“Dr. Jill – it works!”

Nyagak’s excitement was tangible. What worked? It was the cell tower. After years of delay, they started construction this past fall. By late January, it was up and running. Nyagak, a health worker now studying midwifery, dashed by the clinic clutching her miraculous phone. She’d just called her friend who was about 100 yards away in the market. It worked!

OH MY GOSH. This tower – which was built by men scaling each element to hoist and attach the next one – no cranes involved! – had been promised back in 2016, before the last civil war…

Now if we can’t locate some medicine, we just call the man in charge of the pharmacy and he tells us where he has stored it. Now if our staff is on the runway waitting for a charter, they just call Juba and find out where the plane is.

It changes everything. People who send money can call their relatives to let them know the money is on the way. People who ship goods to the market can let the market know which boat will bring them. Finding lost relatives – a huge issue in wartime – becomes much easier.

So crazy. People who had jobs with internet access were avid users of the WhatsApp application. They were shocked to have to pay by the minute. Those long African greetings at the heart of community turn out to be costly. But widespread access to cell phones is really life changing.

There is no question that our country, South Sudan, needs infrastructure. The journal of sustainable social change says the greatest obstacle to sustainable development in South Sudan is lack of road maintenance. Apparently South Sudan has less than 400 kilometers of paved roads, more than half of them are not maintained. And there is NO road maintenance equipment in country. But the Nuer are resilient, and happy!

South Sudan Medical Relief achieved another infrastructure milestone this year. SSMR built a sustainable sanitation project. In this land of black cotton soil where you dig pit latrines only to watch the sides cave in during the rainy season, where black cotton soil cannot become a leach field, it is a dream come true.

We thank Ann and Carl Evans for their support for this one. Gravel and sand are nowhere to be found locally. They had to be imported by boat. We now have latrines that empty into an underground digester with a leach field. Even if a hundred people used it daily (they don’t) it would only need to be serviced in 10 years or more. Visitors from the ministry of health were surprised and so appreciative.

Most amazingly, inside the stalls there is water! So helpful for handwashing and bottom washing. No need for toilet paper that does not exist!