I have been to Singa which is a town in Sudan. My parents lived there. It is located by the Blue Nile and used to be The Capital of the Blue Nile. It breaks my heart to see how the people there are severely suffering from lack of clean water, access to food, and deadly diseases like Cholera, Malaria, Meningitis, etc. I saw a few people in my neighborhood coming to my parents’ home to get water from the aqueduct. The people were constantly getting water and causing the water to stagnate which was causing an influx of mosquitoes. I also noticed that some contractors from China came to my parents’ town and set up water canal pipes to move the water around into other towns for irrigation. However, they did not do an excellent job at installing the pipes, so the pipes broke and caused constant running water throughout the town causing mosquitoes to proliferate. The government did not help the people to improve the situation, but they supplied them with netting to sleep with at night. I went to my town one time with a supply of medication to prevent malaria and other diseases, but I caught stomach flu despite taking some precautions. I returned home with mosquito bites and a high fever. Also, I visited the youth club while I was there because it was near my parents’ home and found out that the youth club had neither televisions nor computers. The youth there were extremely interested in watching and playing soccer because they used to come to my parents’ house in the evenings to watch soccer whenever the games were on. What amused me was that they knew every player’s name on every single European team. It broke my heart to see how excited they were while watching the games. Moreover, the schools in the same town did not even have books and computers for the students, also they had to come to my parents’ house for clean drinking water. I went to the town with two computers from the US, but they were not enough. The sad thing was the computers could not be connected to the internet because the connection there was expensive. Safety was a huge concern for the children. At the time of writing, they are in the middle of a civil war.

If computers, clothes, and money can be donated to them, that is the best thing that can be done for these people.  I want to contribute to the youth of my birth country because I could have been in their shoes.