Kala-azar Outbreak in South Sudan

The container holding over $17,000,000 of medicine is scheduled to reach Africa on February 15th. You can help loosen the grip of disease outbreak in Southern Sudan by ensuring it gets to where it is most needed!

The World Health Organization has described Southern Sudan as having a “confluence of the worst diseases on the planet”.

Three-quarters of the people are unable to access basic medical care and the weak health care system cannot cope with emergencies, such as the recent outbreak of “kala-azar”, a neglected tropical disease contracted through the bite of a parasite-carrying sandfly. The worst outbreak of this disease in 8 years wracks South Sudan today. The parasitic kala-azar kills approximately half a million people, second only to malaria. Symptoms include an enlarged spleen, fever, weakness, and wasting. It thrives in poor, remote and unstable areas. If untreated, kala-azar is fatal in almost 100 percent of cases within one to four months, children being at highest risk. However, there is up to a 95% success rate with treatment. The medicines currently in transit to Africa will be able to save people who would otherwise die of this wasting disease.

The severity of this outbreak is dwarfed by the wider medical humanitarian crisis facing the entire region, including chronic malnutrition, regular outbreaks of other preventable diseases, and insecurity that displaces communities and destroys lives.

The return of tens of thousands of Southerners from the north in anticipation of the upcoming January referendum for freedom and independence for the South is compounding the medical emergency. These returning refugees will be exposed to the other prevalent diseases, such as malaria, measles, meningitis, and tuberculosis. Their presence will add to the largest population of displaced persons in the world. This will place additional strain on already limited resources, including the lack of adequate food, clean water, and medicines.

Bob Kirkman with the Sudanese medical team in Nimule

Our Sudanese indigenous partners on the ground know where the need is greatest and how it can be most effectively met. These young men and women, including Dr. Mindra Godwin and Luka Benson, are emerging leaders in developing the indigenous health care system of the New Sudan. Please “Join Hands with the New Sudan” by helping ensure that the container of desperately needed medicine reaches our Sudanese brothers and sisters.



Your generous online donation today will help move these medications to the clinics in South Sudan where they are most needed to help prevent kala-azar, malaria, and tuberculosis.

Malaria & How We Can Help

In the 2 minutes it will take you to read this, 4 children will die from Malaria
Over one million people die from malaria each year, mostly children under five years of age, with 90 percent of the cases occurring in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Sudan, this mosquito borne disease is one of the biggest threats to health, with data indicating that one in every five children under the age of five suffer from malaria at some time each year. For those children who survive, malaria hampers their schooling and social development. Many children who survive a serious attack of malaria develop physical and mental impairment. Malaria is also particularly damaging to pregnant women and their unborn children. It often results in maternal anemia and low birth weight - the single greatest risk factor for death during the first months of life.


How is this relevant to our mission? Effective drugs for the treatment of malaria make up a significant portion of the 17 million dollar shipment of medicine we are helping the International Children's Fund to deliver to South Sudan. It is critical that these medications arrive before the rainy season, when children are most vulnerable.


Our Sudanese partners on the ground know exactly where these medicines are most needed and how they can be best distributed. Among them is Dr. Godwin Mindra. He serves on the Board of Directors of SonRise Missions – a totally indigenous, faith-based Sudanese humanitarian organization. SonRise Missions was formed to address the economic and health care needs of the marginalized and displaced people of South Sudan. Dr. Mindra also serves as a Health and Nutrition Specialist for the United Nations Children's Fund in Juba, South Sudan.


Please join hands with us in helping Dr. Godwin and the staff of SonRise Missions meet the critical needs of their people by donating today to ensure that these critical medical supplies reach them when they need them. You can truly make a difference in the fight against this deadly disease.

In the Grip of His Grace,
Bob Kirkman

Help Support Our Sudanese Brothers & Sisters Today

More Pictures from Sudan

These are more pictures that we took the last time we were in Nimule, Sudan, located on the Uganda/Sudan border, to give you some visual context for this incredible need.

Donate Today!

We now have the ability for you to donate to help move this medicine to the clinics in South Sudan who desperately need it. This form is completely secure, and Joining Hands with the New Sudan and Grace Congregational Church guarantee that your entire donation (minus transaction fees) will go to help this cause.

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Pictures from Sudan

These are some pictures that we took the last time we were in Nimule, Sudan, located on the Uganda/Sudan border, to give you some visual context for this incredible need.

A Children's Clinic in Nimule

An Outdoor Clinic

These are people with incredible determination and a desperate need for medical supplies. We have the means to help these people get the medicine that they need. Do not forget them!

Please Don't Forget Me

It was a sweltering spring day on the Nile basin in Northern Uganda in 2002. I was climbing a goat path that was winding toward a small clinic on top of a hill overlooking the Allere Refugee Camp. I was last in line behind my friend Rev. Michael Gantt. I was part of a small medical mission team he had assembled. We were tired. It had been a long trip. A couple of days before we had been forced out of another camp about 300 miles away because of a tribal conflict. We still had seven boxes of medicine left that we hoped to distribute.  The Allere camp served as a sparse refuge for over 90,000 people –mostly women, old men and children, who had fled the genocide just across the river in Sudan. They had nothing.  Most lived under trees or tattered blue U.N. tarps. They had no clean water. They were dependent upon handfuls of grain, occasionally delivered by the World Food Program trucks.  One hundred people were dying each day. The path wound a mile up from the main body of the camp. Lying on both sides were those who were too weak or infirm to continue.  I asked our guide, Michael Longwa, why the clinic was so far away. He said it was because resources were  limited, and it ensured that those who had the best chance of surviving would make it to the clinic. It was…a kind of triage.

The clinic was small. It had 12 beds. The beds were full of children – some of whom were wrapped in gauze. The camp had been raided by the Lord’s Resistance Army a few nights before. They were looking for children to serve as soldiers. These were too little. They had been pushed or thrown into campfires. The Ugandan nurse said that the U.N. doctor had left the day before. He was depressed because he had no medicine.

Children were lying on the wide steps leading up to the clinic. They had been brought there by their mothers or older siblings.  I was stepping over these little ones to bring a box of medicine to the nurse. A boy, 4 or 5 years old, reached up and hooked his fingers in the cuff of my pants. He was weak from malaria, and his eyes were glazed. He was whispering. I asked Michael Longwa what he was saying. He said, “Please sir, when you go back to America, don’ t  forget me.”

 In the hours, days and weeks since that encounter, I found myself desperately determined to do whatever I could to remember him by ensuring that children like him would not go without medicine. I asked God for the strategy, the resources and the people to make it happen. I never figured out the strategy, really. But in the years since, God certainly has provided the resources, the people and the opportunities!

Grace African Medical Missions has partnered with Dr. David Bruenning of the International Children’s Fund to deliver a sea rail container full of 17 million dollars worth of medicine to missions serving children in South Sudan. The International Children's Fund will ship the medicine to Port Mombasa in Kenya. Our job is to make sure the medicine gets to Juba, South Sudan, for distribution – about 1500 miles over land.  The container is ready to ship from the Netherlands. It will take about 42 days to get to Mombasa.

Please, join me in remembering the little boy on the steps of the Allere Clinic by ensuring  that these medicines will reach children in clinics throughout South Sudan. Checks may be made out to Grace African Children’s Fund.

“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try spending a night in a closed room with a mosquito”

-          An African Proverb

In the Grip of His Grace,
Bob Kirkman