Ngapagok School Project
Calgary’s Peace through Education Committee was formed to help re-build a school at the request of the people of village of Ngapagok, Warap, Sudan. Over 22,000 schools were destroyed in Sudan during the twenty years of civil war prior to the signing of the Peace Accord in 2005. For over twenty years, the education of the youth of South Sudan had suffered with students often walking up to 7 kilometres to attend ‘school’ which was nothing more that the shade of a tree, and scratching their lessons in the dirt with a stick.
The citizens of Alberta, with strong representation of the Sudanese Community in Calgary and Brooks, raised over $120,000 to build the Ngapagok School. The school was completed in 2010 to accommodate 600 students and the school is now filled to overflowing. For the first time in over a generation, the youth of Warap can receive the full school curriculum, protected from the weather.
Get to know the children of Ngapagok by watching the Youtube videos below detailing the journey of the Ngapagok School Project and it's students!
Meet The Children of Ngapagok School
Meet the teachers of the Ngapagok School
While the objective of the Ngapagok School Project was to simply provide shelter so that students may receive a complete education, the project has served to revitalize the economy of the village and to re-unify a society fractured by civil war. As it was the first school to be rebuilt in the province of Warap, people from from the surrounding regions have been migrating to Ngapagok village seeking to give their children a better education. As a result, new homes and businesses are being developed which has created an unprecedented economic boom in the village. Rebuilding the Ngapagok School has thus turned out to be a community revitalization initiative. The influx of people into the village, and the mingling of children in school, has also helped reunite families and clans who were separated during the civil war. In doing so, the school, and the migration into Ngapagok has helped to reduce inter-clan conflicts and effectively helped re-unite the region. In this way, building the Ngapagok School has created an economic stimulus and help re-unite the people of the entire region
The migration of people into Ngapagok and the resulting rapid increase in population has, however, created some has unforeseen consequences – that FYRE proposes to soon address. The greater population, mixing of people of people from different regions and sheltering children in the school have dramatically increased the need for better heath care services. The small, already strained primary health clinic is under-sized, ill equipped and chronically understaffed to meet the growing health care needs of the population of Ngapagok. The Ngapakgok Health Clinic Project is a new venture being proposed to build and provision a primary health care clinic to address the medical needs of the community. This clinic will not only serve to improve the lives of the people of Ngapagok, but also serve as a model for future grassroots development projects in Southern Sudan. FYRE is currently in the process of applying to the Canada Revenue Agency to expand its charitable purpose in the hopes to undertake the Ngapagok Health Clinic Project in the near future.
For more information on the Ngapagok Health Clinic Project, or to get involved in this project, please click on the above link to visit the website.