Sixty-five thousand square kilometres is a hard number to picture. It is roughly the size of Sri Lanka, or of the Republic of Ireland with a county to spare. It is also the ground one bishop, a limited number of ordained clergy and four departments are asked to cover.
What follows is not a report. It is the diocese counted up — every figure below is one the Catholic Diocese of Rumbek already publishes about its own work, gathered into one place so the shape of it can be seen at once.
The ground
The diocese covers Lakes State and southern Warrap State: 65,000 square kilometres, seventeen parishes and one mission. Many of the parishes are sub-divided again, and beyond them stand more than 150 rural chapels and prayer stations reaching the villages and the cattle camps.
The arithmetic of that is worth sitting with. A priest who visits every chapel in his parish once will have made a journey most people would call a expedition, and he will need to start again the following week.
Because priests are spread thin across long distances, lay catechists are the primary pastoral leaders in rural communities.
Hundreds of catechists and pastoral animators are trained and accompanied by the Pastoral Department. They lead Sunday services, keep the prayer stations open and give spiritual support in the many places a priest can reach only from time to time.
The classrooms
The diocese is the largest provider of education in the Greater Lakes and Warrap states. It owns and runs eighteen primary and secondary schools and assists thirty-seven community-owned satellite schools — many of which have no buildings at all and teach in open-air classrooms.
Alongside them stand seven kindergartens, four vocational institutions, the Mazzolari Teacher Training Institute, Accelerated Learning Programme centres for adults who never went to school, and a campus of the Catholic University of South Sudan.
And 50,000 children are fed, in cooperation with the Scottish charitable institution Mary's Meals. In a country where a season can fail, a meal at school is often the reason a child comes to school at all.
The wards
Mary Immaculate Hospital stands 75 km south-east of Rumbek at Mapuordit. Founded in 2002, it remains the largest and best-equipped hospital in the region: 111 beds across maternity, paediatric, medical, isolation and surgical departments, an operating theatre on 24-hour standby, and a nursing training centre boarding 48 students.
It employs 92 permanent staff, of whom eleven are expatriates, alongside 24 part-time and trainee staff. The Primary Health Care Centre in Rumbek treats around 2,500 patients a month, and a second centre is run by the Loreto Sisters.
A weekly outreach team carries antenatal care, prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV and childhood immunisation out into the communities of the catchment area — because for most people in the diocese, the hospital is not somewhere you can simply go.
The signal
Two radio stations reach more than 100,000 people in five languages: Dinka, Jur, Bongo, Simple Arabic and English. They carry news, teaching, entertainment, gospel homilies and prayers — and a pre-recorded Sunday Mass for those who cannot attend in person.
They also do something less expected of a diocesan station. Good News Radio is a dedicated human rights watchdog, reporting on abuses and malpractice, on corruption by authorities, on forced marriage and on domestic violence. In a region where few others will, it broadcasts those subjects anyway.
The office behind it
All of this is coordinated from Bethany House in Nairobi, acquired in 1994 by the late Bishop Caesar Mazzolari, which serves both as the administrative headquarters of the diocese and as a house where the religious congregations working in Rumbek may find peace and reflection.
Because so little can be sourced inside South Sudan, most of what the diocese uses is bought in Kenya or Uganda and carried in. Two logistics officers — one in Nairobi, one in Rumbek — move it: food when the rains fail, school materials, medical supplies, and the technical equipment that keeps the computer training programmes and the radio transmitters running. It travels by road and by air, and every load depends on paperwork prepared exactly.
What the numbers do not say
Figures are a poor instrument for this. They cannot record the walk a catechist makes to a prayer station, or what it costs to keep a hospital theatre on standby through a night in a country with no reliable power, or what a woman does with the first money she has earned herself.
But they can show the scale of the thing, and the scale is the point: a diocese the size of a small country, held together by a few hundred people and by help from those who will never see it.