And peace for all ..this holiday and everyday..

Just six months after South Sudan gained independence, severe inflation, rebellions and escalating tensions with Sudan are dampening the euphoria that followed secession and undermining efforts to build badly-needed state institutions and a new nation for all.

South Sudanese celebrated the birth of Africa's newest nation on July 9 as they split away from Sudan ending a 22 year long conflict claimed countless millions of lives and made the lives of the survivors perpetually difficult.

But hard realities have since set in. Disputes with Sudan's government in Khartoum have raged over issues from oil revenues to ending border violence. The countries' armed forces clashed in a rare direct confrontation in a disputed border region this month.

Even if peace with Khartoum holds, a war-torn and severely underdeveloped country bordering six nations - could become a quagmire with several lawless regions and rising poverty.

About 2.7 million South Sudanese, roughly a third of the population, will need food aid from next year because of crop failures and widespread violence that killed more than 3,000 peopl e in 2011, the United Nations says.

Violence on the border with Sudan has disrupted trade, pushing annual inflation to almost 80 percent, up from 57 percent in August. Inflation is 100 percent in some regions,adding to the hardships of people already exhausted by decades of civil war. We saw most people not being able to afford life saving soap, crucial to hygenine, at the local store as it is imported from neighboring countries and costs three times the daily wage.

The government has sold oil worth around $3 billion since July but there are few signs it is channeling the money to development projects or shifting resources from the dominant armed forces except to build roads no locals can use.

NO PROGRESS

Ravaged by civil war and neglect dating back to the British colonial era, South Sudan is one of the world's least developed nations. It has less than 100 km (62 miles) of paved roads and its budget depends almost entirely on oil revenues.

There is hardly any infrastructure outside the capital Juba, which buzzes with hundreds of consultants and aid workers. Aid groups provide basic services such as clean water in many regions of the country, roughly the size of France but not in forgotten Magwi on any scale large enough to put a dent in the needs of 300,000 of the poorest people on the planet.

Adding to social pressures, more than 350,000 southerners have returned from Sudan and more than one million might follow once their legal status ends in Khartoum in April. They will need jobs and housing.

SQUEEZED BY KHARTOUM

Though a return to full-scale war with Khartoum seems unlikely tensions will get worse as both governments need revenues from South Sudan's oil.

Landlocked South Sudan relies on Sudan's export facilities to sell its crude.

By regularly closing the poorly marked joint border, Khartoum is hurting South Sudanese regions which depend on food imports from the north and are awash with refugees escaping fighting in Sudan's South Kordofan and Blue Nile states. Here in Magwi refugees are returned from Uganda's camps to find nothing to hold on to and that in most cases life is WORSE. Uganda , Sudan and the NGOs have abandoned them.

The fact is the South Sudan we saw has a long way to go before it is the country it has pledged to be for ALL its people. It is our hope that in the next year that peace and prosperity and a life of abundance will extend to Magwi county's Acholi people. It is only fair .

we will gather one last time , then no more. We have been lied to

Rural Magwi County, South Sudan , Africa


The village of Omeo gathered to greet our arrival grudgingly under a large tree next to the well-built and functional road the Turks had built. It now splits this village, an hour's dusty motorbike ride from Magwi town , in half. The crowd was mostly children, many orphans. The adults simply didn't want to come any longer to hear promises that they knew we would break. The water is drying up, people are sick and tired.

There were questions , concerns and outright anger. Understandably so. The NGOs had come and gone and evidence of there presence in the form of US AID cans made into toys and doors and in pretty signs with the names of "project whatever". They had come , and gone with absolutely no results, leaving disillusionment in the villages. The government of South Sudan , freshly minted in July, is ineffective and useless as well. They have abandoned Magwi county and its Acholi population except to built roads which are useless to a people without a motorized vehicle of any kind. AIDS is sitting at a projected 80 percent among the 300, 000 people of this area and testing kits and medicine will be gone by July .Not in this district but in the entire nation.  The clinic we run is the only one of its kind in the area but our dedicated staff toils with dirt water , few supplies and little electricity to save babies, accident victims.

The goverment , Nuer led , has no intention of including the opposing tribes in its plans for the new nation. Twenty two years of civil war to free the nation from the Arab north has inflicted suffering and unbelievable hardship on this population. The people are just returned from their forced exile in Uganda only to be left to die from malnutrition , AIDS , drought and disease. They have every right to be angry. I feared I simply couldnt say enough or a thing to ease the pain . I knew I couldn't make any promises I couldn't keep.

 I spent three tense days talking to villages to some success and some abject failure. I got questions , stories and pleas. One woman brought grasshoppers in a coke bottle to show us what was happening to the crops.A very a woman finally liked what she heard enough to hug me and invite me to eat greens with her. A huge honor! One woman brought her son to meet me dressed in a plastic bag as he has no clothes at 2 years old.

We had come to witness the lives and deaths of a people. Besides some moments which we will be sharing in pictures and film with you all soon we have been consolidating all we learned into the following needs, wants and dreams .

1. We aim to send 100 village children to the existing school , which is a bare bones basic shelter with logs for desks at present (2011). The cost is 15 dollars a year , including the only meal most children will have that day. The new school will come by 2013.
2. basic medical donations for our existing clinic baby scale , beds , autoclave
3. Clothing , housewares , blankets, shoes, and the SHIPPING COSTS to send the materials to Sudan
4. 150, 000 dollars for the new clinic . We met with the villages and the consensus is the hospital MUST come first as woman are giving birth on the road en route to our clinic , a days walk away. We have land and need a better  structure . Services to be included safe birth , AIDS testing education and counceling , PTSD counceling from the war , emergency care, vaccinations , nutrition support

Can you help

We need to keep our word and the Acholi of Magwi county need to know the world hasn't forgotten them . It s a matter of life or death. We choose to believe in life.

onward..South Sudan

Magwi, South Sudan

We jumped the border several days ago , up through the Acholi heartland of Northern Uganda by a bus of other urbanites returning to the homeland . Chickens and children and sweaty people viaed for a comfortable place to sleep as we wound through the countryside and finally at dawn to Niamle-a border town of blowing red dirt and men with guns starring eachother down across a stick across the road. (Photos as soon as we have a decent connection not run by a gas powered generator and a wish). In Niamle we lost our bus to a break down and I took a hard fall shredding my knee and my pants. Another busa finally picked us up and we rode relentlessly through the land , more dusty and more drought stricken as we drove on. The roads we drove on were literally being built underneath us by hand , transformed from gravel and dirt by men and a few women in turbans laboring next to rudinmentarly marked minefields. We crossed the Nile several times on bridges with no support to speak of. Uganda the much richer neighbor to thesouth of Sudan , shockingly had neglected its roads far more than South Sudan though , which has let its people pay the burden.

Arriving in Juba was a shock and this from a seasoned humanitarian aid worker whose worked all over the developing world (!) and several African barefoot doctors from Uganda. The national capital is rather like the end of the earth these days. It is the wild south -lawless and violent. On our first night in a rundown guest house we ate at the bar /disco /house of ill repute next door to avoid a walk in the dark (no electric anywhere ) and an ethiopian prostitute tried to take a walk with Kahlo, my 5 year old, to a waiting car. I suspect our arrival attracted some attention in this quiet nowhere place.

It was a literal breath of fresh air to come to the field . After traveling 50 miles on the back of a motorcycle across ditch filled roads , sorghem fields, villages of thatch roof round houses and goats and small children most of whom had rarely seen a pale skin child. Kahlo scared a young boy to death and children ran after our motorbike, we arrived in Magwi , near back in Uganda and site of our clinic and some of the worst fighting of the war that swallowed lives here for 20 years.

We are spending these next  months in a guest house in the countryside among our Sudan staff . We washed clothes this morning by hand and talked of needs and priorities . They are seeing ecoli and all types of diease on the rise , typhoid most notably. Maternal health and infant mortality are sliding down a terrible scale. This new nation which the people consider a blessing from god is being tested in ways that are barbaric and profoundly unfair . The lives that war didn't take are in the balance. We are finding ways to try to help . The aid agencies , our staff tells us have abandoned Magwi. We are trying to plant roots. Tomorrow we tour the local clinic, our clinic for now, and get a better grasp on conditions and work to see what we can do . I am sure when I climb inside my mosquito net at night what I see here will haunt and move me and affect my dreams . My heart is  here and I hope we can do something..anything .

Soweto : New partnerships and new ideas

Kampala , Uganda

We have been in the capital of Uganda for going on one week , and besides some down time with family, have linked our efforts with those of a start up non-profit which strives to help the families displaced from the civil wars in both Northern uganda and SDouthern Sudan , in short the people we strive to serve in our clinic across the border.

I spent part of yesterday afternoon in So We To (South West Township , named for the famous slum of the same name in Johannesburg). So We To here in Kampala sits backed up to a swamp and against a railroad track with a single watersource for thousands of people. On my visit I was met by the women and children of a workshop which produces varnished necklaces, bracelets , earrings and bags out of recycled paper. The work is stunning. 95% of the profits are returned to the women to feed and clothe their families. I am alsways happy to support a powerful and empowering cause and will be bringing these pieces of art back to help raise much needed funds through sales. The 5% remaining of the profits will serve to pay for materials and eventually aid the development of other projects serving the women of Soweto, the first of which will be adult literacy courses. As soon as possible pictures will be posted.

We leave for the field tonight and are looking forward to spending time in South Sudan at our clinic site and blogging from there.

Kahlo's BLOG: I have been working on school work here in Uganda but most of my time has been spent out side swimming , playing with local kids. I was stung by fireants . They live in anthills that are made of dirt. I kicked the hill because it looks like a pile of dirt and the ants attacked me. I am fine though. I am excited to stand on the equator and see wild animals and the source of the Nile later in my trip. Today we are going to Sudan.