Africanews
Making Sudan a better place to live in is an endeavour that has frustrated many humanitarian organisations and people of goodwill. Missio Aachen, a German Catholic funding agency, recently sent a team of its personnel to the region to assess its current and future needs. |
Every year in October, the Catholic Church celebrates World Mission Sunday, during which time faithfuls reflect and take action to support the missionary mandate of the Church.. During the celebrations, besides other things, funds are usually raised to aid the poor dioceses of the world.
This year, the Church in the Sudan has been chosen to benefit from proceeds realised during the October missionary celebration of the German Church. To set the ball rolling, a group of four members of Missio Aachen in Germany recently toured the Sudan to assess the situation on the ground.
Members of the team were organisation's new president Dr Dietmar Bader, Dr Otmar Oehring, who is Missio Aachen's project officer for Africa, Veronika Buter-Strack, a journalist, and photographer Gerard Klijn. They were accompanied by Msgr Caesar Mazzolari, the Apostolic Administrator of Rumbek Diocese, during the tour that began on May 15.
The five-day expedition saw the group visit the dioceses of Rumbek, Torit, El Obeid and Tombura Yambio. They met and held talks on a wide range of pastoral activities in the war-torn African state. The visitors also had the opportunity to pray together with the Sudanese Christians.
"We hope to embark on a campaign to inform Germans in particular and the world in general about the situation of human suffering currently prevailing in the Sudan", says Buter-Strack. "We thus considered it prudent to make the trip to see with our own eyes the situation in the Sudan since there has been very scanty information about life in the region."
What impressed her most about the Sudanese was their quest for spiritual nourishment. "To the Sudanese, whose lives have been shattered by a protracted civil conflict, the church remains the only source of hope and inspiration. If the church in the Sudan would collapse, then everything else would break down," She observed that the Sudanese were very emphatic in their request for priests to live with them..
The lady journalist revealed that on reaching back home, they would organise a campaign against human rights abuse in Sudan. "We will also try in several ways to influence the German government not to forget the Sudan."
To 40-year-old Dr. Oehring , the situation in the Sudan has been frustrating. "Every time you visit the Sudan, you discover to your dismay that what you had laid on the ground on a previous visit has been destroyed." However, he stresses, there should be no giving up. "We will put emphasis on lobbying but implementation of our ideas will be subject to availability of funds," he says.
He said that his organisation's strategy has been to try and work closely with other humanitarian organisations to assist the people of the Sudan. On May 9 this year, for instance, there was a meeting of all Christians and Protestants in the city of Cologne in Germany aimed at mapping out strategies for various pastoral and humanitarian activities all over the world.
Dr Oehring observed that the Sudanese are a spirited and friendly lot that has to contend with innumerable odds. Education, for example, remains a controversial subject about which even the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA), which controls most of the southern Sudan, is not always ready to cooperate. "The SPLA requires young men to fight on its side and is unwilling to compromise with any organisation that advocates schooling for the same age group."
The SPLA which is led by Dr John Garang is the main rebel group fighting the Khartoum government of Lieutenant Colonel Omar Hassan al-Bashir. It has waged the civil war for 13 years, during which time internal squabbles have seen a number of splinter groups emerge from it, a development that has not only weakened it a great deal, but has also heightened ethnic animosity among Sudanese communities.
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