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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Carter Targets Pestilence In Sudan Cease-Fire In Bitter Civil War Allows Health Care To Reach Afflicted Villages

Eileen Alt Powell Associated Press

The water that sustains the people in this tiny farming hamlet in southern Sudan has also brought them sickness and death.

So they lined up outside their thatch-roofed huts to cheer as Jimmy Carter arrived, thanking the former president for a cease-fire he negotiated that opened the way for health care and water treatment they had never before received.

Since the cease-fire began March 28, aid workers backed by the Carter Center in Atlanta have moved into villages like Nyamini to try to eradicate Guinea worm disease and other waterborne illnesses and to vaccinate children.

Carter was on tour not only to promote better health care but to press the Khartoum government and southern rebels, who have fought each other for 12 years, to extend the 3-1/2-month cease-fire and begin peace talks.

He spent Thursday and Friday visiting villages in the bush, and on Saturday and today was meeting with government and rebel leaders in hopes of ensuring that fighting would not again block his campaign against disease.

Ridding the world of Guinea worm - a parasite picked up from unclean water - has been a Carter crusade since the late 1980s. The remote tropical villages in southern Sudan are among its last bastions.

Getting to Nyamini was part of the battle for Carter, his wife Rosalynn and their son, Chip. It took a 3-1/2-hour flight from the capital Khartoum to Juba, 720 miles south, then a bone-jarring hour west on a winding dirt road.

Along the road people walked barefoot, with their belongings balanced on their heads. Electricity and telephones are unknown. Firewood is so precious a family makes do with four small tree branches a day.

In Nyamini, a village of 400, Carter grimaced as he watched a health worker try to pull out a yard-long Guinea worm from the leg of farmer Luka Deng.

“It is very painful,” the 24-year-old Deng told Carter. “I cannot stand. I cannot keep my cattle.”

To Carter, who has made improving the lot of the Third World his mission since leaving the White House in 1981, the visit symbolized a brighter future.

“Today is a day I will never forget,” he told the villagers. “I will … never forget those who will never again know Guinea worm and never again know river blindness and the children who will never again have polio and measles.”

Carter said he was very pleased with what was accomplished during the cease-fire: 2,336 villages identified by health workers as infested with Guinea worm, 150,000 nylon water filters distributed, 40,000 people treated for river blindness, more than 95,000 children vaccinated.

Sudan is rife with disease. Health Minister Galwak Deng estimates that one-quarter of the nation’s 27 million people catch malaria every year. One-third of the world’s 160,000 annual Guinea worm cases are in Sudan, mainly in the south. Diarrhea is rampant, and often fatal.

The civil war has made matters worse. More than 1.3 million people have died in the conflict and resulting famines.

The rebels, mostly Christian or of tribal religions, want autonomy from the Islamic north. Carter said he had access to rebel leaders Riak Machar and John Garang, as well as Sudanese President Lt. Gen. Omar el-Bashir.

In the past, he used such access to help pacify Haiti and bring North Korea to negotiations. But Carter also sees a strong link between humanitarian work and peacekeeping, with success in his health programs “giving me credibility” with combatants on both sides.

Underscoring his neutrality, Carter not only visited government-held Nyamini but also Tambura, a village of several thousand near the Central African Republic that is held by the rebel Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army.

In Tambura, as men of the Zandi tribe beat hollow logs and women swayed in skirts of fresh-cut leaves, Carter visited a hospital struggling to combat river blindness.

The disease, carried by black flies, can be contained with an annual dose of the medicine ivermectin. Yet in some villages, nearly half the people suffer from its itchy scales and many of the adults are blind.

The United Nation’s Operation Lifeline Sudan, the World Health Organization, CARE and the California-based International Medical Corps are all working with the Carter Center on the Sudan health project.

“This campaign has brought a lot of hope, a lot of enthusiasm,” Carter said. “But there is so much more to be done.”