing to catch rain water. The next step will be for me to teach the contractor how to build the above-ground cisterns, a talent I learned as a water technician in Kenya more than 20 years ago.

Our other construction projects include the transformation of a former chicken house (yes, you're reading that correctly) into a dormitory for two of our married students and their families; the digging of a pit latrine for those families; and the mudding of a new house and a new kitchen (separate buildings here, almost always) at the married students' dorm, which is about 3 kilometers from the College. The conversion of the dormitory is now complete, and we no longer call it the chicken house. It is now referred to, and soon will be christened, Emmanuel House, after the church in Delaplane, Virginia, that gave the money for this work. (Don't ask what we're calling the pit latrine; really, don't ask. I don't think I have permission to tell you.) On Thursday and Friday, we halted classes to take all of our students out to the dormitories to mud the new little house and kitchen. Mudding is an intense affair; each person has a specific job to do. Some students are literally down on their hands and knees, mixing the dirt, water and straw together to the right consistency. Some students carry big balls of mud from the mixers to the throwers. Others are masters at throwing the mud, and yes, that truly is what you do, you throw it. I spent the first day as a thrower, and the second carrying mud balls to the throwers. The students are convinced I shouldn't be doing this work -- I'm a lecturer AND chaplain AND khawaja (foreign white person) AND a priest (which many of them are) AND a woman. Well! See how many red flags you can hold up in front of me! So I worked right alongside them on both days, and helped to accomplish all the work. A family will move into the new little house next week -- it still needs to have a final coating of thin mud put on, but first the mud walls have to dry out, so that job comes later on. I think that the students will do this, but we might try to find some money to get some local women, who are very good at this, to do the job. I don't know.

In the midst of all this, we held our Emergency Diocesan Synod to nominate (in the end) two people to be our next bishop. I was the preacher at the opening worship service of the Synod, a great honor bestowed upon me by Bishop Hilary Garang Deng of Malakal, who also is our caretaker bishop. Bishop Daniel Deng Bul Yak was elected in February as the new Archbishop of Sudan, and will be enthroned next Sunday in Juba. We have at least 10 people from the Diocese of Renk attending that enthronement, which means there was a lot of work that had to be done before they could leave. Father Joseph Garang Atem, principal of the Renk Theological College, is one of the two nominees. We actually aren't certain when the election will take place; the House of Bishops, which will meet on 21 April, will make that decision, call representatives from all 24 dioceses to a meeting, and they make the final decision.

We also had Newland Smith, the librarian from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Illinois, spend a week with us, helping us to organize the library. That has been a long-term project of ours, and we desperately needed help to categorize each book, decide which ones to keep and which to donate to the public library that the town of Renk is building. Many of the books that are to be donated were given to us years ago, but have no place in a College library. (The 1976 High School Sports Record Book from the US truly is not what we are seeking.)

AND the College underwent a one-day evaluation by members of the Provincial Theological Education Committee to see if this college is ready to become part of a planned university system run by the Episcopal Church of the Sudan. Renk Theological College will specialize in both theological studies and commercial studies, the latter because we are a rapidly growing town with great commercial possibilities. The other four provincial colleges will have their own specialties: the one in Khartoum will feature Islamic Studies, for instance, while Bishop Gwynne in Juba will feature peace and reconciliation studies, because the University of Juba has a department in that area. If this plan goes forward, which we think it will, in the next 10 years there will be even more changes coming to the College, all of which are pretty exciting.

In other news, we are experiencing, full-blast, the effects of climate change here in Renk. Normally, April is hotter than Hades, with temperatures sometimes reaching 140 degrees and only 4 percent humidity. (Some days, I'm not certain it's worth it to me to have a travel clock with all this additional information on it!) The rains usually begin sometime in May, with some scattered showers, and arrive full-blast in June. But we have been having rain for the past week ... nothing large, but enough to upset the normal scheme of things. We don't have our fields fully prepared for planting (it's too soon), the water cisterns aren't ready, and the temperatures are all over the place. Daily, we watch the winds: If they come from the North, there will be dry, hot weather. If they come from the South, it's the harbinger of rain. For the past five days, the winds have changed several times each day, first from the North, then swinging to the West, then from the South. It's hard to tell what's going on. The other night, we had thunder and lightning and what should have been a full-blown storm. But we didn't get much in the way of rain -- literally, only one inch in a bucket. This means that it's harder for us to plan our construction projects, and much harder to decide whether to sleep inside or out. (The first two nights of rain, I slept outside, and endured a small drenching, gambling that the rains wouldn't last long. I was right both times. But on the third night, I had to move inside and stay there, alas. It's much hotter inside, with night-time temperatures usually reaching up to 100 degrees.) A sign that indeed I'm becoming a true Sudani -- when the temperatures plummet during the night, from 100 all the way down to 80 degrees, I actually get cold and have to use a sheet, doubled-up, to keep from shivering.

Father Joseph is off to Juba for the enthronement of Bishop Daniel, so I've asked one of the students, the Rev. Moses Anuur, to move into Joseph's compound with me. I'm not allowed to be alone at night, and usually am not allowed to be alone much during the day either. We've had some security moments in the area (buses being stopped on the road, people robbed, injured and some even killed), so we take extra precautions. Because I'm known here (I'm the only American who lives here full-time) and because I interact quite a bit with the children especially, who love to call out, Khawaja! Khawaja! and to practice their schoolroom English on me, Joseph wants me to be cautious. I have just come from the souk, the market, where I got a haircut, because my very thick hair needed help badly. But I was only allowed to go because Moses went with me, to choose the place where my hair would be cut, and to sit there for the whole time, never leaving me alone for a second. When we walked through the souk, he stayed quite close to me at all times, and chose where I could shop, and where I could not, to whom I could speak and which people to ignore. There are some unkind, sometimes drunken men down there who gravitate to white people always; trust me, it's not worth the harassment, so I follow Moses' lead.

One of the reasons for this increased concern centers on the census, which was mandated in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed three years ago. The last "official" census was done in 1993, I believe, but because it took place during the war, with more than 2 million Southerners displaced, both inside Sudan and without, it is not a valid count of the people. The census was supposed to begin on Tuesday and last for two weeks. Everything was ordered shut down throughout the entire country for the first day, and all of us were to stay in our homes. But this morning, it was announced that the Government of South Sudan had called off the census, citing the war in Darfur, the disturbances in Abyei (a disputed territory between the North and the South), the million or more Southerners who are still displaced and have not been able to come home yet (you are counted where you are, so if you're in a refugee camp in Khartoum, you are counted as a Northerner), and the unsettled question of the border between the North and the South. There also are questions about religion and nationality, neither of which are clear to me, but which are very upsetting to Sudanis. And the fact that there are approximately 2 million people in refugee camps outside Sudan who have not been able to return home yet has further disrupted the census. From what I understand, the government in Khartoum is quite upset, while the government in Juba is quite adamant. No one knows how this will play out, or when the census might actually take place.

A great deal of the rest of the time, I am a doctor of sorts, not only for the students, but for people whom I know, and sometimes for people who seem to think that I can cure anything. I have all my medical supplies from the ECW and friends at St. Paul's, Winston Salem, NC, and from the Daughters of the King at Good Shepherd, Burke, Va. I treat cuts, small wounds, small burns, colds (honey in water, please, then "drink" some ibuprofen -- if you tell them to "take" the pills or to "eat" them, they literally will chew on them, which is not a good thing to do with ibuprofen), headaches, general aches and pains, etc. I also have been treating small children a lot -- they get many diseases here, just from playing in the dirt. I'm supplying the married students' families with Oral Rehydration Salts, have provided children's medicine for various other problems, have worked with the mothers to get them to boil the water for the children to drink, and to bathe them frequently to keep the flies off them, and in general am consulted on just about everything. I also use the majority of the money I brought with me, donated by all of you, for medicine. I spend, on average, 60 percent of the money I have, to buy medicine or to pay for procedures that I simply won't do. One of my students needed a very rotten molar pulled -- I eagerly paid to have the "dentist" do that. Having had four root canals myself, I'm not touching that procedure. Another student's child was quite ill with diarrhea and vomiting; when nothing else would work, I made Daniel Bol take his child to the hospital, where she stayed for four days, hooked up to an IV and receiving antibiotics. Surprisingly, that stay only ran 100 pounds, or $50 -- I had expected to pay a great deal more.

I still have a bit of money left, but am glad it only has to last for another five weeks; otherwise, I would completely run out, and I still have to pay to get to Khartoum and to stay there for two nights before leaving on 18 May. Father Joseph sometimes gets upset with me when I give away the money, but I keep telling him, "Medicine has to be purchased; I can't treat some of these diseases otherwise." So he smiles and nods and cautions me to be careful, not to be taken in by folks, and I agree, and then I pay out more money.

And that's the news from this end of the world. It's hot, the work is good, the water filter is giving me headaches daily (but another is being brought to Sudan to rescue me in my last weeks here). The students are delighted to have me here, and I truly consider them my children. We are committed to each other, even when we disagree, even when what they are learning is hard for them to accept, even when we load them down with assignments that keep them working all day and night.