Juba Mornings

One of my three loyal followers has asked me to describe a typical day here in Juba.

7 a.m.  Juba time (this is 12 a.m. for you guys on the East Coast of the U.S.) – My little battery-powered travel alarm clock beeps. I  bought the clock in Amsterdam airport. I hit the snooze button and think “What the hell am I doing here?”, usually my first thought of the day. I can see light outside the heavy beige curtains and hear people walking by on the street outside even though my AC is on. I hit the snooze every five minutes until 730. Not sure why I do this. Each snooze gets me closer to my first trip home in June?  

730 a.m. – Throw back the curtains, turn off my remote-controlled AC and go into my private bathroom, which smells a bit dodgy – I think it’s the toilet water. Turn on the water in the shower to get it hot. Sometimes there is just a trickle. When it gets hot, it’s boiling hot.  Kind of tricky to get it to a comfortable heat.  Recently the borehole for the house tapped out and we had to call a water truck to refill the water tank. Since then the tap water has smelled of diesel fuel. Brush my teeth (using bottled water) and get dressed, pack up work-issued laptop and docs.

8 a.m. – I go downstairs to the kitchen to grab a bite.  I am supposed to take my Malarone malaria medication with food, ideally something fatty. I have been fixing myself corn flakes (from Saudi Arabia) with boxed milk (from Saudi Arabia) and sometimes, PBJ on toasted thin, funny-tasting white bread from a Juba bakery, and eating that with my malaria med. I also take an immune booster and multi-vitamin. I make myself Nescafe instant coffee with milk, even though we have real ground coffee from Kenya and Ethiopia. I’m usually in too much of a hurry to make real coffee and I actually think I might like the Nescafe. Almost everyone else drinks tea. I’m not sure why I like the Nescafe, because it sort of tastes like boiled cardboard, but it has become part of my routine.

830 am – the driver arrives in one of the Land Cruisers for the second trip to the office compound (first one leaves right at 8 am). Five or six of us crowd into the truck with our bags. The people who live in my house are mostly Africans, a mix of male/female professional project managers or technical sector specialists from countries including Kenya, Zimbabwe, Southern Sudan and Madagascar working in either agriculture, democracy/governance, water/sanitation, education or community development.  The chief of party (Angola) and deputy chief of party (Bangladesh) also live in the house. Everyone is very smart, multi-lingual (except me), hard working, and kind. They take their mission – helping the war-torn people of Southern Sudan launch their new nation – incredibly seriously. My colleagues are humble, respectful, professional people.

845 – The drive to the office compound takes us by Juba airport and past water trucks, fuel trucks, people walking to work. I see women cradling babies, waiting to get into the Egyptian clinic. Smiling, skinny kids walking to school in pastel blue or green cotton blouses with Navy blue shorts.  Big kids holding the hands of smaller ones. Occasionally a woman in a long beautifully patterned dress balancing something in a large bucket atop her head while walking. Today I saw a woman carrying a stack of 15-foot long aluminum rods on her head. There is construction everywhere. A Chinese furniture store is going up lightning fast on the end of my street. We pass army trucks, soldiers, and men sitting on cheap Chinese-made motorbikes called boda-bodas.The bodas  are for hire, they will take you wherever you want to go in the city if you are brave enough to get on the back.

9 am – At the guarded, walled office compound I settle into my cubicle in a room full of eight cubicles. The place is owned by the Catholic Diocese and I think dates to colonial days, when Sudan was run by an Anglo-Egyptian cartel. It is  shaded by beautiful orange-blossomed jacaranda trees, huge green neem trees, with some red bougainvillea. There are enrormous dark gray boulders sticking up between some of the buildings; people sit on them and make phone calls. I boot up my laptop and check Outlook. Blissfully few emails compared to my Wesley House days.  I work on whatever report, bulletin etc… is requested. Attend meetings. The work is interesting. It is about setting up a new country, from scratch. How do you involve people in the decision making process? How are they engaged and empowered? What systems can be set up to do that? How do you help build trust in a new government when the old one bombed and starved you? How do you improve food security and livelihoods? We talk a lot about ox plows, pit latrines, boreholes and hand pumps, community action groups, transparency. Gender equity. There is A LOT of training going on – courses on democracy, governance, public finance, budgeting, human resource development.

1 pm  - Lunch time. We gather in lunch room for a meal catered by a hotel called Logali House, located right over the fence from our work compound. Usually chicken or beef dish served with rice, bread,  salad.  Occasionally after lunch I go hunting surreptiously in the dark laundry room, if the laundry ladies aren't around, for my lost laundry items. I found a pair of my underwear in a miscellaneous big bucket of anonymous clean laundry items, and stuffed them in my trouser pockets. I feel sneaky stealing my laundry when they're not looking but it's the only dignified way to get lost socks and underwear back. I do my own laundry now, easier to keep track of things.

Tomorrow: Juba Evenings