Letter from Southern Sudan and Northern Uganda

Lindsey and Justin Holcomb
Photo by Jack Looney

The human rights situation in Sudan is not marketable to the American people.
— United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, 1999

Until January 9, 2005, the oldest civil war in the world was being fought in Sudan.

For decades, the people in northern Uganda and southern Sudan have suffered from violence, injustice, land-grabbing and poverty. These people have been attacked by the Lord’s Resistance Army, an extremist group that patrols the border of southern Sudan and northern Uganda attacking villages and refugee camps with grotesque violence. These butchers are notorious for filling their ranks by abducting children. Atrocities committed by this group include mass murder, forced prostitution, rape, forced cannibalism and mutilation. In addition to these attacks, the people of southern Sudan had been attacked by their own government — the Government of Sudan — and they are still feeling the effects of a two-decade-long civil war.

In January 2005, a comprehensive peace accord was signed ending the civil war that had been uninterrupted for the past 22 years. The 20-year civil war left southern Sudan and northern Uganda with devastated education and health systems.

My husband, Justin, and I traveled to Nimule, Sudan, last summer to work with women and men who are learning new skills and educational tools to rebuild their war-torn villages. Justin had visited southern Sudan every summer since 2001 to teach chaplains in the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army to serve southern Sudanese soldiers, prisoners of war from the Government of Sudan and civilians.

During our 2006 trip, I visited the local clinic that provides care for the entire village of Nimule (whose population has been estimated anywhere from 45,000 to 90,000) with just two doctors and a handful of nurses. I was shocked by the extreme suffering from mostly treatable diseases and inspired by the dedication of the limited staff available. That’s when I realized that simple preventive tools such as mosquito nets and vitamins could greatly reduce the risk of disease and infection that many experience daily. Mosquito nets are absolutely necessary for the people in these areas. According to World Health Organization statistics, more than 1 million people die in Africa every year from malaria. Malaria kills one African child every 30 seconds and affects between 300 and 600 million people each year — almost twice as many as tuberculosis, AIDS, measles and leprosy combined.

I also met with groups of women to talk about their lives, struggles and future aspirations. Many shared with me that their husbands had either died from the war or were gone for years at a time working or fighting in the war. Most have three or more children to care for, no education and no job opportunities. However, women are the fabric of this tribal culture, as they perform most of the daily tasks from cooking, cleaning, child rearing, collecting water and taking care of the animals to growing vegetables and grains. Every group of women asked one question: “Do people in America knew of our situation of violence, poverty, illiteracy and disease?” I promised to share their stories with people back home and to raise support to serve them as they begin to rebuild their community.

Having grown up overseas and studied international relations at U.Va., I was drawn to issues of social justice, human rights and gender-based violence. Upon returning home, Justin and I began to share with our friends and families the stories of the incredible individuals we had met in Sudan and Uganda. We also began speaking at public events, churches, classes and sororities and fraternities in an effort to raise awareness and to fundraise. That was the beginning of Mosaic, our nonprofit organization that initiates sustainable projects in southern Sudan and Uganda and partners with organizations to enact creative strategies to serve those suffering in these areas.

Thanks to numerous donors, we have been able to start new projects and partner with existing ones. Mosaic built a women’s center and an English as second language program building in Nimule. Another project is a tailoring and literacy program, which enlists 20 southern Sudanese women every four months to receive instruction in tailoring, English language and writing, and entrepreneurship. Women in southern Sudan and northern Uganda are trained to cook, clean and be mothers, but in their society they are ill-equipped for income-generation. The tailoring program provides the women with profitable skills that allow them to compete in the marketplace and earn an income for their families. Furthermore, there are not many tailors, much less women tailors, in southern Sudan so this training program answers an unmet need for the community. During the program, the women practice their skills by sewing clothes for an orphanage in northern Uganda and at their graduation ceremony they receive a sewing machine and start-up capital to begin small businesses.

Mosaic also has been able to raise funds to purchase vitamins and mosquito nets, necessary items to reduce the risk of disease, infection and malaria. The need for vitamins is desperate in these areas. Providing vitamins to one child for one year costs $3. The cost to provide multiple vitamins to one adult for one year is $3.60 and the cost to provide prenatal formula to one expectant mother for one year is $6. Mosaic has distributed thousands of mosquito nets, but many more are needed. In July 2007, the cost of mosquito nets dropped to $4 each.

We are currently raising funds to build an after-care home in Gulu (northern Uganda) for former girl abductees of the Lord’s Resistance Army.

To learn more about Mosaic’s projects and how to get involved, please visit www.mosaicpeace.org. Click here for a slideshow.