Field Trip

I am flying into a remote place called Wau on my first trip into the field. My company owns a compound north of there, in Kuajok, from which it manages projects in super-rural Warrap State. I am flying on a World Food Programme plane run by the United Nations Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS). At the last minute I am asked to transport a spare part needed to fix a broken generator in Kuajok. The package is not labeled, is in a beat up box with sagging corners and wrapped haphazardly in packing tape. It's little bigger than a shoebox but is very heavy. The tall guards at Juba airport have all kinds of questions for me when it comes out the end of the x-ray machine.

What is this.

A part for a generator.

What part.

I don't know. A spare part.

Take it out.

I fumble with the tape half-heartedly, so the guard yanks some off and pries up one of the box flaps. All we can see inside is grayish powder and silver metal rings resembling handcuffs. I see arrest and interrogation in my future, but the guard shoves the box back and tells me to wrap it better, I can go.

When we land on the dirt airstrip in Wau an hour later, the first thing I see are two crashed passenger jets of unknown origin. Good thing I'm on a UN plane. UNHAS was set up in response to requests from the 370 humanitarian agencies in Sudan for assistance getting around the country. A lot of the WFP flights go to Darfur, out west, though Darfur is not part of South Sudan and few people here talk about the problems there. South Sudan has its own crises, including the brewing fight over a place called Abyei, right on the proposed border between north/south Sudan. Oil and grazing rights are at the heart of the dispute, and there is sporadic skirmishing going on, along with a big military buildup by both sides that threatens to cause war, again. George Clooney is worried about another genocide occuring in/around Abyei, and has a satellite trained on the area.

But Kuajok is safe. The biggest threat there is getting caught in the crossfire of a cattle raid. Cattle rustling is a serious business here, involving gunfights and killings. Today while bumping over dirt roads on my way to observe an ox-plow training for farmers in the middle of nowhere, a group of herders wearing berets march their cattle by us on the road. Young men amid the cows have machine guns slung across their backs, but pay us no mind. People in big white Land Cruisers – the trademark vehicle of relief orgs -  seem to get a free pass. We are ushered through checkpoints without even a peek.

The road is painful. There is not a single smooth patch on the three-hour drive to where we’re going. My guts and brains are scrambled by the incessant jolting and jangling as the truck jumps up and down over bumps. A fellow traveler told me of even worse roads she took on a 12-hour drive farther north. "My arse was burning," she said.

Out the window, the landscape is mostly bone-dry African savanna with mixed woodlands. Red-brown sandy dirt, twisted acacia trees with some palms; green shrubs and small trees I don't recognize. Dried up gullies with small white herons flitting around. The rainy season is almost here but right now the land is parched. Tussocks of blond grass, red and brown rocks, dead trees and hacked off stumps. I see a few mango trees near villages; under one tree, a small kid is shooting at unreachable fruit with a slingshot made from a flip flop.

There is plenty of wood out here, and people use it to build their tukuls – the traditional small Sudanese homes, cylindrical in shape, with wood frames and walls of smooth gray mud, topped with yellow thatched cone roofs. A tukul costs about 2,000 Sudanese pounds to build if you’re not producing all the materials yourself, so you need a little income to build one. Out here, cut tree poles, sacks of homemade charcoal and bundled thatch appear to be the main goods for sale, though we drive through some scruffy village markets, where canned items, sodas and sacks of grain are available. Diesel fuel varying in color from brown to yellow is sold in re-used water bottles, sitting on tables in the sun.

Women are walking along the long road carrying jerrycans of water and other things on their heads. Goats and cattle abound, many untended. Men aren't carrying much except herding sticks or spears. Men and boys stop when they hear us coming, and hold their hands out, looking for a ride but the women stoically plod on. My driver, who doesn’t like to talk, pretends not to see them.

Toward the end of our trip I see a boy who can’t be older than four, walking alone through the scrub. He is wearing a ratty t-shirt with a portrait of Obama on it, and no pants. He stops to watch us drive by, but doesn't wave.