Lessons to the World: Sudanese Youth and the Wellbeing of Children.

The Current Issue of the Sudanese Journal of Paediatrics (SJP) reflects on the engraved old heritage of the Sudanese to help the needy by highlighting the story of the Hawadith Street Initiative (HSI) [1]. Named after the street on which it was founded, which translates indirectly to “Accidents Lane”, HSI was established in 2012 to meet Sudan’s child health insurance gap by crowdfunding medical care online (using the social medium website, Facebook) to help the needy hospital patients covering their treatment costs in Khartoum and other cities of Sudan. The activities of this group of youths, most of them fresh university graduates in their twenties of age, started with recreational programs for cancer patients, and public campaigns for donation of blood. Currently HSI includes more than 2000 volunteers in Khartoum and 17 other cities. The icon of HSI is Um Gisma. Her nickname came after her eldest daughter Gisma. She was referred from South Kordofan (about 690 km Southwest) to Gaafar Ibnauf Children’s Hospital (GICH, located in Hawadith Street) to treat her daughter, Gisma, who was suffering from renal failure in 2009. To meet the living costs for five children who accompanied her to Khartoum, she started making and selling tea and coffee near GICH. Based on a known heritage of Sudanese doctors [2] a young Consultant Pediatric Nephrologist at GICH (Dr Safaa Abdelhameed Madani), helped Um Gisma to rent a house and enabled the rest of the kids to continue their basic education. Following the help she found from HSI, Um Gisma then became a vital motherly member, providing her clients’ seats as benches for HSI members to sit on and meet to manage their issues. She also performed what looked like ‘secretarial and treasurer’ work for the HSI, receiving visitors in their absence, and collecting donations. The health of her daughter Gisma improved, and she managed to complete her secondary school study, and joined Ahfad University for Women, on a scholarship, to study psychology. The HSI group chose Um Gisma as the best representative for the opening of their most spectacular achievement, namely the establishment of an intensive care unit at a children hospital in Omdurman city costing 435,880 US dollars. The HIS constitutes a unique organization, worldwide, in a new wave of Internet-based initiatives. Hawadith Street Initiative (HIS) is not the only youth organization in Sudan who volunteered for the