Our Lost Boys Augustino Mayai and Bai Geng returned to their village after being absent for over 20 years to find many of their family members had died from diseases most of them preventable had there been availability of clean water and basic healthcare. There is no clean running water and there is no healthcare. At the current time at least 57% of all the deaths in Southern Sudan are children under the age of five. Infant mortality is 150 per 1000 live births and 250 per 1000 of the general population. The average life of the Southern Sudanese if they live past childhood is 35 years.
(Statistics gathered by the United Nations and our own Lost Boy Augustino Mayai currently a graduate student at Wisconsin University, department of sociology and demography. August travels and lives in the Southern Sudan each summer to study and collect data and statistics for his doctorate and to help his country.)
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The first two photos above show the
conditions upon which the deadly guinea worm parasite is fostered through
polluted ground water sources where the guinea worm fly lays it eggs. Hatched
larvae are then transferred to people by drinking and stepping into the water.
The third photo shows a man beginning to remove the three-foot long worm from
his body. In two of the Apuk Padoc villages, a UN-sponsored medical
professional who is there treating infected people claims that over 80% of the
people in those villages are infected by this parasite and many will die due to
infections caused by the worm’s emergence from their bodies.
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Phase 2 will consist of installing family wells and family self-standing rainwater collections and storage systems, building gardens, constructing latrines, installing outside vented “smokeless” stoves for households, building five schools and revamping the existing medical clinic with supplies, equipment and professional medical personnel. Women’s Committees set up by the Community Workers will undergo extensive training that will include family health care and hygiene, family finance, starting family businesses, gardening, and functional literacy. Programs will be set up to develop and help to orphans, mothers will organize and acquire loans to build grain mills and farmers will have access to new ways of building oxen herds to be used in farm production improvement. And finally, contracts will be let to borehole contractors to increase the number of deep wells in the communities and maintenance and repair of all the broken existing pumps.
This long-range development program will create self reliance because of the many economic enterprises that will be born from the above mentioned technology with guidance and training from our organization and our government and NGO partners.
The new Community Workers who will train willing villagers with hands on training in technology community service will guarantee replication, maintenance and sustainability of the pumps, wells, rain water harvesting devices and other simple life giving technologies and services.
The availability of new schools and further development of the education programs, teacher training and expansion of education throughout the community will make education available to many children not currently attending any school at all. Currently those few children who are attending school learn under the trees using a stick to draw in the sand. No money is currently available for teacher’s salaries or school materials.
As part of the Five Year Plan, Machara Miracle Network will continue to grow the Machara Education Scholarship Fund so as to bring a brighter future for the Apuk Padoc Community students who will qualify for education outside of Sudan.
A Community Center (part of the Permanent Machara Office in Akop Center) will offer social education for adults (literacy for social change). This will augment the training that will be on-going in the Women’s Committees throughout the Community. Adult training is critical for families to thrive. Western and Sudanese volunteers will work together to provide further training for a self sustaining community.
In the newly refurbished healthcare clinic, healthcare services, like maternity needs, etc. will be expanded and provided in a number of ways. Expatriate doctors and trained healthcare professionals nurses will come in from the U.S. and other African nations that have the skills desperately needed by the Community. At the present time there is neither trained medical staff nor any basic healthcare available anywhere in the Region.
