Philanthropy Daily Talks With Sudan Relief Fund’s Matt Smith

Saving Lives in South Sudan and the Nuba Mountains 

Philanthropy Daily, a publication of the Center for Civil Society, recently spoke with Sudan Relief Fund Senior Vice President, Matt Smith, on SRF’s ongoing work in the humanitarian hotspot of Sudan and South Sudan—focal point of the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis on record, with massive numbers of people needing assistance to survive. 

The interview spotlights in particular the work of Dr. Tom Catena and Mother of Mercy Hospital in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, in response to the crisis that’s escalated since the onset of Sudan’s civil war in April of 2023. 

Missionary doctor and award winning humanitarian, Dr. Tom Catena, helped found the hospital that is the only referral center for hundreds of miles in the Nuba Mountains. It is one of the few hospitals still operating in Sudan’s devastating civil war. 

Dr. Tom, as he’s known, describes the situation as the “worst he’s ever seen” in Sudan, a significant statement considering his stay reaches back to 2008, during which time he’s endured previous wars, bombing campaigns, and famines. 

Sudan Relief Fund is responding to the crisis by supporting Dr. Tom and the hospital with critical medicines, supplies, and nutritional support to combat famine. Shipments of an emergency nutritional product known as Plumpy’Nut have been instrumental in treating starving children and other victims of malnutrition. 

With millions displaced by war, commerce at a standstill, and no planting underway, food insecurity has deeply oppressed the nation. Dr. Tom says his children’s ward has been overcrowded with malnourished toddlers, and their staff is treating triple the normal caseload daily. 

The hospital is serving an extended catchment area of 3 million plus people now, with the influx of over a million displaced refugees. Under Dr. Tom’s leadership and with partners’ support, the hospital has added 19 outreach clinics across the region to bring medical treatment closer to people without it. 

Dr. Tom describes the clinics as “spokes in a wheel” designed to treat many of the more common ailments, with complex cases being referred to the hospital itself. Despite the immense challenges of the civil war, Matt Smith says Dr. Tom’s efforts are “building out a sustainable healthcare infrastructure that is unheard of in this part of Africa.” 

Currently Dr. Tom and his team are seeing up to four hundred patients a day – a lifesaving work he says would be impossible without faithful donor support, since the hospital is fully dependent on the same. 

“Without their help, we can’t do anything,” he says. As a hospital rooted in Catholic faith, Dr. Tom also emphasized his reliance on the power of prayers and God’s protection to keep them going amid such heightened challenges. 

Dr. Tom and his team continue to treat war injuries, cancers, malaria and other diseases, perform surgeries, and deliver babies for mothers facing complications, often with limited supplies amidst the escalating crisis. He and his team are committed to staying and helping the massive numbers in need despite the civil war that encroaches ever closer to their location. 

Matt describes Dr. Tom as “a modern saint . . . I’ve never seen someone work the way he is working, so consistently every day, for as long as he has, in the conditions he is working in.” 

Sudan Relief Fund, with the generosity of donors, continues to support Dr. Tom’s work and the refugee crisis in Nuba with medicines, hospital supplies, clean water, and emergency food distributions. Learn more about how you can help in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Read the full Philanthropy Daily article.

In Dr. Tom’s Own Words

A Personal Interview with Dr. Tom Catena

“When you’re a doctor, you want to go where the need is.” – Dr. Tom, on his chosen path

Dr. Tom Catena has been hailed as one of the world’s most renowned missionary doctors, serving as a founder, medical director, and for many years the sole surgeon of Mother of Mercy Hospital – a remote referral hospital in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains. Through civil wars, famines, and great risk to his life when he’s been forced to jump into foxholes to survive, “Dr. Tom” has refused to leave the 400 patients he sees a day for an easier doctor’s life – a figure now nearing 500 daily since the escalation of Sudan’s civil war.

During a brief visit to the United States, Senior Vice President Matt Smith had the rare opportunity to sit down with Dr. Tom Catena for this personal interview. Dr. Tom shares his story from his auspicious beginnings as an engineering student and football player at Brown University, to the journey that led him to choose a calling as a mission doctor in one of the most desolate and underserved areas on earth. You’ll hear how the hospital he began with 80 beds now holds 480, serves three times its usual patient load treating malnourished children in the midst of Sudan’s famine, and how his vision of expansion clinics is bringing health care to people without it. Take a rare look into his personal life with heartwarming updates about his wife and growing family. Learn how the hospital is responding to the worst crisis in Sudan he’s ever seen. And discover how faith and the prayers of supporters sustain him to carry on his mission.

“When you see that kind of courage, that resilience, you think, who am I to complain?… Let’s keep working hard for these people who are suffering.” – Dr. Tom, on the people he serves

An Easter Message of Hope and Encouragement

As much of the world prepares to celebrate the Easter season, our neighbors in Sudan and South Sudan are struggling through multiple, overlapping crises. Thank you for all you do to bring hope into suffering lives. As Jesus brought victory over death, you are shining light into the darkness. Pray that the hope and promise of this wondrous day will lift our suffering brothers and sisters with encouragement and fill them with hope that transcends their earthly struggles.

Easter reminds us that even in the face of suffering and loss, renewal is possible and life can emerge where it once seemed absent. It is a time to remember the power of compassion, sacrifice, and enduring faith in something greater than ourselves. As we look to Sudan and South Sudan, we are reminded that hope is not abstract—it is carried through the actions of those who choose to serve, to give, and to stand alongside others in their time of need.

May this season encourage a renewed sense of purpose, bring comfort to those who are struggling, and inspire continued generosity for those seeking relief and restoration.

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The Girl with No Name: Resilience, Slavery, and the Soul of Sudan

They beat her name right out of her.

This concept is nearly impossible to grasp from our modern, connected world. The thought, the idea of a person being so thoroughly broken by trauma that the very word used to identify them – their name since birth – slips into a mental fog of survival. For a seven-year-old girl in the Darfur region of Sudan in the 1870s, this wasn’t a metaphor. It was a physical, agonizing reality.

Can you imagine being seven years old, playing in the doting warmth of your family home, only to be ripped from your mother’s arms by Arab slave raiders? The horror of realizing that you will never again see your father’s gaze, never again intertwine fingers with your brothers, or share the secret laughter of your sisters, is a grief that should be ancient history. Yet, for the people of Sudan and what is now South Sudan, this story is both 150 years old and as fresh as this morning’s news.

A Land Defined by Shadows

The word Sudan comes from the Arabic Bilad as-Sudan, meaning “Land of the Black People.” It is a region with a history as deep as the Nile itself. This area was home to prehistoric relics dating back 50,000 years and the ancient, gold-rich Kingdom of Kush. However, for centuries, this land has been viewed by outsiders not as a cradle of civilization, but as a source of natural resources – human lives.

In 1821, the Ottoman Egyptian ruler Mohammed Ali invaded Sudan with a specific, cruel directive: to search for slaves. This oppressive “Turkiyya” rule devastated southern Sudan. This was the world into which a young girl was born in 1869. She was part of a prosperous family in the village of Olgossa; her father was the brother of a village chief, and she grew up surrounded by three brothers and three sisters.

The walls of her home were filled with love, but the world outside was a hunting ground. When she was just five, raiders stole her sister. Two years later, they came for her.

The 600-Mile Walk into Silence

The marauders dragged her from her home and forced her to walk barefoot for 600 miles to El Obeid, the grim epicenter of the Sudanese slave trade. For a child, 600 miles is not just a distance; it is an eternity of hot sand, sharp rocks, and the mounting realization that your previous life is fading away.

She was bought and sold twice during this journey. The trauma performed a kind of psychic surgery on her. When her captors demanded her name, she could not answer. Her mind had retreated to a place where words didn’t exist. Seeing her silence, her abusers mockingly called her Bakhita, the Arabic word for “fortunate.”

The irony was as sharp as the knives used to brand her. Over the next twelve years, Bakhita was sold and resold into different rounds of torturous captivity. She was demeaned, denied her humanity, and physically damaged. One of her owners, a Turkish general, practiced ritualistic cruelty. He scarred her with tattoos, a process involving 144 intricate cuts across her chest, back, and arms. Then they rubbed them with salt to ensure the scars remained permanently. She was recklessly tortured to within an inch of her life, once left unable to walk for a month after a particularly savage fury from her master’s family.

The Spirit of a New Nation

To understand Bakhita is to understand the spirit of South Sudan – the world’s youngest nation. Marred by decades of civil war, droughts, and famine, South Sudan finally achieved independence in 2011 after 99 percent of the population voted to break away from the north and endured a protracted and bloody battle.

Yet, the “waiting and wondering” that Bakhita endured remains a reality for children there today. Even in 2026, the region is haunted by conflict. Support agencies struggle to provide aid as staff are kidnapped and storehouses are ransacked. Perhaps most horrifyingly, children are still conscripted into wars, sometimes used as human mine detectors. The “Land of the Black People” remains a place where endurance is not a choice, but a requirement for existence.

Bakhita’s story, however, takes a turn that moves from the depths of outrage to the heights of inspiration. In 1883, she was sold in Khartoum to the Italian Vice Consul, Callisto Legnani. For the first time in over a decade, she was not met with a whip or a blade. When the political climate in Sudan turned violent during the Mahdist War, Legnani took Bakhita to Italy.

The Power of the Release

In the quiet of Italy, the girl who had been branded “fortunate” as a joke finally found the literal meaning of the word. Entrusted to the care of the Canossian Sisters in Venice, she was introduced to a concept she had never known: a “Master” who did not lash her but loved her.

It is here that Bakhita’s story transcends mere survival and becomes a lesson in the human ability to forgive. On January 9, 1890, she was baptized with the name Josephine Margaret Fortunata. She didn’t just find a new name; she found a new identity that the raiders could never reach.

The religious aspect of her life was not a retreat from her past, but a total reclamation of it. She famously said, “If I were to meet those slave raiders that abducted me and those who tortured me, I’d kneel down to them to kiss their hands, because if it had not been for them, I would not have become a Christian and religious woman.”

This is not the sentiment of a victim; it is the declaration of a woman who has achieved a complete victory over her oppressors. By refusing to carry the weight of hatred, she ensured that her abusers no longer had power over her. She spent the next 50 years of her life in Schio, Italy, serving as a cook, a sacristan for Mass, and a portress (gatekeeper). Her gentleness and ever-present smile became so legendary that when she passed away in 1947, thousands flocked to her funeral.

A Legacy of Hope and Empowerment

Bakhita walked with beauty in a body bearing 144 physical scars. She proved that while the world can steal your name, your freedom, and your family, it cannot steal the soul unless you allow it.

Today, St. Josephine Bakhita is the patron saint of Sudan and victims of human trafficking. She stands as a national treasure for a people who have known very little stability. Her life encapsulates the work of modern volunteers and partners who fight every day to help the people of South Sudan achieve a life of empowerment.

Partners and volunteers continue the fight today to liberate those who are still captive to oppression. According to the United Nations’ International Labor Organization, modern slavery – including forced labor, sexual exploitation and forced marriage – affects an estimated 50 million people in today’s world.

Further, the chaos of wars, violence, and conflict create situations that are rife for preying on the vulnerable – displacing women and children, creating refugees and orphans. According to research conducted by the Arise Foundation, trafficking occurs in 90% of wars and armed conflicts.

Conflicts like Sudan’s nearly three-year civil war (a present and ongoing conflict that continues to devastate families and communities today) breed environments that foment greater instances of child slavery, conscription into militias, and girls forcibly taken as “wives” or other forms of human slavery.

Non-profits like Sudan Relief Fund have fought among some of the most inhospitable conditions to bring food, clean water, clothing, shelter, health care and help for vulnerable children and orphans to Sudan and South Sudan, and they continue this fight today.

Whether enslaved to militias, human trafficking, or the oppression of extreme poverty, Sudan Relief Fund has been laying the groundwork for sustainable solutions and holistically transforming lives from despair to hope for nearly three decades – breaking the cycle of poverty that gives rise to instability, and empowering children through education and opportunity to achieve better futures.

Help fight poverty by helping young kids with education opportunities.