PRESIDENT’S REPORT TO BOARD OF DIRECTORS
August 4, 2006
I am happy to report that American Friends of the Episcopal Church of Sudan has completed another year of useful life. We are one year old if you go by the date of our incorporation, two years old if you reckon how many nationwide conferences we have held, and three if you count from that snowy afternoon in Annandale, Virginia when a group of Mid-Atlantic Episcopalians listened to USAID's Kate Almquist and Young Adult Service Corps volunteer Ross Kane speak and then, led by Jack Mathias and Nancy Frank, said, "God is calling us to do something now."
As the grandfather of a three-year-old boy, I notice some aspects of being three that seem to characterize both an organization and a child. My grandson Will has developed considerable language and motor skills: he has a lot to say and many explorations to make. At the same time Will is frustrated by his limitations. In Will I see delightful possibilities emerging. Let me describe for you what I see to be similarly the accomplishments, frustrations, and possibilities of AFRECS.
AFRECS has already proved itself capable of rendering useful service to the Episcopal Church of Sudan and to its scattered members and many friends across the United States. By sending Nancy Frank and Fritz Gilbert to the first post-Peace Accord Synod in Juba and by welcoming Provincial Secretary Enock Tombe to speak forcefully for the ECS at our San José conference last February, we have taken on the role of reliable contact point between our respective nationwide churches. In light of staff limitations and transitions at the Episcopal Church Center in New York and the current fissures between various mission-minded elements in the Episcopal Church in the United States, our role as a unifying switchboard continues to appreciate in value. Nancy Frank's splendid report as Executive Director gives you heartening details of services we have rendered at the 2006 General Convention in Columbus, in connecting local Sudan activists, and in disseminating reliable information on work in Sudan. AFRECS has begun to put substance into our avowed intent of "Connecting Hopes and Gifts".
But the world of the two and three-year-olds is not always a completely happy one. Our imaginations outrun our capacities, and we haven't discovered how to implement all our ideas. One need AFRECS has from our beginning sought to address is the need for more sustained communication between hosts of resettled Sudanese, promoters of resettlement and reconciliation in Sudan, and the pastoral leaders of Sudanese Christian communities. In addition to expensive annual conferences, we have elected to take advantage of more inexpensive electronic media. We have generated a fair bit of e-mail traffic, but I do not know whether the electronic forum on Resettlement has seen much use. My personal inclination runs to the more polished and static medium of our handsome newsletter Sudan Connections, edited by Nancy Frank and Constance Wilson, and to the useful reports and documents posted at www.afrecs.org, but I do not know if anyone is reading these. In matters of money, AFRECS has said that we are not a funding organization, yet AFRECS's members are repeatedly made aware of promising projects and splendid opportunities. There is some inherent tension between raising funds for the Sudan work of our respective parishes, dioceses, and non-profit organizations and raising the $40,000 per year needed for AFRECS's undramatic, unnewsworthy but crucial service as a network. Telephone companies charge monthly rates; electronic search engines sell pop-up ads – what can AFRECS charge, sell, barter, or beg to earn our way as a network? A related frustration, or at least a challenge to our thinking, is the climate of public awareness surrounding Sudan. News reports of the horrors of the war between 1983 and 2004, and the admission of significant numbers of Sudanese refugees to the USA in the 1990s were skillfully used by American activists to produce laws and donations to address the suffering; the devastating response to rebellion in Darfur has renewed student and human-rights pressure since 2004. But the long, erratic, undramatic labor of reconstruction and reconciliation in southern Sudan can be expected to lose its grip on American minds. Our challenge will be to stay focused.
Amid our frustrations, I can at the same time see good reasons for hope. We obviously will be unable to do all the things we would like to do, much less all the things others urgently desire us to do. We will have to choose and to settle for modest accomplishments. I would like to offer you three matters I think might be within our reach during the coming year. First, I think we can expect to receive a license from the US Treasury permitting AFRECS to make lawful transfers of money to entities within the Episcopal Church of the Sudan. Your Secretary and Treasurer have devoted considerable effort to this application in the face of inordinate delay by the issuing agency. When we receive our license, then we can proceed to obtain our status as a 501(c)3 organization. We will then be in a stronger position both to solicit donations and -- if we should decide to take on such work – to make occasional financial transfers. Second, we can during 2006-7 encourage those educated Sudanese who have not put down roots in the USA to consider the appeals and incentives from the Episcopal Church of Sudan and from governmental agencies to taste and see what the life of a returnee could be like when he returns to an unfamiliar homeland bearing gifts. I propose that AFRECS make the repatriations of skills from the Diaspora a focus in the coming months. Finally, we can pray, and pray without ceasing. The General Convention has approved the refining of an annual liturgical observance thanking God for the martyrs of Sudan. The Diocese of Southwestern Virgnia has produced a calendar which guides us in orderly intercession for the members of all the twenty-four dioceses of the Episcopal Church of Sudan. Biographies, histories, and collected letters are being published which allow friends in the USA to picture more vividly and therefore pray more realistically for our companions in Christ in postwar Sudan, as well as in the Diaspora. Both in public, common, ceremonial prayer and in our private prayer, we can make the coming months a time when we hold up to God daily the reconciling, rebuilding work of his faithful servants and witnesses in Sudan. Down through the centuries it has been the experience of Christian people that God gives better gifts than we know how or dare to ask for. We can go forward in work and prayer confident that God cares even more about his people in Sudan than we do.