Field Journal: Guns, Goats and Gospel in Kuajok

I am back in Kuajok for a couple of days, still in the field on my seven-day tour. On a beautiful cool evening as the sun sets and a big moon begins to rise, I listen to the sounds of village life drifting into the compound from the mud-and-stick tukuls on the other side of the tall fence that surrounds us. I smell dung and smoke from charcoal fires. People talking in relaxed tones in Dinka and Arabic, kids laughing, goats bleating and cows lowing, pans clattering as the women get dinner together out in the open air. By comparison, the compound is a dull place to be. Twin generators hum in the background and pump out diesel fumes round the clock; fluorescent pipes strapped to trees throw unnatural light into the shadows. As the sun sets, the program people usually retire to undecorated, air-conditioned prefabs and fire up their laptops to Skype or surf or watch downloaded movies, and the guards at the gate are the only ones left outside.

Earlier I had jokingly suggested to the team leader that we should have a barbeque, and though she seemed receptive, and I had given the compound manager money to buy some beer, it was about dinner time and I didn’t see any signs of a party in the making. So I decided to go for a walk and grabbed a South Sudanese colleague who lives full-time on the compound to go with me. Within minutes I was rewarded by an only-in-Africa scene, as I came up on two boys sitting in grass weaving palm fronds together to make toy machine guns. I snapped a few pictures as they giggled and made gun-fighter poses for me. Down the road a bit, I saw a grizzled woman using a long wooden pole to stir something steamy in a large rusty barrel. My colleague told me she was making an alcoholic sorghum-based homebrew, and I went over to investigate. As I approached, a dozen men drinking the brew and watching a football game under a thatched roof nearby walked over to see what I was up to. They invited me in for a drink but the mop-water color of the liquid, and the bits of matter floating on top, combined with the fact that the brew master was using a dirty branch to stir the stuff in a rusted barrel, prompted me to politely beg off. My colleague, whose hometown is in the far south, close to Uganda, said he has never tried the home brew, either – he wrinkles his nose and says it doesn’t look like something that would be good to drink.

Back in the compound after our walk, I was surprised to find the barbeque getting started, under a full moon. The compound manager had set up tables and chairs, and buckets filled with iced Heinekens, and was grilling a large he-goat, which he had purchased for a few hundred pounds while I was out walking, and then slaughtered, right on the compound grounds. “I saw them bringing the meat in while you were out,’’ said my roommate, a lanky consultant from South Africa who dines exclusively on his own dried meat, called biltong, made of oryx, kudu and springbok that he shoots in Namibia during annual family hunting trips. He brings his wife, daughters, deep-freezers and generators with him in trucks up to Namibia, shoots the game, skins and butchers it in hunting camps, and then returns to South Africa with a few hundred pounds of frozen meat, much of which he then sun-cures on special racks using fans and netting. He saves it for eating while on his consultancy trips to South Sudan, supplemented by a little granola and dried fruit.

I felt a little guilty for suggesting, on a whim, a barbeque that apparently resulted in the immediate death-by-throat-slitting of what had probably been a happy-go-lucky, grass-chewing father goat earlier in the day, but truth be told, the meat was without question the freshest, tastiest I’d ever had in my life. I ate more than my share, and later asked the grill master what he did with the parts he didn't cook. He said he gave the goat skin to the compound cooks, who will use it to make belts, shoes and bags. He gave them the head, also, which they will boil and eat. "The head is the best part," he said. "But I didn't think you would want any."

On Sunday morning I was up early. I’d been asked urgently to draft a lengthy letter on behalf of someone I’ve never met on a matter of some importance. It was my first ever ghost writing commission, aside from several retail-related emails and other correspondence I’ve written on behalf of Tahra (who doesn’t type), and I was nervous about it. As I sat alone in an office pre-fab in front of my laptop at 9 a.m., swatting at a pair of giant, orange-black wasps dive-bombing me and waiting for inspiration, it arrived through my open window in the form of the most amazing live singing I’ve heard since going to JazzFest more than a decade ago. It turns out there is a church behind the compound, and, it being Sunday morning, a choir of what sounded like professional African acapella gospel recording artists was just getting going. I didn’t recognize the songs or the language in which they were singing, but it was magical and I went outside to peer over the top of the fence at them and listen. I could see them, all women, all dressed to the nines in green and orange and lavender and gold, swaying and singing in perfect harmony in front of a huge outdoor congregation, their voices bouncing off the broken brick walls around them.

I listened for a while, went back inside, banged out a kickass two-page letter, and went to lunch.