We as the Akook community are appealing to you donors, friends, our sons and daughters, all good and well wishers inclusive to excuse and think good of us by revealing your generosity, benevolent, self-willingness, with a complete solidarity to pay us whole heartedly your great intimacy and affection to be very concerned and respond positively without long hesitation but with immediate intervention to the situation. You are asked to read in our proposal and sympathize with us and give in your hand. To protect the community is to protect the nation; note, a whole nation is raised up with little concern. And as ignorance kills, so does malaria. Throughout the pages of this project proposal, this issue is being made with a lot of efforts and limitless provisions and as it appeals to you, that’s our cherish hope and incase of any shortage, we shall always remain in supplication for that.
ABOUT THE PROJECT:
The project began with the Ngapagok community’s appeal to the Calgary community for help to rebuild their elementary school destroyed during Sudan’s 21 years of civil war. The directors and volunteers of the Foundation for Youth Rights to Education, Canada, FYRE, helped raise funds and re-build the Ngapagok School, in South Sudan, one of 22,000 that were destroyed during civil conflict that afflicted Sudan until 2005. We successfully raised enough funds and built a 12 classrooms primary school. Construction of the Ngapagok School was a huge success – and in some ways that success is causing unforeseen difficulties that the Ngapagok Health Clinic Project is specifically intended to address. One of the key lessons learned from building the Ngapagok School is that development of a school is much more than simply building a structure. Building a school in a rural area is often a community enhancement and re-development project. At the time of construction of the school, 350 students were meeting under local trees for an education. The school was built for 600 students and now that it has been operating for a year there are more than 1,000 students attending. Building the school attracted many rural people to the village to enhance their children’s educational opportunities.
While this migration has greatly aided regional re-unification after the war, the surge in population has caused unanticipated issues in terms of accommodation, infrastructure and, in particular, health care. While the village of Ngapagok has a health care clinic, its facilities, supplies, and staff have been chronically insufficient. The increase in population of Ngapagok has vastly increased the demand for health care services and the already over-extended health clinic has become simply overwhelmed with the demand. We have come to learn that enhancing education opportunities require more than supplying a new building or paying a teacher. Students can only learn once their basic physical, security and health care needs are met; enhancing health care services will help ensure that the community can obtain the most benefit that a new school can provide.
The volunteers of the Ngapagok Health Care Project are working with the local community to meet the demand for medical services brought about by building the school and the associated increase in population. The Project proposes to provide new facilities, medical equipment and to initially provide medical supplies for the primary health care facility. A key element of this project is to work with the end of the project in mind: to develop an effective transition, to complete this project, by ensuring another party will be responsible for on-going provision of medical supplies and funding of medical staff salaries.