Snake

This is the fourth times we are killing snakes here in the premises. If there is Any anti snake you send us.

I just received this email from the field office. Not sure I can help...

Mini-Break Sudanese Style

I’m having a Mini-Break in a small town lost deep in a big forest in South Sudan. When we get stressed out by our main office, we get sent to oversee the projects here, in a place that suddenly feels (it’s all relative) like Sudan's answer to the 19th century Swiss spa town. The sky is starry, the tea is warm and milky and the meals are uniformly lentil-based. "You are highly welcome!"

This is a smallish town of 75,000 inhabitants. From May to December no trucks can access the town with their supplies. No fuel. No more powdered milk. No contact with the outside world except by donkey, bicycle, footing, or UN flights. The town is an island surrounded by big impassable rivers for more than 7 months of the year. Consequently it is a self-reliant community with a Wild West feel. The prison, for example, has just a simple fence. After all, where would an escaped prisoner, in his visible white uniform, run to?

Today I went to the market at 6.30pm or so, which I rarely do on my own, and wandered around feigning purpose. The men were playing cards and slamming down dominoes in little conspiratorial clusters. I pondered over the identical piles of sugar, salt, dates, and tea in every shop, and wondered what to spend my new Sudanese pounds on. People came up to shake my hand, look me in the eyes with a ‘Salam’, and then move on with just the same laugh. The snotty children shouted at me in unison “What happened?” (which has now become my favourite greeting) It’s a cliché - I know - but how can everyone be just so friendly? Even in the office, the staff greet each other every morning like long-lost friends, smiling seemingly incredulously to find one another yet again, in this same office, morning after morning.

But at home, smiles and polite greetings can turn to the universal familiar bickering, and guns are quietly hidden in obvious places. In the market, they are purposefully brandished in public places – from in front, you are greeted with a big smile, from behind, a big Kalashnikov slung across the back. This week, following CPA stipulations, the government started demobilising one of the local militias. House to house searches left big crosses on those that have been given the all clear, or disempowered of their weapons. To noisily remind us all of these not so hidden dangers, this afternoon (before the shopping trip) between mangoes and rain falling, other bangs and crashes made me run to my vantage point looking out over the wall. Everyone had stopped to watch. On the other side of the market smoke rose and explosions popped red as stored munitions disempowered themselves (and their owners) in one fell accidental swoop. Or so it was generally agreed. More news tomorrow.

Life’s Ceremonies

On Sundays, the muddle of life’s milestones pass by the office, singing and wailing and clapping. Yesterday I stood at my vantage point next to the wall to watch pots of stew and lentils, trays of rice and dowry boxes bobbing along to a marriage balanced on invisible heads. Then, three young boys sitting on shoulders, surrounded by singing and clapping as they innocently made their way to be circumcised. Later, the boys are carried back, more quietly now, just missing a funeral procession wailing its way in the other direction.

When the Sunday sun sets I imagine all these lives irrevocably changed by all these ceremonious beginnings, and endings. I lie under my mosquito net hoping the electricity holds out just a little longer, and the mangoes don’t clud onto me as I sleep. The red sky will wake me up at 6.30, after I’ve slept through allah akbar at allah only knows what time. Goodnight.

The Big Questions

There comes a time when we just stop asking ourselves The Big Questions. We just live with them and stop wondering and worrying. When I was little I used to think, on a daily basis, about the size of the universe. I probably learnt about it at school, but lying awake at night (as I usually did and still do) I would try to work out what happened at the mythical ‘end of the universe’. It really troubled me for a while, though of course the effort of worrying passed. You come to live alongside these questions, put up with them, block them out. You learn to look up at the sky at night and say “the stars are so beautiful and bright, look, I can see Orion’s Belt” without worrying about the concept of infinity. But sometimes I miss that lost wonderment (is that a word?) of being little.

After worrying about infinity, I suppose I moved onto God (let’s not go into that now) and then onto questions about ‘Development’, and the environment. The Osborne Book of Facts and Lists told me that the ozone layer had big holes in it, and that our planet could not sustain Western levels of consumption and use of resources for everyone. I asked myself, was I really happier in my centrally heated house watching TV than someone in a village in Africa with no electricity? So why was everyone around me so stressed? Hmm, The Big Questions, like ‘What to give the girl who has everything for Christmas?’ How about a job in humanitarian aid…

Of course, you also learn to live with these unanswered questions about development, and stop thinking about it too much. In any case, Big Questions seem a bit naïve. Just as your friends don’t ask you every morning over breakfast ‘but how can God exist when there is so much suffering in the world?’ my colleagues don’t ask me whether we actually think we’re doing anything beneficial here in Sudan, and whether I envisage (and believe in) a ‘developed’ South Sudan in which everyone has the right to internet access, for example. We’ve all had that conversation before and reached the dead end.

Like all good Big Questions there are no answers. Anyway, I’m too busy organising things and getting things done, and being grown up, and not wanting to appear naïve, to worry about big questions all the time. But sometimes I do miss the daily wonderment of being little.

(P.S. if that isn’t a word, it should be.)

Daily Bread

I remember someone telling me once that if you have a bank account you are in the top 10% (or was it 1%?) of wealthiest people on this earth. It enables you to save or borrow money. You can manage your money and make plans for the future. Such ways of being are completely ingrained into me, since opening my first piggy bank account at the age of 5 and having to decide which sweets to buy with my pocket money, or saving up for a Michael Jackson tape.

I realised recently just how difficult it is for my colleagues to manage their money. For example: we had been discussing for a few weeks how to solve the problem of food in the office, and it was decided after much debate that all those who wanted to eat lunch could contribute 200 dinars (ie 1 dollar) a day, towards food, which the cook would cook for everyone. Everyone agreed that this was cheaper than buying food in the market. For the whole month this meant the staff would spend about 5% of their salary on lunch.

For one week the system worked beautifully, and we all sat together at lunchtime, waving away the flies and tucking in to a variety of dishes. The khawajas tended to go more for the rice and lentils and the Sudanese seemed to prefer the asida and dried fish in sauce (which my colleague has appropriately named ‘fish and snot’!). We sat around Sudanese style sharing the food from the same big plate, eating with our right hand and keeping our left hand below the table. We would laugh about who ate the most, and eat until everything was finished. Finally everyone had something to eat at lunch. For pudding there were mangoes a plenty, and more swatting of flies.

However, come the end of the second week, no-one turned up for lunch anymore. They went off somewhere during lunchtime, walking around the neighbours’ mud-huts or sitting outside chatting to the guards. I couldn’t work out the problem, did they not like the food? Were they getting ill? So I sat down with a couple of staff who finally divulged that they had no money left. It was about the 8th of the month, and everyone was broke. They’d given money to their wives and families, and so they just weren’t eating during the day. I asked if they could bring some food from home, but they said all the food was always finished the night before, there was never any food left-over.

Financial planning is an alien concept. But then again, in Sudan, if you are hungry, someone will usually feed you, even a stranger. Especially if you are a man; in Darfur the men eat out on the street and if you pass by at fatoor time they will invite you to eat with them. (As a woman it’s not so easy as you have to eat inside the compound, but someone will always help you out).

In the end my colleague and I paid for everyone's food for the rest of that month, and this month we started afresh and people have paid in advance (if they wanted to) for the whole month. So we can still all eat together. Though when it’s the horrible smelly ‘fish and snot’ dish I try to sit at the other end of the table.

More Peace Dancing photos

Peace Dancers

Credit goes to a friend of mine here, who has talent, and a camera with a big lens.

Honey Seller

A Honey seller in the market. This honey is thick and sweet and strong, and filthy! It is collected directly from the trees, and you find bits of dirt, honeycomb, and bees' legs all mixed it. But delicious. Funny how back home I used to inspect my lettuce for bugs, and now I just close my eyes and eat honey with bees' legs in it. Yuk! Standards are clearly dropping.

A Marriage Proposal

"Sorry, no cold coke here. But, would you like to be my wife?"

Basic Schools

I have just done an assessment of 20 Basic Schools. Basic meaning Primary, though basic is a more fitting description. Some schools are so basic you can barely even find them – they have temporary rakuba (grass matting) structures which fall apart every year. Where there are permanent structures they are usually roofs, doors and windows missing. The schools lack books, blackboards, chalk, and facilities such as latrines and water. I remember a teacher in Darfur once complained to me that people came into the classrooms at night and defecated under the desks. I naively told him that he should lock the doors, to which he replied "but look, we have no doors and no windows, people just climb in". Where do you start? The teachers’ salaries are not always paid, and some are shockingly low (about $50 a month, which really doesn’t go far here). And with up to 90 children in a single class, getting an education here is not easy.

Hand dug wells and hand pumps in South Sudan

where I lay my hat

ahh a place to call home...Just to give you an idea of some of the building work I've been dealing with here, setting up the new office. The 'kitchen' is now going to be a store. We're trying to block up all those holes in a battle against the relentless encroaching dust. The big pole is to attach a satellite dish onto (now finished - very inconspicuous really). At least I now have internet access. But I never thought I would learn how to make concrete here in Sudan. You can see the water tank is still lying idle... so I continue to lug buckets of water around. Internet access but no water, and no electricity (except a rickety generator). Yep, still a bit of a mess, but coming together, little by little.

Sweaty Sleepiness in South Sudan

Many people had warned me about malaria in South Sudan. One UN guy has had it 5 times in as many months. Apparently it is a rite of passage that every khawaja, and undoubtedly every Sudanese, must go through. But, I never thought my body’s reaction would be so immediate. In fact, no sooner had I entered Southern Sudanese airspace, in the noisy little UN plane flying from Khartoum, than I felt the chills start to relentlessly shake through me. Luckily I had bagsied the enviable 5 seats at the back of plane, so the armrests went up, I spread out, and I lay there shivering hot and cold waves and feeling very sorry for myself. It was in fact not a bad bed, apart from the aggressive armrest which crashed down on my head (I still have a lump) but that was just a minor added annoyance.

So, on my first evening in South Sudan, I asked the driver to take me to the UN clinic. Unlike Darfur, there are UN peacekeeping soldiers stationed here. I was taken to one of the battalions, where I eventually found a doctor (who didn’t speak English) and who was absolutely no help at all. I asked him if he thought I had malaria, to which he looked blank. I then proceeded, in my dizzy state, to act out being a hungry buzzing mosquito, which bites me, me scratching myself, then feeling delirious and pale (which didn’t take much acting). Still met with blank stares from the doctor. He didn’t think he could treat me as I was NGO not UN. I had to come back in the morning and go to a different clinic. I stumbled back into the car and home again. The next morning another military doctor at another battalion confirmed that I had malaria, which bizarrely I must have contracted in dry old Darfur (most unusually unfortunate).

My Sudanese staff told me that the khawajas are ‘too scared of malaria’ and really it’s not that bad. It is true that I’ve had bouts of flu which have been worse than this. All I need to do is take the medicine and eat ‘too much fruit’. So indeed, I have been eating too much fruit all week, sleeping too much, and sweating too much. I don’t yet feel too much better, but I’m getting there. Let’s hope next week is a bit less superlative than this one, because this week, for many reasons, has all been a bit too much.