South Sudan Harvey Road have links with a charity in South Sudan through a Deputy Head teacher from Watford. She is doing voluntary work overseas, helping the Government Minister for Education set up a school system in this very poor country. Here is Miss Starkl in action:

It was ‘Orphan Day’ at the Star Group in this picture. The Star Group is an organisation run by the church to help and support people who have the HIV/AIDS virus. HIV/AIDS is rife here and the Star Group support about 1700 people each week by providing drugs and health check-ups. The children are all orphaned, most of them have lost both parents, and some have lost just one. People here in South Sudan live in small communities altogether so it’s the extended families that now look after these children.

Some children are ‘homeless’, they live next door to where Miss Starkl is living with a very lovely old lady who cares for them. The lady who looks after the orphans relies completely on donations to provide food, shelter and medicines for the children. When she has extra food left over from dinner, Miss Starkl takes it next door for the children! Sharing food is a massive part of life here.

They have a ‘Fun Day’ on the first Saturday of every month where the orphan children can come and join in with fun activities and are fed a great big meal! This is why they come….for the food! They have about 200 children turn up each month! Miss Starkl helps run these sessions along with some of her ‘student teachers’ who come and practice their teaching skills. So now they have, reading sessions, maths sessions, oral Literacy sessions, football and games, singing etc.... It’s not perfect yet but it’s much better! The Christian Brothers tended to let them just run riot!

Miss Starkl provided the children with paper, pens, pencils, crayons, chalks and slate boards during one session. Some children had never seen marker pens and crayons before! The excitement was astounding! She was overwhelmed by the children’s reactions! It was amazing to see them using the materials. Our children just take this stuff for granted! We are so lucky to be living in a developed country.

So the pictures you see is Miss Starkl doing a ‘singing’ session! She has now taught the children to sing: one, two, three, four, five….once I caught a fish alive, If your happy and you know it, Let’s all clap together, Heads, shoulders, knees and toes, and the Wheels on the Bus! It also helps them to learn English as most young children here speak in Zande which is the local language. Zande is also the name of the tribe here in Yambio. The children who come to ‘Orphan Day’ are of varying ages. They have very young children, some babies but most of the children are between seven and fifteen. The babies are looked after by their older siblings or just by other children! The children arrive about 9.30 am and leave after lunch, so that is about 3ish.

The children are given presents when they leave. Most of the time it is a bar of soap! Imagine giving our children a bar of soap as a pressie!!!! They would give it back!!! The children are overjoyed with the soap. Sometimes the church is given clothes, so the children would then be given an item of clothing. It may not be suitable for the particular child but they can take it home for a family member. Ground nuts (Monkey nuts to us!) are grown everywhere here. So last month the children were given a bag of nuts each as a pressie to take home. They were all very happy!

There are a group of ladies who come on a voluntary basis to cook for the children. They cook on charcoal fires which are outside; well the large cooker is in a kind of brick built hut, no windows or doors so it feels outside! The cooking takes a long time on a charcoal fire but that is how everyone cooks here. Kitchens are outside! It is very hot and smoky around the cooking area. The children sit on the dirty ground to eat. They use their fingers, no cutlery here! There is a borehole nearby so the children can wash their hands before they eat. Sometimes they have soap and sometimes they don’t! No paper towels to dry your hands, that’s what the sun is for! The ground is sometimes dry and dusty, so the children get very dirty sitting on the ground to eat. Sometimes, during the wet weather, the ground is very muddy, the mud feels like the clay we use at school….very sticky but the children still enjoy eating the food provided.

The staple food here is rice. It is cheap to buy and easy to cook so the children eat loads of it, and it fills you up well! They are also fed a meat dish which is always beef, known as cow to the people here. It is boiled up in a tomato sauce. The meat is not always cooked enough so it tends to be really tough, but the children munch away on it. This meal (for some children) is the best meal that they get in a month.

There are many different kinds of leaves here that people eat. They call them ‘greens’, a bit like spinach to us. The ‘greens’ are grown locally and are donated by people for the children on orphan day. These ‘greens’ are plentiful in the market so they eat them every day! They are very nutritious and very organic! Most of the food here is organic. Miss Starkl has seen a chicken alive one minute, then cooked and in the pot for dinner that evening! The children get a drink of water which comes straight from the borehole, so untreated, with the meal. Water is a massive problem here as it carries so many different diseases. We are so lucky that we put the tap on and our water is clean to drink. The children here are not so lucky. Many children become sick and die from water borne diseases as there are no drugs out here to help them recover. Death is a normal part of life out here.

Here is Miss Starkl’s blog so you can read some more about her work: We are using this blog to communicate with Miss Starkl. Huts in South Sudan don’t have addresses so we can’t write to her but they have computers charged by solar energy allowing us to her. We have asked her questions and she has replied using this Blog!

At our Harvest Festival, we raised over £160 for pit latrines (toilets) for the local orphanage. Here is the link for this charity: Miss Starkl has found another lady who looks after orphans in a small village about four hours’ drive from where she is living, orphaned again from HIV/AIDS. She looks after loads of children on her own. She feeds them and shelters them by herself. Another organisation is trying to build a brick building for her and the children as currently they live in tents which is Plastic sheeting over a wooden structure! They don’t have toilets. Pit latrines are the thing used over here. The organisation doesn’t have enough money for pit loos as well so she has got together with a little group of volunteers she has met to try and raise about £2000 to build them for her and the children.