Saturday, February 4, 2012

Update

I am back in South Sudan after spending a wonderful holiday at home in Key West, marred at the end by some very troubling Tahra health developments: auto-immune disease and kidney problems. After 40-plus years of fantastic health, she was diagnosed just as I returned to South Sudan – practically while I was on the plane. My parents, TJ and Victoria, immediately flew to her rescue from Virginia to help take care of the kids as she recovered from a blood transfusion after a biopsy. Still there nearly a month later, they have been lifesavers, and have become surrogate parents to the girls, who can’t ever get enough of them. Our Key West friends, many of whom helped with the kids and in other ways too numerous to mention, carried us through the last few painful and frightening weeks, too. Tahra is now feeling a little better though some adverse reactions to new, heavy-duty meds have complicated matters. Fortunately she is working with a very concerned and capable nephrologist, and we are starting to see a little light at the end of the tunnel.

Before Christmas, after much thought and discussion with Tahra, I agreed to accept an extension of my contract in South Sudan for a period of time yet to be determined. Originally I had planned only to do this for eight months, until December 2011. Over the past few months there have been negotiations between my company and its funder, over the scope and length of our proposed continued project, and finally things were resolved when my company settled on a contract extension out here through 2013. My company wants me to stay, though final terms for me are still to be negotiated and Tahra’s new health condition has given us much to think about. In the meantime, next time I’m home, in early March, we are relocating up to western Massachusetts, to occupy a rustic, 150-year-old farmhouse on 25 acres in Berkshire County, enabling Tahra and the girls to be much closer to family while I’m in and out of the country. We are keeping the apartment in Key West, with our close friend Hanrow Hartley installed as house sitter.

The big news in Juba these days is all about South Sudan’s recent decision to shut down its oil wells in protest over the north’s theft of millions of barrels of oil from the south-to-north oil pipeline. The south owns the oil but the north owns the pipeline, refinery, and port where the oil is picked up by tankers. Since the south’s independence in July, the two sides have been dickering over the price-per-barrel for export over the pipeline. Since no agreement on the fees could be reached, the north allegedly decided to steal millions of dollars worth of oil from the line, and in retaliation, last week the south shut down its wells. This action will hit both nations hard in the pocketbook, but here in Juba, citizens are applauding the move. The government says it has enough funds in reserve to get by without oil revenues for a while, and has even signed a contract to build its own pipeline from its oil fields through Kenya (to the south), which will take anywhere from 1-3 years to complete.

Meanwhile, there is renewed inter-ethnic combat in the north part of South Sudan, with a pair of tribes called the Murle and the Nuer going at each other in cattle and people-stealing raids that have left an estimated 600-700 people dead, and hundreds of women and children abducted, prompting apocalyptic front-page headlines in both the New York Times and the Washington Post recently describing the “descent into chaos’’ of the world’s newest country. There is no widespread chaos in the capital, Juba, though Landcruiser-jackings involving expats have been on the rise, prompting my company to bump up our curfew and make some other security modifications.

The other big change since my return: it is now HOT – up over 100 degrees on some days. Arizona desert hot, as in, even your eyelids feel hot when you walk outside. And we are in the dry season now, with no rain for months, and none expected until May or so. Dust and wind are kicking up. When I play football now, sometimes we lose the ball in clouds of dust. Two weekends ago as I stared out of my bedroom window at the empty lot across the way, a mini-tornado blew through, picking up all the trash and flinging it 500 feet high into a giant, swirling vortex of plastic bags and bottles and papers. It was strangely beautiful.

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