Valentino

Last month I have been in Northern Bahr El Ghazal State, in the north-west of South Sudan, where IBIS is currently implementing the EU funded ‘Poverty Reduction through Improved Access to Education’ project which focuses on community, government and civil society engagement in education while providing access to functional literacy to children, youth and women. The main reason of my visit was to discuss with the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology of the State, possibility of expansion of IBIS in the area since it is good practice to involve the government officials from the very onset of new projects’ design, not only to obtain their approval but also to receive their inputs on approaches to utilize, advices on the locations where to work, recommendations about specific activities to implement. Christopher Athian Door, the Deputy Director of the Alternative Education System (AES), a Directorate established in 2002 to provide educational opportunities to children, youth and adults affected by the war through a series of alternative education programmes which meet their various learning needs, was instrumental into describing as all the seven components of the AES work in the State. Santino Ajiing Riing, AES Inspector, was particularly good at explaining as one of them, the Community Girls School (CGS) programme provides quality basic education for girls aged 8-12 in villages that have no schools. Gino Aguer Aguer, Coordinator of the National Languages Department, was passionate about the benefit of mother tongue as language of instruction in increasing the literacy rate, which is to date only 27%, in a country where the national language has been changed from Arabic to English after Independence on July 9 2011. All of them were particularly excited about the nomination of the new Minister, by the name of Valentino, who “does not sit in the office all day long, but moves from one side to the other of the state, to get to know the status of the school structures, the attendance rate of the learners, the performance of the teachers”.

It is not the first time that I heard about a Valentino from Northern Bahr El Ghazal. Exactly 3 years ago, when I came to South Sudan for the first time, I read, as many other foreigners eager to grasp a bit of the dramatic story of this country, the book ‘What is the what?’ by Dave Eggers, who narrates the story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the many lost boys of South Sudan who was resettled to the United States after so many years as refugee in Kakuma during the second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005). You can’t imagine my surprise when I set up a meeting with the Minister, and there he was Valentino, the same Valentino of the book, who was appointed Minister of Education of the state where he comes from, only 5 weeks ago! It was really quite emotional to meet someone who has walked (literally) such a long way and has come back to his own country to contribute to its reconstruction and development. During our discussion, Valentino was very supportive of IBIS, of its present as of its future education programming in Northern Bahr El Ghazal State, and was relentlessly taking notes of the areas of education we would like to explore. 

There is no need to say that he made my day and I could not refrain myself from asking to take a selfie together, the first I have ever made, to crown an encounter which had the taste of grace.

5 October: World Teacher Day

It has been a while since last time I blogged…and I have just realized that my last post started with the same wording and dated August 2013…well, last year I have been pretty busy with the development of IBIS South Sudan Thematic Programme, which IBIS conceives as a strategic space for developing programme activities and systematizes present and future lines of action around a specific theme  (Education in Emergency and Fragility in the case of South Sudan) and this year I have been busy in the coordination of the Education in Emergency (EiE) project which is responding to the crisis broken out in South Sudan on December 2013…so I didn’t really want to stay in front of my computer even after working hours and I stopped writing about my life in South Sudan. However, recently I feel a bit lonely and I don’t really have much to do when I am back home and I remembered that blogging was a good way to keep me company and do something creative and productive so…I have decided to re-start again and…let’s see how dedicated I will be..

 I want to restart writing today October 5^th and use it as a way to celebrate World Teacher Day. I have never been aware of this date before but since I am in South Sudan I am particularly keen on celebrations because I think they offer an opportunity for reflections. Teachers are important people in the life of each individual but we often tend to forget that and it seems like our governments tend to forget it too. It is a fact that almost globally, teachers are not very well paid and even their status in society is gradually decreasing, probably because in our modern money-oriented world it doesn’t matter what you do but how much money you get and a poor salary devalues teachers before the eyes of everyone. However, teachers are for most of us the first door to knowledge, the first to teach us how to read and write: a gift which will accompany and enrich our life forever. 

In South Sudan, teachers have not been paid, due to the conflict, since December 15 2013 and only those working for INGO are receiving a monthly incentive of 300-350 SSP (around 80 USD). Nevertheless, it is amazing the good work they can do and how restless they can be. They really feel that responsibility of educating the future generations and this can mean a great deal to those children and youth displaced by the war, idle in the (Internally Displaced People) IDP sites where they temporarily reside, who are welcome to the Child-Friendly Learning Spaces (CFLS) constructed by IBIS as well as by other education partners.    

As part of the EiE project, we train teachers in Life Skills and Psycho-Social Support in Emergency and a session of the training focuses on the qualities that a good teacher needs to have in a child-friendly learning environment. In order to do so, we ask the trainees to first draw their favorite teacher on a piece of paper and then discuss in groups what the qualities that made that teacher special were. 

Every time I facilitate this training I also think of my special teachers, since they were actually two. One was an English teacher I had in middle-school [in Italy the education system is divided in primary school (5 years), middle school (3 years) and high school (5 years)] called Mrs. Ignoti (never knew the first name since we were used to call her that way). She was a tiny woman from the “city”, sophisticated but down-to-earth at the same time, whom I will be always grateful for having enhanced my self-esteem.  

In middle school I was not what you will call a brilliant student and, according to the Italian grading system, I was always graded as sufficiente—average. I have been sufficiente for 3 years and I had the feeling that no matter how much I would have worked hard, I would have always remained a sufficiente student, since the prejudice that all the teachers had for me was difficult to wipe out. But Mrs. Ignoti came on board in the third year of middle school, unaware of my sufficiente past, and gave me a buono—good—at the first English composition she assigned, commending my writing skills in front of my classmates. Can you imagine what this meant to somebody used to the anonymity of the back row? It is thanks to her that I started to be passionate about foreign languages and cultures and be more self-confident about my capacities and skills, regardless of any grade.

In high school, I met instead Mr. Pezzinga, a teacher in philosophy who looked like a boy with grey hair who is probably a favorite teacher of many, since his former students have created a Facebook page which counts 454 likes so far. What make Mr. Pezzinga different were his teaching methodologies. He was not using, as the others, what Freire would describe as the “banking system” but instead he was provoking debate and discussion in class, using a learner-centered approach which is the same we train our teachers at IBIS. He didn’t treat us as tabula rasa but as individuals with an inner knowledge who could contribute actively to the lesson in a Socratic dialogue of questions and answers, doubt and reasoning.      

It is to Mrs. Ignoti and Mr. Pezzinga, to the teachers of South Sudan and to the teachers of the world, that I wish a Happy World Teacher Day, to honor their too often unpaid, forgotten, devalued but priceless work.

Not a single story

It has been a while since I blogged about my life in South Sudan and not because I was lost for words but because the internet connection of our Yei field office was closed due to financial constraints. Modems were used to supplement such a lack but their extremely low speed can discourage even the most prolific creative mind, therefore I used internet only for necessary communication and I largely disconnect myself from the rest of the world. It’s easy to feel lonely when you are the only resident of a compound located in the outskirts of a semi-urban town and the only friends you have are either your South Sudanese colleagues who go home after work or your life-time friends who are tons of miles away from you. But being detached by the so-called virtual reality pushed me to discover the reality around me, and one of the things I learnt by liberating myself from the net was that I was not alone at all. The compound was actually inhabited day and night by men wearing uniforms and smiley faces: the guards.

Almost every NGO and UN agency has one, two or more security guards to protect its staff and its assets. We had two during our working days and one during the weekend, who became my best companion. E. is a 28 years old guy with whom I spent almost all my Saturdays and Sundays chatting, cooking, learning Juba Arabic, going to church before his day shift starts, going to visit his beautiful wife and his equally beautiful kids after his day shift ends. E. was my door opener, the guide in the unknown alleys of Yei who gradually disclosed to me its majestic teak and mango trees, its streams and rivers, its neighborhoods, coffee-places, restaurants and bars.

The reality I came to be familiar with was quite different from what I initially know or I thought to know. I was particularly surprised on how fast the perception of the world around me changed in the course of few months.

The mind of a white Westerner who has never been in Africa as me is full of pre-conceived images of this continent, that a generally sensationalistic press described as ravaged by poverty, war and a sense of hopeless disillusionment. However, by strolling around the streets of Yei, I came to understand that what is destroyed can be reconstructed, what is lost can be regained, and that the bare-feet children who populate way too many European charity adverts, are not necessarily poor but are just playing upon their own soft and sandy land.

I don’t want to propose a too rosy picture of South Sudan, a country which I still know too little and of which I have seen only the better off areas. I know that South Sudan is fragile as it could be a two years old infant, with a lot of ongoing emergencies and challenges ahead. But to portray only the hardships of South Sudan won’t do justice to the enormous efforts that its citizens are doing to stand on their feet and it will still mean to tell a “a single story of catastrophe”  which is how the entire African Continent has been told for too long.

And yet, after 10 months of blessed solitude which never made me feel isolated but on the contrary in unison with the universe, it came the time to leave Yei. Before us, other NGOs have left the compound where we were working (and I was the only one living), to operate in other areas of the country. After the completion of the ALP project, we were the last to say goodbye to this beautiful place, its bougainvillea, its foxy cats (which stole my dinner so many times), its starry sky and fairy fireflies which used to appear as a predictable surprise every night. 

Now, the nature of Yei has given way to the people of Juba, the magic of solitude to the magic of encounters, a shitty internet connection to a fast and efficient one, thanks to which I can tell my stories again.

To the North of the South

Few weeks ago, I have been sent to an assessment visit to Northern Bahr El Ghazal to assist Daniel in collecting information, looking for local partners, establishing connections with the international ones in order to possibly implement a 18 months project that will start in January next year. Ibis would like in fact to expand its activities up to the North where the need for education is great: for example, only in Aweil North County, one of the three counties chosen by the State Ministry of Education as a potential operational area, 65 out of 80 schools are under the trees, do not have qualified teachers as well as trained education officers to inspect and monitor their work. However, the learners’ enrollment is quite high, teachers, who usually do their job on a voluntary basis by being paid in kind by the community, are committed and the education officers are willing to improve their skills. For this reason, Ibis is now writing a proposal that, if accepted by the European Commission, can become a project focusing on the capacity building of all the education stakeholders just mentioned above.

For the time being, here are some of the pictures taken during the hectic days spent in Northern Bahr El Ghazal where we had limited time and a myriad of tasks that somehow we managed to accomplish fully. It was tiresome but exciting to see another part of South Sudan very different from Central Equatoria: geographically flat, culturally arabized, ethnically Dinka.

The Director General of the Ministry of General Education and Instruction of Northern Bahr El Ghazal State read carefully a summary of the project that Ibis would like to implement.

Daniel Wani collects quantitative and qualitative data regarding the status of education in Northern Bahr El Ghazal State that are going to enrich the proposal and will be the base for the design of the activities. 

Nicolò Di Marzo leaves the Ministry in his official car…

The coffee/tea culture of Aweil Town: before starting our morning, drinking a franzai (caffelatte) and eating freshly baked bread was a must.

On our way to Aweil West and Aweil North: Northern Bahr El Ghazal is flat as Denmark but with storks instead of seagulls.

I was trying to take a picture of the under-the-tree-schools...

...but quite a number of learners took over the background…

ConcernWorldwide  has been operating in Northern Bahr El Ghazal since 2001. They hosted us for one night in their extremely nice compound where each tukul is a room. 

I and Daniel prepare the schedule for the next day while enjoying fresh air. 

The Education Officer of Aweil North County stands up proudly in front of his (tiny) office.              
He is the only to work in one, since his colleagues work outdoors due to lack of adequate working places.

The United Nations Humanitarian Hair Service (UNHAS) facilitate the mobility of food, medicines and NGO personnel around South Sudan.  Here Daniel ready to jump in and go back to Juba. 

I am reading V.S. Naipaul’s The Masque of Africa, a travel book centered on the theme of African beliefs. The following lines can describe in better words the South Sudanese landscape that I saw from the plane: “The land was green: not the dark green of primeval forest, but the fresh green of land that had grown things many times over and was still fertile, requiring only rain and sun to burst into new vegetation [….]. I was under the spell of the empty green landscape, which I hadn’t seen before, not in Trinidad, not in India: wide and green and empty”. 

Radio Miraya or the power of words

Since I set foot in South Sudan, a jingle has become part of my daily soundtrack, the jingle of “Radio Miraya, the pulse of a new nation”. Radio Miraya was launched on June 30 2006, in partnership with the United Nation Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) and the Fondation Hirondelle, a Swiss NGO constituted by journalists and humanitarian workers, whose aim is to support independent information in war, crisis and post-conflict zones. With the help of the Fondation Hirondelle, 30 millions people are getting free information in countries such as Kosovo, Timor Leste, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Liberia, DRC Congo and South Sudan, where Miraya (which means Mirror in Arabic) is able to cover the whole country thanks to its 25 transmitters and its 140 national and international staff members. No wonder a recent survey has ranked Radio Miraya the first radio of South Sudan for credibility and quality of information provided.

I get up at 7:15 am every morning but I start to wake up only when I tune to Miraya Breakfast Show, whose most popular feature is probably Miraya Connect. According to the Fondation Hirondelle: “after a conflict, societies do not only need to re-build their infrastructures, but they also need to re-build their social network”. From 7:35 to 7:45 am, Miraya Connect receives calls of friends, relatives, classmates and colleagues who have lost touch with their loved ones during the war and hope to re-connect with them through the frequency of Miraya.

I start to work at 8:30 am, so I cannot listen to the other programmes of Radio Miraya, but when I happen to be home, I greedily listen to Tribes from 11:00 am to 12:00 am, which broadcasts traditional music of South Sudan’s myriad of ethnic groups. If I want to be updated about what’s happening at the  moment, I do not only listen to Miraya’s news but also to Inside South Sudan, that in the past weeks has extensively reported on the border clashes between Sudan and South Sudan, on the populations affected by the conflict and on the efforts by communities, aid organizations, UN and governments to assist them. When I prepare my dinner at 7 pm, my guests are those of the Round Table, a daily discussion programme about the topical events effecting South Sudan. I do enjoy very much their company, since they change every day, they let me eat all my food without asking for sharing it and do not get offended when I don’t listen to them anymore.

Yei has also its own radio station, Spirit FM, which has hosted Ibis few months ago for a talk show. It was difficult to believe that through the red velvet walls of a tiny room, the voices of Felix Amule, Central Equatoria State Coordinator for Budgeting and Planning, Daniel, the ALP project manager and those of the County Education officials could be heard by thousands of people listening on how important is the role of parents in the education of their children. But the dozen of calls we got from the listeners, swept away my doubts. In a country where almost nobody has power at home and where few can read or buy a newspaper, a radio which run on batteries remains the only source of information. Fortunately radio waves, as words, can float throughout households and clans and villages spreading knowledge at no-cost as the South Sudan’s Ministry of Education Science and Technology (MoEST) has noted. The MoEST has in fact implemented a Southern Sudan Interactive Radio Instruction (SSIRI) project, that provide learning opportunities for children, adults, and teachers with activities like: the Learning Village, whose lessons are designed to complement classroom instruction in local language literacy, English language, mathematics, and Life Skills; RABEA (Radio Based Education for All) that provides an opportunity for learning or strengthening English language skills; Professional Studies for Teachers, a distance learning course to improve the teaching practice.

Thanks to Radio Miraya, I rarely walk without my portable radio, which has become a faithful companion to my no more lonely meals.