My Marathon Task - Adrian Thomas

My name is Adrian and I am going to run a marathon to raise funds for Together for Sudan.


I have just completed the Ballater 10 mile road race. That is definitely a milestone in my training programme, though it’s still less than 40% of the marathon distance. The good news though is that I enjoyed the Ballater run and did not feel too exhausted at the end. It was not a stellar performance – I was 128th out of 188 runners, but most were a good deal younger than me!

I have been quite active over the last few weeks with visits to the Pyrenees and Alps. Walking at altitude should have been good for my lung capacity and endurance and the challenge is to maintain that. We are spending most of July and August in Scotland and I have been running every couple of days since I got back from Switzerland on 18th July. The moorland tracks are fine places to practise for running the cross-country course from Salisbury to Winchester.

I have discovered one particularly well maintained track on the nearby Balmoral estate. It is enjoyable running with good views and pure air, but being in such a privileged place does provide a real contrast to the heat, dust and poverty that is the lot of so many people in Sudan. I only hope that I shall get the support I need and that I will be able to raise enough to contribute in some small way to improving things there.

I now have 10 weeks left until the marathon on 4th October, which should be just long enough to build up my performance, but I shall have to work hard at it. I may enter another race to provide a target for improvement, and I will continue to report on how things progress. I'm making a Just Giving page for this run but you can always give anytime through the TFS website, see this link - www.togetherforsudan.org/donations.htm


Adrian Thomas

Women's Literacy Project

One of the most important means to empower displaced and destitute women is through education because this will help them towards a brighter future. The Women’s Literacy Project actually began in 1997 even before Together for Sudan itself officially began. What happened was that a Sudanese Episcopal priest working with displaced people in squatter settlements told two or three groups of women outside Omdurman to set up classes and Dr. Lillian would pay the teachers salaries! Although he had not consulted her, she felt she had to do it! Since then TfS has graduated over 2,500 women from its literacy classes and in 2007 & 2008 trained 52 teachers in the REFLECT literacy method.

Women’s literacy classes were sometime later set up in the Kadugli area of the Nuba Mountains and nearly 200 women have graduated from three centres there in 2009. Most recently Together for Sudan expanded the project to El Fasher in Northern Darfur where we have trained 14 women as literacy teachers. Despite the difficult circumstances, two classes have been set up. So Together for Sudan has been a pioneer in the field of women’s literacy.
From my point of view as a literacy monitor, the Women’s Literacy Project is significant for building peace and community reconciliation and in empowering women.

In February this year I participated in a workshop in Gadarif in the east of Sudan at which the Director of the National Council for Illiteracy Eradication, Dr. Abdelhafiz, described Together for Sudan as an “unrecognized fighter for humanity”. He said that he appreciated the role of TfS due to its effective efforts to eradicate illiteracy among displaced women. I hope that Together for Sudan will be able to continue this vital project despite the present funding difficulties.

Saudi Abdelrahman
TfS Officer Manager, Khartoum

Vocational Training Project

In 2008 Together for Sudan started to offer vocational scholarships to young men as well as young women from the settlements for displaced persons and to those from disadvantaged backgrounds. This was our first offer of education to males other than children in basic school. In its first year this project, funded by the Gordon Memorial College Trust Fund, sponsored eleven young men to study general electricity, automobile electricity, general mechanics and air conditioning. Four scholars who were on a one year course graduated and some of them wrote letters of appreciation to express how they have benefitted from TfS support and how this support has changed their lives.


Even in its first year the vocational project was highly popular with young men and their families because those trained are able to acquire professional jobs. In June and July 2009 I have received many telephone calls from young men and their parents asking TfS to sponsor them for vocational training. Sadly, our funding for this project has run out due to the international financial upheaval. I wish I could find a donor to continue this vital project which is currently inactive.

Saudi AbdelrahamTfS Office Manager Khartoum

Another Visit to Sudan

My evening flight from Washington Dulles to London on 3 May was followed by a six hour layover after which I flew on to Khartoum via Beirut, in total 22 hours of travelling. British Ambassador Rosalind Marsden, Together for Sudan Trustee and my long suffering hostess for the next two weeks, kindly sent a car to pick me up at the Khartoum airport by which time it was early morning of 5 May local time. I managed four hours sleep before Country Coordinator Neimat Hussein showed up for several hours of briefing and discussion. Despite the exhaustion I was, as always, exhilarated to be back in Sudan. And I am, of course, very grateful to Neimat and her colleagues in both Khartoum and Kadugli for putting up with my bi-annual fact finding missions which are very disruptive of their work!
Over the next several days Neimat and I did the rounds of local patrons and partners and international funding charities, thanking those which support Together for Sudan and seeking new partnerships. I also spend hours in the TfS Khartoum office talking to staff members and receiving visitors including Dr. Nabila Radi who runs our Eye Care Outreach. I have learned to love and sometimes to resist Dr. Nabila because she knows that those who “look on suffering” with the intention of helping are often greatly blessed and therefore usually insists that I go with her to visit those who are dying, diseased, deformed by leprosy or otherwise in a position to teach me more about compassion. I’ve learned a lot from her.



Another highlight of my Khartoum visit was attending the graduation of 127 Community Health Care Workers, over 100 of them women, in a makeshift tent in one of the settlements for the displaced outside Khartoum. When the Sudanese are happy they dance – and we did, celebrating the graduates’ new ability to contribute to their communities as well as support themselves and their children.
This visit was dominated by opposition from the government’s Humanitarian Affairs Commission (HAC) to my planned visit to the TfS sub-office in Kadugli, capital of the Nuba Mountains in Southern Kordofan. But after several days delay, which required that I extend my stay in Sudan, and having written a letter of apology for obtaining my visa from the Sudanese Embassy in Washington rather than from HAC (!), I was eventually allowed to travel to Kadugli. I am enormously grateful to TfS Office Manager Saudi Abdel Rahman for the hours he spend at HAC headquarters and the patience which he displayed.
When finally allowed to fly to the Nuba Mountains, Neimat and I spent four days in Kadugli getting to know Field Representative Ibrahim Ahmed Jabir and Field Coordinator Saleem Musa, both new employees since my last visit to Kadugli in early 2008. I was delighted to see how well they are working together. We arrived to find 25 community leaders, 10 of them women, from the countryside outside Kadugli engrossed in a course in Primary Health Care. All are members of “development committees” in their home areas. Neimat and I called on the Ministries of Health and Education where we were warmly greeted and asked to expand our training of teachers and community workers. At the Kadugli Hospital we were thanked for the TfS Eye Care Outreach which has resulted in the opening of an Ophthalmology Centre there. (The newly hired ophthalmologist was in Khartoum trying to raise money to run the centre!) Other highlights of the visit were visiting some of the now more than 30 young women put through university by TfS who are now back in the Nuba Mountains as teachers, health workers and government and INGO employees. As always, I felt blessed to be part of a growing work which is helping hundreds of individuals improve their lives. For further information see the June Together for Sudan Newsletter.

Lillian Craig-Harris

Website Updated

The Together for Sudan website has been updated and is now more accurate and relevant than before. Most of the updates are in the project areas although there are some in the About Us section. The home page has been refreshed with a clever rotating display of our new web banners. These link directly to the Together for Sudan project work that is so vital. All of the banners can be displayed from your website or blog - why not download one. We would really appreciate your support.

- Webmaster

Another Visit To Sudan

On Sunday, 3 May, I leave Virginia for Sudan, arriving in Khartoum at 3:15 a.m. on 5 May after a several hour stopover in London. Like many people, I endure rather than enjoy long flights and always find it near impossible to sleep. On these at least twice yearly visits, I bring along a good book or two and also use the time to mull over the work ahead. Usually I don’t talk much to my seatmates as most people find it hard to understand why anyone would voluntarily go to Sudan. So it would be too complicated to tell them that this is my 23rd return since I was expelled in late 1998.

This time I’ll spend a few days in Kadugli, the capital of Southern Kordofan, in order to monitor TfS educational and educational support projects, talk to government officials and meet the two new staff members in our four person office. I’ll also call on representatives of other charities and UN agencies with which we cooperate. And every night I’ll eat either beans or bread and peanut butter (this latter carried in by me) for supper. Although life in Kadugli is now even more expensive than Khartoum, there is little food in the area and many people are chronically hungry. But sitting after dark in the street market with the generators roaring in the background is always a magical experience, a feeling of solidarity with an “end of the earth” place where human needs are enormous and anything you can do is appreciated.

In Khartoum, where I’ll spend most of my time, life is much more up market. There are grand hotels and restaurants, most very recent, embassies and high rise buildings and too much traffic. I’ll spend a lot of time in the Together for Sudan office with our nine employees and even more time battling traffic to call on potential funders including embassies and international organizations. I’ll attend an Eye Care Outreach and the graduation of our first group of public health trainees in the IDP settlements and have meetings with some of our Sudanese Patrons. And I’ll do a bit of office encouragement and management and catch up with friends. After midnight on 14 May I’ll board a flight for London and then another for the US, chasing the sun, so that it will still be 14 May when I arrive in Virginia. I’m always both sad and relieved to leave Sudan – a country whose diverse people are very kind and hospitable and captured my heart over a decade ago.

Lillian Craig-Harris

Eye Care Outreach and Blindness Prevention in the Khartoum Area Squatter Settlements

The Khartoum office is busy churning out reports these days and another which I read this week filled me with particular satisfaction. What can you say about a project which prevents blindness, restores sight, enables people to learn to read and helps unite people in service to one another?

Up to three million people now live in the settlements for displaced persons which surround the increasingly modern city of Khartoum. The majority have no access to education, health care or secure livelihood.

In 2002 Together for Sudan set up an Eye Care Outreach Project led by Sudanese ophthalmologist Dr. Nabila Radi. Targeting children, women and the elderly, that effort has now benefitted well over 25,000 people through eye examinations, eye glasses, medications and eye surgeries. The Eye Care Outreach is a particularly satisfactory sort of charity work because its benefits are so quickly obvious. After all, if you can’t see you are unlikely to learn to read and glasses can usually fix that problem. Or put another way, if you have ever misplaced your glasses (as I do regularly) or have suffered from an eye infection or other condition which threatens or impeded your sight --- well, we all get the point.

This latest Eye Care Project report reminded me that TfS has learned many lessons from our work in this area. Among the most important are that eye disease and eye injury are two of the greatest threats to health and livelihood in the settlements for the displaced, that community cooperation is crucial to the outreach and that provision of eye care information to communities is vital.

A simple pair of glasses can provide a mother with the ability to sew and thus to support her children. Eye glasses can restore meaning to life. I recall a recent outreach when an old man, practically weeping with gratitude, thought to thank me for the gift of a used pair of reading glasses. I rejoice that this project does so much good and earns so much goodwill for Together for Sudan.

Lillian Craig-Harris

Training Teachers to Train Other Teachers in the Nuba Mountains

This week I read a report from the TfS office in Khartoum about teaching teachers to become trainers of other teachers in the Nuba Mountains of Southern Kordofan. That ought to be simple because Nuba people are clamouring for education of all sorts. But life in the Nuba Mountains is difficult for many reasons and this time we came up against the weather when delay in a funding transfer took us into the July to October rainy season.

When it rains in the Nuba Mountains everyone and everything bogs down; even tractors are often unable to get through the mud. So training had to be rescheduled for November/December 2008 when 25 kindergarten teachers, all women, were finally taught training techniques, administrative skills, preparation and use of teaching aids, how to identify possibly useful materials, etc. This may sound simple to those who have enjoyed the benefits of well equipped schools and university trained teachers. And so it is: simple, effective and efficient. So efficient, as the report revealed, that two months after the training some of the participants had already set themselves up as teacher trainers and were teaching other teachers how to become teacher trainers.

Things don’t usually happen this quickly in Sudan and the reports writer in our Khartoum office allowed himself a bit of rather unrestrained rejoicing. The impact of the training was, he said, “good news”, in fact it was “a triumph for the people of the Nuba Mountains”, as well as “a milestone to our endeavor to upgrade education in the region” and “a beginning which makes us hopeful that more work will follow”. Well, that sums up fairly well how I feel, too.

Lillian Craig-Harris

Banners to Download from our Website

Once again the website has been updated and now includes downloadable banner images. These are designed to link back to our site. We would be very grateful for the support of anyone displaying a banner on their website or blogsite. All the images on the banner download page are of work that TFS does and are coupled to a word that defines an aspect of what we do and you could join in with. Please display one and show your support for our work. I placed the hope banner on the blog and put two here to show you what our banners look like.

Check the rest out on our website. With this link - Banner download page - Webmaster.

Shedding Light on Solar Panel Issues

The TfS Solar Project continues to have difficulties in the Nuba Mountains due both to its great popularity and to unfamiliarity with the need to keep even simple equipment maintained. The project is, in fact, so popular that panels on schools, clinics and community centres have to be closely monitored least they change location or disappear completely. One recent incident involving a “replanting” of the panel was followed by great consternation when the apparatus did not simply turn itself on and provide the thieves with light! More seriously it is a nuisance that, as a very grass roots charity, we own no vehicles. Let me know if you can recommend a Kadugli area organization or individual able to volunteer use of a four wheel drive for a few hours a week. TfS will pay for the petrol and hundreds of “enlightened” people will pour blessings on the car owner’s head!

Lillian Craig-Harris

Activity in Khartoum and Kadugli Offices

Country Coordinator Neimat Hussein is on well-earned holiday from mid-March to mid-April and Deputy Country Coordinator Victor Gali Thomas is in charge of the office. Consequently, I am working through Victor, an energetic and committed southern Sudanese whom I met many years ago while living in Khartoum. The mixture of Sudanese from several areas of Sudan enriches our Khartoum office and allows me insights into a variety of Sudanese cultures. I always feel it a privilege to work with Sudanese so deeply committed to educating women and children. Since Alan and I were obliged to leave in 1999, I have been back to Sudan 21 times and plan to visit both Khartoum and Kadugli again in May. Each return to Sudan is a joyful reunion.

In the past few days the Khartoum office has concentrated on an application to the European Union (EU) for funding for our Teacher Training and Support Project in the Khartoum area and Nuba Mountains. This is probably the most difficult funding application we have ever worked on. If successful, our application to the EU will allow TfS to continue our Teacher Training and Support Project by training up to 660 teachers over a three year period and providing them with small “incentives” during a subsequent period of monitoring. In TfS experience, such gratuities have often allowed displaced people living in squatter areas to keep open the self help basic schools which they set up for their children. This is an area in which Together for Sudan has been a pioneer. We are also hoping to ask the EU for funding for ongoing training of our office staff, another necessity as the work expands and becomes more complicated.

The Khartoum office and I have also been busy recently working with a request from the Mohamed Ibrahim Foundation (MIF) for further information about our university scholars. MIF is one of three major contributors to TfS’s flagship project, the University Scholars Project (the other contributors are the UK Department for International Development and the Gordon Memorial College Trust Fund). And now the MIF offers us an opportunity on their impending website. Dr. Mohamed and his wife Dr. Hania Fadl, both TfS Patrons, inspire all who know them.

Our Kadugli office is still settling down following a major turnover of employees in recent months. TfS Field Coordinator, Saleem Musa Agoaf is supported by an assistant field coordinator, an office guard and a cleaner – and is showing signs of being a natural for the job. The Khartoum office knows that I am happy when accurate and timely reports keep coming in and Saleem seems well able to fit in with this requirement. TfS plans another Eye Care Outreach in April which will target some one thousand people, for the majority of whom it will be the first time they have been examined by a doctor of any sort. Dr. Nabila Radi, a saintly ophthalmologist, will travel to Kadugli from Khartoum once again and has offered to sleep in the office to save money.

We’ll see about that.
Lillian

Web Site Updated

Once again the website for our charity has been updated and includes more stuff. Mainly this time around it's documents including the latest Financial Report and Annual Trustees Report. The really big change though is the Latest News page which has now got a grid style design filled with little news snippets. We are doing so much now as a charity that the old style page just could not cope. Each snippet leads to a bigger article and the cleverest thing is that the grid design allows us to pop news in easily and simply.
Together for Sudan is a dynamic and growing charity that is doing more and more, and is ever in need of funds to support it's work in Sudan. By providing better access to what we are doing we hope to encourage our supporters and web visitors to support us as we continue to grow. Check out the website now if you have not yet seen it, all visitors are welcome. www.togetherforsudan.org

Dave

Annual Report & Accounts 2008

Success! On 12 Feb 09 I submitted the TFS Annual Report & Accounts for 2008 to the Charity Commission of England & Wales, following the publication's approval by the Trustees on the previous day. After a nerve-racking couple of days while the Commission gave the Report & Accounts the once over it was eventually published on the CC website (go to www.charity-commission.gov.uk and enter our registered number 1075852 to see). The time limit for posting accounts etc is 31 Oct 09 but by posting so early we show people - supporters, partners, auditors, authorities and the casual reader that we continue to be a responsible and well run charity which takes its responsibilities for openness and accountability seriously.