Lisa Smith of Arlington is involved with a group that is helping to build a school in Wunlang, South Sudan. Three of four board members went to Sudan in January. Here is her story.

00For about a year, I've been on the board of directors of Village Help for South Sudan, a 501(c)(3) whose first project is to build a school in Wunlang. Wunlang is remote; it's in South Sudan, in Northern Bahr-el-Ghazal, a little southeast of South Darfur. (Two hours northeast driving from Aweil, which is the closest town you'll find on a map.)

Three of our four board members went to Sudan on Jan. 6. I know the executive director Franco Majok because he was the case manager for several of the Lost Boys who lived in Arlington, including my foster son.

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Photo gallery

We landed in Nairobi, which at that time was between riots and eerily quiet. Then to Juba, the capital of South Sudan (a semiautonomous region at the moment), then to Wau, Aweil, then Wunlang. You can find all this on our blog, www.helpwunlang.org/blog if you go to the archives and click on January.

Our purposes were several.

We set up our banking. It's not easy to get money to South Sudan. There's a maximum amount you can fly out with. We comparison-shopped for construction materials, ultimately buying some for the school's foundation in Aweil and most in Kampala, which are being shipped north now.

I did some teacher training and assessment of the teachers' needs, and assessment of women's literacy. (They started their own program with their own teacher and 25 students.)

We left behind the very small beginnings of our future clinic: first-aid kits and vitamins. The vitamins came from a holiday drive organized Arlingtonian Kate Harris; shoppers brought the vitamins into her store, Crossroads Trade, for a free animalito.

We checked out the well we drilled.Local leaders told us where we should drill the next one. We set up a satellite modem and a laptop, and we managed to blog from the village. We met several important government officials, some of whom were pleasantly surprised we showed up. (There was also trouble at the border between Aweil and the north -- and the road to Khartoum is still closed.) In Kampala, I priced foot-treadle sewing machines and fabric; we plan to have a small enterprise of uniform-making.

And we met everybody. Franco and Ron had spent a short time there in November 2006. Many nongovernmental organizations fail at building schools at areas that remote. Save the Children has gotten out of the school-building business. But we have the backing of the local people, who are doing a lot themselves. There's lots more on our Web site.