While I was engaged in the recent discussion on this blog about political action and political commitments, I received a circular email from an old friend and comrade, Judith Baker, about her recent experiences in South Sudan. Judith and I have been friends for twenty-five years, going back to our time together in Harvard/Radcliffe Alumni/ae Against Apartheid. Judith should have graduated from Radcliffe in 1970, but she took part in the Viet Name War protests at Harvard that year, and was bounced. She returned to finish up a year later, and then pursued a career as a teacher in the Boston schools. For as long as I can remember, Judith has been working in Africa [initially in South Africa] to help teachers to learn to teach more effectively. Unlike me, she goes to Africa for weeks or months at a time, not just for quick trips there and back. If I were the pope of a secular church, she would be my first nominee for the rank of secular saint.
Here is the circular letter I received. It is fascinating as a picture of what is happening in South Sudan, but it is also an object lesson in how to be political, which was the subject of my posts and the discussion they engendered. Since she has given me permission to post this letter, I think it would be perfectly all right for you to circulate it in whatever way you wish.
Dear Friends,
Finally, though, I think I am beginning to understand why the words have come so slowly. In short, South Sudan made me intensely angry and intensely uncomfortable. Usually I am in Africa working with local teachers and parents who, though they may not have a lot of material resources, may not even have enough to eat or access to health care, have invited me in because they are building something, and while I am there, they are sharing their culture with me, teaching me about themselves and what they believe and care about, singing perhaps, joking, telling stories. But Sudan is a genocidal dictatorship, and the government of Sudan has been bombing and starving its own more marginalized peoples for 30 years, creating vast UN refugee camps and IDP camps [internally displaced people] out of the survivors, destroying the very cultures of those survivors, in order to replace them with favored groups. And because I don't usually write about politics in my Africa letters, I guess it's been hard to write about anything else. My original involvement with Sudan was to work with the MA Coalition for Darfur which was founded to try to stop the ongoing genocide in that part of Sudan, and this was my first actual visit to any part of Sudan. But despite all the survivors I'd met and worked with, all the video footage and news I'd seen, I guess I was not emotionally or spiritually prepared to be part of the reconstruction. I felt totally inadequate, could see very little way to contribute, and it left me with a blankness that I'm determined to overcome, but have not yet conquered. The world's collective inability to protect the Sudanese and the activist community's failure to mobilize adequate response to war and genocide must have created in me a fear of failure greater than I could face in South Sudan. Now that I'm finding the words, perhaps I'll also find some of what I will need.
People in South Sudan [almost the poorest country in the world, although when its oil is developed that will change] became independent last July and the signs of progress are everywhere - buildings going up, hotels being built for the flood of aid workers and business people, even a few tourists, schools and hospitals being sponsored by international allies, regular international flights into the capital of Juba. There is certainly a resilience among the people and palpable dedication to a new way of life. Huge trucks carry food from Uganda and Kenya and business people from Ethiopia and Kenya are opening small hotels and restaurants and shops with credit unavailable as of yet to most Sudanese, who in any case are not as experienced in business. I expected to be inspired and was hoping to be useful in some way to the educators I would be working with, who I had already worked with before and liked.
But what I found was people who have known war all or most of their lives, have had their traditions seriously disrupted, have been forced to depend upon dedicated but underfunded aid agencies and sometimes fickle donors, and have not yet found their balance in a very unbalanced and precarious globalized world in which they are far behind and know it. Traditionally a proud, almost aloof, people, wholly self-reliant and somewhat isolated, now the Dinka [I worked in a Dinka village, but they are one of many South Sudanese cultures] must catch up to the 'modern' and educated world while still at risk of murderous air attacks by the Sudanese army. The contradictions are intense, and I could not negotiate them. I was in awe of the Sudanese women who have been trying to build a network for peace, of My Sister's Keeper for sticking with them and with the Kinyuk School project and trying to widen its reach, and I don't want to write anything which diminishes that hopefulness. But I have to say that I personally am still reaching for the spiritual resources and courage to face the South Sudanese educators and say honestly that I think this or that will work.
Women are very highly valued here in some ways - bride price here is much higher than I've ever seen it in other African countries and can easily run to more than 100 cows - but many men have more than one wife, and women are very quiet. I was told that traditionally, when a woman cooks a chicken, she cuts it into 8 designated pieces so that her husband can easily count to make sure she hasn't taken any for herself or the children. These women can be very tough, and the girl students eager to become educated, so I know this is changing, but gender differences are deep and obvious.
Literacy Activist and Consultant
Boston Public Schools, Retired
50 Melville Avenue, Dorchester, MA 02124
