On a recent trip to the south Sudan, ISU alumna Sarah Lubbs learned something that cannot be found within the confines of a classroom – the meaning of community, hope and perseverance.

Lubbs, born in Johnston, graduated from Iowa State in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in English, and now resides in St. Paul, Minn. She currently teaches preschool in an “at risk” area.

She traveled to southern Sudan in January on what is called a “learning tour” with others in a nonprofit, church-oriented aid group, called The New Community Project.

Even from a young age, Lubbs said she “always had a passion for Africa.” The group stayed mostly in the border town of Maridi. It was Lubbs first trip to Sudan.

“With The New Community Project, we are the ones who are on the receiving end of the benefits from these trips,” Lubbs said.

The trip began in the Nairobi/Uganda region, and wound its way through small villages, giving aid wherever they stayed. The New Community Project engages in programs that mostly aim to empower women in the community.

The Give Girls a Chance program focuses on giving scholarship money to girls around the ages of 12 and 13 to complete their education. Generally, when girls in Sudan enter the age of puberty, they drop out of school for many reasons, including marriage, pregnancy or inability to afford to send them to school. When that situation arises, the families usually keep sending the son to school, Lubbs said.

“Every year of education a girl has . decreases the chance that a girl will get pregnant and married,” Lubbs said.

Another program the project engages in is called Every 30 Seconds, which donates sewing machines to communities for the women share and teach others how to sew. They sew mosquito nets because it is common for children under the age of five to contract disease and die from mosquito bites. There were five cases of death from malaria in the three weeks the group was there, Lubbs said.

The whole community benefits when women learn skills, because economically they can provide for their families in the absence of their husbands, who have either forcibly joined the army or have died, Lubbs said.

The conditions in the villages are such that strife and warfare have become standard ways of life, although Lubbs and fellow traveler, Nan Erbaugh, say they saw a gleaming of hope and happiness that could be called strange and wonderful under such conditions.

“Every night we would wake up, without fail, to either gunshots or someone crying or a funeral procession. Death is very common, but there is such a hope, such a happiness, that people have that you don’t usually see in here [in the United States],” Lubbs said.

Erbaugh, who has visited Sudan three times, is connected to the project through her church in West Alexandria, Ohio. She has visited Sudan in times of war and in the recent relative peace.

“[Five years ago] there was a lot of tension in the air. They never knew when they were going to get bombed,” Erbaugh said. “There were not a lot of smiles. There was not a lot of laughing.”

Erbaugh said that the Arab government is forever trying to foment war between the Sahara Desert-like northern Sudan and the oil-rich southern Sudan, which contains the war-torn Darfur region.

“They want the black Africans to leave. They want the oil to themselves,” Erbaugh said.

A peace agreement has been drafted and signed by both the sides. On one side are groups such as the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, and the other side is the government that has repeatedly tried to destroy the African population through any means necessary to create an Arab state. One provision in the treaty states that in 2011, southern Sudan can vote to succeed from the country altogether, which could cause another war, Erbaugh said.

Lubbs said there are rebel factions, such as the Lord’s Resistance Army, that draft young boys or whole families and subject them to torturous initiation rituals, such as making someone kill their own brother or face death themselves, or drinking the blood of someone they have killed. The group itself is reluctant to disarm because they will be persecuted for their crimes.

At the end of her stay, Lubbs said she was offered a teaching job in Maridi. The locals offered to build her a hut. Lubbs, who has returned to the United States to teach and to advocate for the cause in the Sudan, said she is thinking about taking the job.

“I think that people here look at the situation [in the Sudan] as hopeless. The situation is different from what we know. But we have much more in common than in differences. It’s the common threads between us that struck me the most,” Lubbs said.