wfn.org | SUDANESE RETURN TO NEW LIFE IN A DANGEROUS LAND

[a.whitefield@quest.org.uk]

Title:SUDANESE RETURN TO NEW LIFE IN A DANGEROUS LAND
July 1, 1997
ANGLICAN COMMUNION NEWS SERVICE
Canon Jim Rosenthal, Director of Communications
Anglican Communion Office
London, England

[97.6.4.6]

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The Very Revd Dr William Taylor, the Area Dean of Ealing in London
recently returned from southern Sudan.  This report first appeared in
the Church Times and is reprinted here with permission from William
Taylor. A fuller report with pictures about the situation in southern
Sudan will appear in the Michaelmas Anglican World.

SUDANESE RETURN TO NEW LIFE IN A DANGEROUS LAND

The Bishop of Yei, in the southern Sudan, returned home a fortnight ago
from Arua in Uganda, where he, his clergy and people have been living
since their flight from the Sudanese war in 1990.  In the devastated
city of Yei, only a quarter of which is standing, the Rt Revd Semi
Solomona's former home is now a patch of scrub littered with spent
cartridges and shells.

Since March, some 67,000 refugees have returned from Uganda, following
the changing military scene in the south of Sudan.  They left their
homes when fighting intensified between troops of the Sudanese
government and those of the southern-based liberation movement, Sudan
peoples Liberation Army (SPLA). In the past six months the SPLA has made
significant military gains, and Yei is among the areas they have
liberated.

Its inhabitants face a tough future. There are no roads, no electricity,
no schools or hospitals.  Rutted tracks, impassable in rain, are the
only way into the country, so it is almost impossible to bring in basic
supplies. The few lorries that can meet the challenge of three-foot-wide
potholes are carrying seeds and tools - the first necessity, if people
are to begin rebuilding their lives.

The evidence of violent trauma is everywhere.  As you cross from Uganda
into the SPLA-controlled part of South Sudan, the first sight by the
roadside is a captured government tank.  Next to it is the burned-out
shell of a pick-up truck, now home to a dozen child POWs.  Much of the
countryside is land mined. 

Ten kilometres outside Yei, the road crosses the site of a fierce
battle. An estimated 2000 corpses still lie  there, the detritus of
their lives - clothing, the occasional suitcase, a set of dentures, a
torn Qur'an - scattered around them.  Some of the bodies are now hidden
by the long grass.  The stench is not.

Yet amid the devastation, new life emerges. A settlement is rising next
to a burned-out military post.  The earth is fertile, rain abundant, and
new crops are sprouting.

Also growing is the Sudanese Church, which throughout the whole period
has retained extraordinary vibrancy.  It is no sentimental platitude to
say that a suffering Church is always a strong and growing Church: the
figures speak for themselves.  The Anglican diocese of Rumbek grew from
nine congregations to 357, between 1983 and 1993. In the decade from
1985, the diocese of Bor produced more than 10,000 new hymns.  In the
decade from 1987, four new Bible schools and one seminary were set up to
develop pastoral leadership for the Sudanese churches.

The Sudanese Ambassador to Britain said recently that the Church had
grown more rapidly in the 1990s than at any time in the country's
history.  "The government's goal of producing an Islamic society has
been a failure," he said.

Since all other institutions have been destroyed, the churches now
provide the only grass-roots networks for social structure and
stability.  They will have a crucial role in helping build up schools,
clinics, and a basic infrastructure in the country.