Lisa Deeley Smith, director of Village Help for South Sudan, reflects on the recent progress and images that have arrived from the school that Arlingtonians and others have built in the village of Wunlang:

I was chagrined that I couldn’t accompany Franco Majok, the executive director of Village Help for South Sudan, on his mid-November trip to the remote part of Southern Sudan where we are building a school. But I got to play a part when, the day after Thanksgiving, Franco began e-mailing me photos (more than 100, five at a time!) of the school we had built in Wunlang.

I just marveled over the photos. In January 2008, we had serious doubts whether we could build the school we wanted. But by negotiating with a local contractor, shopping hard for construction materials in Sudan and Uganda, and with the work of our field manager and his assistant, construction started in March.

We got the first photos of construction some months later. Franco was present when our desks were being made on-site by a South Sudanese carpenter and his crew. And now, here were boys and girls sitting at their new desks in their new school.

They were using textbooks from UNICEF, which our headmaster acquired because now, with a building, we meet UNICEF’s criteria for distribution. With the help of many, including the members and youth of St. Paul Lutheran Church and Trinity Baptist Church and private donors here in Arlington, we had done it.

Then to work: I spent the day editing and posting the photos to our photo-hosting site, www.wunlang.smugmug.com. The photos were also being incorporated into the Powerpoint presentations we give all over the US, and soon, in Canada.

I got the raw video from Franco’s trip before Christmas. But then there was, well, Christmas, so I began editing and posting the footage this week. Our treasurer Ron Moulton and I had each posted a few videos to YouTube, but now we have our own channel, www.youtube.com/WunlangSchool. I’m still adding videos to that, and adding videos to our Smugmug site also. We hope to have our own Web site, www.villagehelpforsouthsudan.org, revised soon to showcase our accomplishments.

I know many people want to say good riddance to 2008. But for me, that year will always be the year we built a school in Wunlang, South Sudan.