Today is international Women’s day – a day to celebrate women’s achievements and to reinforce our commitment to those whose well-being remains at risk. While there have been impressive strides in recent years, women around Magwi County are still disproportionately affected by natural and man-made disasters.

For many women living in unstable communities like Omilling sub Boma of southern Sudan without access to medical care, complications from pregnancy and childbirth are often a death sentence. In Omilling sub Boma for instance, women have a 1 in 22 chance of dying in childbirth due to lack of childbirth delivery facilities, compared with1 in 8,000 in industrialized countries.

HopeOfiriha is committed to providing local women around Omilling sub Boma with critically needed medical care – that’s why we are funding the training of one traditional birth attendant to handle complications that might arise; we offer health services, including pre-and post-natal care, routine checkups, and safe-delivery services.

To mark this international women’s day – women of Omilling sub Boma southern Sudan need your help to buy childbirth delivery bed – and one set delivery kit by making a donation by tax advantage to you as a donor through our partner GlobalGiving. To give $10 – or more please click:< Donate Now!>

People who ask about HopeOfiriha’s educational support for women and children usually understand why our projects are based in Lofiriha Boma, Sudan most marginalized society, but many of them ask “But why are you working in such an obscure area as the Omilling mountains in northern Magwi County?” There are several answers to this question, including that the Lofiriha Boma have no trained teachers and no schools, no electricity grid or community healthcare and virtually no pave roads.

What the Omilling Sub Boma does have is a tragic history which includes absence of education, violation of women human rights, abject poverty and 99 percent illiteracy among women.  But I need to explain that the Omilling Sub Boma is very special to me because it was there some 15 years ago that an impoverished mother asked to send her daughter to school, a request which resulted in the beginning of a work now as “child sponsorship”.

There is also in my memory in an incident at Onura sub village in October 1999 when emaciated Onura women cradling infants embraced me in the hope that I might find some way to help them. As we wept together, I knew that something extraordinary was about to happen to me as well as to them.

I did and it is ongoing. HopeOfiriha was born in Omilling Mountains. There are a variety of other answers to “Why the Omilling Mountains?”  These include the great desire of Omilling women for education and their enormous suffering during a civil which lasted from the mid – 1980s until peace agreement in 2005. But because our first project was child sponsorship in Uganda, we focused now on Omilling sub Boma where there several children and women. It wasn’t until 2009 HopeOfiriha decided to provide scholarships for non-Omilling girls. Then, over the next 5 years, we will be able to provide onsite projects such, education, healthcare, micro-credit, and environmental projects. Meanwhile, similarly HopeOfiriha work was also expanding in several rural areas then came the current international economic recession.

There is nothing which separates us from poor Sudanese women and children except culture, poverty and distance. It is sometimes easy for those of us who live more affluent lives to forget this. Hopeofiriha ‘s work of supporting impoverished, and deserving women, and children, hundreds of whom are helped by no else, is critically underfunded and thus threatened with closure.

Please help the women of Omilling sub Boma by making a tax deductible donation in any amount today through our partner GlobalGiving by clicking <Donate now!>