Teacher Training Building

During the past week, I was back in Malakal briefly where we had various meetings and the blessing of our house during the visit of Sr Pat Murray, Executive Director of Solidarity with Southern Sudan (SSS), who is based in Rome. Almost all the priests in the diocese were there. Before the blessing, I was pleased to be able to hang an aboriginal cross on the wall donated by some of the staff of De La Salle College, Malvern, and sent to Sudan with Br Denis.

Work is also in full swing at Malakal in the development of the SSS teacher training facilities. The SSS, 2010, eight-week, in-service programmes, for first and second year students, are about to begin in Malakal in borrowed, near-by, school classrooms.

We flew back to Juba on Thursday and on Friday drove to Torit. Sr Pat, Fr Joseph and I set out at 5:30am to drive the 140kms to Torit, the centre of the Diocese, where we had arranged to meet the Bishop, Johnson Akio. The trip took just under five hours each way. The road takes one toward the Kenyan boarder and passes through that part of Sudan where some of the heaviest fighting during the war occurred. It is apparently regarded as a strategic area and even now, a Northern army is based in Torit, as well as the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) from the south. We passed through several military camps, and check-points, along the way. 

The Bishop welcomed us warmly and generously. He took us to visit the proposed site for re-establishing a teacher training facility. His Cathedral was bombed, is no longer usable and at present is too costly to repair. Instead his new ‘Cathedral’ is a tin-roofed shelter, with no sides, supported by cut down tree trunks.

Torit is a very strong Catholic Centre with over 60 priests and 120 seminarians and has large property holdings. The Bishop also showed us bombed-out, seminary buildings, the destroyed Cathedral presbytery and the shell of the house of the previous Bishop, Paride Taban. War wreaks devastating consequences on persons, property, infrastructure and wild-life.

Torit is a thriving diocese, living in the shell of its former expansiveness, led by a visionary Bishop in the midst of uncertainty but generating optimism within the Catholic community. 

The need for better-trained teachers and more schooling is evident. The facility we are offered in Torit will be costly to repair. There are solid walls and a roof but no ceilings, windows, doors, power or hydraulic services. SSS will need to raise the money for the capital re-development and also provide staffing for this much needed facility. 

Elsewhere, SSS began last Monday in Yambio, a nine-week in-service teacher programme for teachers. Yambio Primary schools were scheduled to resume in April. We take advantage of school vacation periods to deliver programmes. On Thursday it was announced that school this year would recommence on 1^st March! What about our nine-week programme for the teachers who have commenced our four-year, teacher-training programme? New Zealand sister, Margaret Scott, who leads our activities in that area, went to the County Education Director who asserted our programme would continue. ‘The schools could make do without the teachers’. Good for us but I’m sure it is not good, short-term, for the schools from which the teachers come! There is no supply of replacement teachers. Longer term, however, there will be better quality teaching. 

We also begin special, four–week teacher training programmes in Juba and Nzara this week and, later this coming week, the first intake for our Health Training Institute in Wau takes place with twety-five young Sudanese beginning a four-year, residential programme to become registered nurses.

We also intend to deliver teacher training after school, mostly during term time, for another group of teachers in Nzara, and also at Leer. Some of these initiatives will require considerable staff travel. The programmes, however, can be delivered more economically during school vacation periods. So it is very helpful to have definite dates. The Education Ministry in each state sets its own term dates. Most are still to announce them. This tardiness, along with last minute changes, does not assist good forward planning! This is a land of uncertainty, late changes and consequent need for adaptation to the amended circumstances. 

This is a busy time for SSS. 

Br Bill