At the beginning of every year, LUV coordinates the procurement of supplies and food to be purchased in Kenya and distributed throughout our anti-trafficking network in Sudan and South Sudan. We have a five-month window to transport goods before the rainy season makes dirt roads impassable and cuts off access to the remote villages. These supply-laden trucks meet the critical needs of our ministry while we scale our locally grown food solutions.
In 2021, record-breaking flooding closed the only access road to the Nuba Mountains in Sudan. Despite promises from the government to repair the road, this February, when the trucks neared Our Father’s Cleft (OFC), the roads remained unexpectedly inaccessible, bringing the entire supply route to its knees.
Giving up on hope for roads to dry before the end of the 2022 transportation season in May, all of the major international aid and relief organizations have diverted supply trucks to nearby storehouses in South Sudan — likely delaying the delivery of critical resources until the roadways are ready in 2023.
These flooded supply routes created urgent, life-or-death crisis conditions by blocking the only way to deliver life-saving supplies to OFC and the communities around it. Due to an ongoing conflict between regional opposition leaders and the Sudanese government, it’s impossible to transport food by other roads or air.
When we say we serve in places that are the “hardest to reach,” we mean it!
After working for nearly two decades in Sudan and South Sudan, our leaders know how to be agile. Once the route closed, we were able to divert the trucks to other centers in our anti-trafficking network. The life-saving supplies are now safely offloaded and will still be utilized this year to protect, educate, and empower children and women in our network.
But, it also means that OFC will need more prayers and more help to meet this urgent need.
Ezekiel Ayub, OFC Director, and his team have been working day and night to find new local opportunities to get the supplies they need to care for the most vulnerable children and women. Their dogged determination has helped us find an assortment of vendors and markets that will secure nearly all the students’ food and school resources for the remainder of the year. In the next few months harvests from their growing school farm will also supplement their nutritional needs — and plant the seeds for long-term food security.
However, in conjunction with global inflation, this current crisis is another example of how lack of access and opportunity perpetuates the region’s vulnerabilities, causing exploitation and human trafficking rates to spike.
You can make a difference! Your generosity will directly prevent the exploitation of vulnerabilities for hundreds of children and women in the Nuba Mountains.