Jebel Mountain

I've wanted to get into the wild on foot ever since arriving six weeks ago, but opportunities have been limited. On Sunday I am finally able to get in a good hike, to a place on the outskirts of town called Jebel Mountain. It’s actually three distinct, rock-covered hills, and you can easily hike to the top of one of the peaks in about an hour. A colleague and I plan to meet up with some other expats at an outdoor restaurant called Home and Away at 8 a.m. It's a little early for me on a Sunday, especially after staying up late last night while watching Barcelona tear apart Man U in the Champions League Final. However I bite the bullet and get up early, head fuzzier than usual. On our way out, our guard, James, shows us that one of the rabbits had babies recently. He is smiling as he squats over the tiny nursing bunnies in the driveway. “I love animals,” he says, grinning from ear to ear. "Only one did not live.”

We walk to the restaurant, where I'm surprised to find a good sized group of people - about ten altogether -- who are also going on the hike. We order coffee but it never comes, so we decide to leave, it’s getting warmer as the morning unfolds and we don’t want to start too late. A rugged Australian named Phil, who has a spunky puppy with him and a large carabiner strapped to his day pack, offers to transport us all in his Land Cruiser.

“Can we all fit?” someone asks.

“Sure,” says Phil. “It’s a troop transporter!”

All ten of us climb in an especially large Land Cruiser. This one has two long, comfortable benches that face each other in the back and we squeeze eight in the back, two in the front, and the driver. We are just pulling out when Phil’s fiancé asks him if he has the puppy.

He does not. Truck stops abruptly while someone runs into the restaurant to retrieve the puppy, which climbs in the back with us, happily clambering and wriggling over 16 feet, eight laps and sets of shoulders. "She has all the grace of a baby giraffe," says Phil, who found the pup during a Hash race in town. She is narrow, brown and short-haired with a pointy nose, which she lay on my lap during a rare break from her antics.

Phil has hiked Jebel countless times and is a natural guide and leader, so he takes over when we arrive at the base of the hills. He makes sure we are all carrying water and reminds us to be respectful and careful when taking photos. If we don’t stay with the group, we need to pair up – no one walks by themselves. He tells us that we also need to be cautious about which rocks we step on, because local villagers are quarrying them, and some of the larger boulders are in the process of being dislodged and readied for rolling down the mountain. Rock busting is the big business in this area, which is called Rock Village. Villagers climb into the hills and haul down bucket after bucket of rocks. Women sit under home-made shelters at the base of the mountain and use hammers to splinter the rocks into gravel, which is sold and used in roads and construction. It is hard work and as we look up the boulder-strewn hill sides, we can see about a dozen sweating shirtless men of varying ages working at the rocks. There is some smoke as well, and Phil explains that villagers sometimes bring tires up the mountain and set them afire at the base of large boulders to help clear the brush underneath and loosen them.

As we start up, Phil reminds us that these hills were the site of some major battles between the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (southern rebels) and the Sudanese military (Sudanese Armed Forces) from the north, and that there is still some unexploded ordnance and/or mines in the area. For that reason, he strongly recommends staying on established paths. A French hiker in our group would later find a large bullet casing.

We start up and a local rock worker tells us we should climb to the right. “They are bringing down a very large rock,” from the direction we are heading, he says. So we switch around to the right. We walk up narrow paths over gray and black rock, and through sometimes waist-high green grass. With the onset of the rains, the landscape is transforming from dry brown to lush green. “By August this grass will be over our heads,” someone says.

We do some mildly tricky climbing in places, up and down a few crevices and broad smooth rock faces, hanging onto tree branches, rock edges and outcroppings, whatever we can find for a hand-hold, but everybody makes it. At one point we rock climb past a dark cave full of small bats but they are sleeping so we don’t disturb them. When they are awakened, they fly out in bunches and bang into you but don’t bite, Phil says; we decide to let them alone. Near the top of the middle peak someone sees a decent-sized black snake slither into a crack in the rocks, but I missed it. Pythons and monkeys once lived up here but they apparently are now gone – probably eaten during the war. Locals like to say a French NGO (non-governmental organization) took all the pythons from Jebel back to France but Phil says he finds that unlikely.

Some fantastic views out over Juba from the peak on a beautiful clear morning, and we can see the Nile from up here. Phil points out where the new U.S. Embassy will be built, on a huge green field not too far from the mountain base. Construction is in the very early stages. Building it will cost in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars, but South Sudan is viewed by the U.S. government as a very important partner in East Africa, not only for its oil but also for strategic/security reasons.

On the trail down we pass a man under a tree butchering something, probably a goat, with a big knife. He smiles and holds up his knife and some glistening entrails as we walk by.

The Abyei Situation

The northern army last Saturday invaded a town in South Sudan and commenced an ethnic cleansing campaign that apparently involves encouraging Arab militias to burn and loot the homes of Dinka tribes peoples, pillaging United Nations food warehouses, and driving 70,000 people from their homes at the onset of annual torrential downpours and floods. It’s the start of the rainy season here, and when it rains, it doesn’t sprinkle, each storm is a violent atmospheric eruption. It feels like the house is being assaulted by fire hoses when it starts up. It storms cataclysmically now frequently, often around dusk, turning the streets to mud and mush. I can’t imagine wandering around outside in these rains with no food, no shelter, no place to go.

Some have said that General Bashir, the repressive dictator in Khartoum who has been indicted for genocide in Darfur by the U.N.’s International Criminal Court, seems intent on derailing South Sudan’s independence, which is now less than six weeks away. The town in question is Abyei, and both north and south have accused each other of transgressions there in the six years since the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed, ending 21 years of civil war. There are a couple of ebbing oil fields and some good pastures in and around Abyei, and the town has some strategic importance as a cross-roads to Darfur out west and to a number of important commercial hubs in the upper parts of South Sudan.

I’ve been interested in the reactions of South Sudanese people to the resurgent conflict in Abyei. Down here in Juba, there is resignation and weary head shaking, but no one I’ve spoken to wants to go to war again, even though thousands of people are being displaced – northern-allied militias are moving in and taking over people’s land and homes in Abyei, apparently, for good. Bashir seems to be viewed as a delusional northern relation who is tilting at windmills. The attitude in Juba is that Bashir and his militias can have Abyei – the South will soon have independence, and will exert control over 80% of all the oil produced in Sudan. Some South Sudanese have pointed out that men of Bashir’s ilk are falling like dominoes. Genocidal heads of state who (allegedly) pilfer billions in national revenue are currently in disfavor.

“Let him have it,” said one South Sudanese colleague of mine, in reference to Abyei. “After independence, Bashir will be removed from his office.”

“People here are done with wars,” said another colleague of mine over lunch. “He thinks he can bring us into war, but there is no interest. People want to have business, go to school. No one wants to go backwards.”

Today the president of South Sudan, Salva Kiir, addressed the nation about Abyei. “We will not return to the war again,” he said. “This is our policy and we will not waive it.”

He is hoping the United Nations can help. In the meantime, he’s preparing for independence on July 9, when South Sudan will become the world’s newest nation. Trash is starting to disappear from the side of the larger roads in town, and flowers and trees are being planted. The new airport terminals and parking lots are under construction, and new businesses are opening. Things are moving forward, though Abyei looms like a distant thunderhead.

Lost Boy's Dream

I am as far north in Southern Sudan as I've yet been. The place is called Aweil, the capital of Northern Bahr el Ghazal. The edge of Southern Darfur is not too far away, a little more to the north and west. Abyei, a disputed border town where army trucks were ambushed yesterday, is about seven hours up the road. I have been bumping around in a Land Cruiser meeting with harvesters and traders of gum acacia, also called gum arabic.

My organization is helping subsistence-level rural harvesters form collectives to pool their product and negotiate better prices with traders. Gum acacia is valuable and useful. It's an edible binder. You can find it in stamps, envelopes, Coca-Cola, M&Ms, gummy bears, edible cake sparkles, makeup, medicine, inks and paints, for starters. Sudan exports more gum acacia than any other country in the world. You can throw a rock in almost any direction here and hit an acacia tree.

It is the end of the day when I return to one of the office units in the compound to boot up my laptop, check email and write up notes. The only other occupant in the air-conditioned room is a quiet young Sudanese man named Santino Madut Akot, also working on a laptop. I met him earlier but didn't have a chance to speak with him. As the windows darkened we put work aside and he sketched a piece of the story of his life, speaking in impeccable English. He does not seem surprised that I am interested in interviewing him. By rights, he should be dead. Santino is one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, and he has returned.

The Lost Boys are famous in movies, books and magazines as the most severely war-traumatized children of our generation. Thousands of South Sudanese children were stolen, sold, enslaved, starved, shot, burned, tortured and raped during the atrocities that accompanied the Second Sudanese Civil War that broke out in the early 1980s. Those who escaped, like Santino, left their families and villages behind on foot, hiding in the bushes, driven out by Arab militias on horseback. Santino's village is about 75 km from our office. Arabs came to Marial Bai on horses in the dry seasons in 1985 and 1986, burning houses and crops, and taking cattle and children. In those two years, Santino and his family fled, returning in the rainy seasons when flooding prevented the militias from raiding. 1987 was worse, though. The Misseriya showed up in greater numbers, shooting, burning and destroying everything in their path.

"They took the boys as slaves to tend the cattle, and the girls were taken as concubines," Santino says. Remarkably (to me) there is no anger or emotion in his voice. It happened, there is no questioning or changing it. Still I ask him if, when he was a young child, he wondered why people from the north were killing people from the south. He does not remember thinking about it.

"They wanted to take over the land."

He ran into the bush in 1987, learning later that one of his half-sisters was put inside a tukol and burned to death. Another sister and an older brother were taken north as slaves. Santino joined a large group of children and a handful of adults walking away from the conflict areas. He walked east for three months, drinking water from muddy puddles, eating anything he could find. Sick, starving, around nine years old, he walked all the way to Ethiopia, where after a time, the U.N. helped establish a camp and brought food.

I've always wondered about the Lost Girls. The scanty references I've found online indicate that girls who were not stolen, enslaved or killed during the conflict were assimilated into other families in South Sudan and Ethiopia, whereas the boys were generally expected to fend for themselves or were forcibly conscripted.

Santino spent a couple of years in rough conditions at the refugee camp in Ethiopia until civil war broke out there, too. He walked back west to the border with Sudan, where Sudanese troops refused passage and shot at them. So they walked south to Kenya. Another refugee camp, Kakuma. Nearly 60,000 refugees lived there, including Ethiopians and Somalis. Not much to eat except what the UN handed out. He received a ration of flour to mix with water, some beans, oil and salt, and lived mostly on that for more than a decade, until he heard about the Lost Boys program, organized by the U.S. and the U.N., with help from big NGOs, and applied for it. It was his shot to get out of the camps and start a new life. The best thing about the camp at Kakuma was that the children were required to go to school, where he learned English. His application was selected and he was one of approximately 4,000 Lost Boys eventually airlifted to host communities in the U.S. By then he was in his 20s. He was given a new name, Santino, which he uses now.

Catholic Charities paid four months of rent for him at an apartment in Lincoln, Nebraska, and helped him get Food Stamps. He quickly found a factory job packaging chicken parts for Cook's Chickens in a refrigerated warehouse and began supporting himself. He applied to a community college and was accepted. He worked the graveyard shift wrapping chickens and got home at 4 a.m. to do homework. He heard about a good four-year college called Doane, applied and got in, quit the chicken job and worked part-time as a Dinka-language translator for the courts and social services department while earning a degree in public administration. (There is a large Sudanese diaspora community in Nebraska.) He applied for a job working in South Sudan for the World Food Programme in 2010 and then accepted a position at my company as a projects officer specializing in human resource development. Now he is helping the new Government of South Sudan establish protocols to build a foundation of professional government administrators. He conducts Power Point presentations, works with international consultants to convey best practices in human resources development and capacity building. He deals with computers, the internet and email, spreadsheets, pdf files, flip charts.

Santino says it feels good to be back, working to help his soon-to-be-independent country get a fresh start. "When I left, I left with nothing. And when I came back, I had something." He is married now, supporting a wife in Uganda. He is paying the school fees of the children of several family members whose parents don't have enough money. He is living in a tukol again, with friends.

His stolen sister and brother were recovered with help from a group called Christian Solidarity International, who tracked them down four years after they were taken, and paid ransoms for them. His mother is still alive, living in his home village. Of his six primary siblings, only one died - of an unknown disease, untreatable due to lack of medicine during the war.

His dream now is to start an orphanage. In Aweil, there are many street children - the sons and daughters of the thousands of returnees who have come back to South Sudan from Khartoum and other places in advance of the country's official independence. They get off buses with bundled foam bedding and sheets, furniture and bags of clothes, and park their belongings next to the train tracks waiting for opportunity to arrive.

Santino's voice gets even softer when he talks about the returnee kids he sees running around the dusty town.

"I want them to have a chance, as I had a chance," he said. "It would be a place to live. Attend school. Eat."

He is working on his plan.

Scary Animals in the Dark

I am doing late night laundry, having taken control of my own washing due to problems with well-intentioned but easily confused laundry ladies. It's late, after midnight. The TV in the living room is off; no one is up and about inside the house, except me. I take advantage of the dark in the kitchen to sneak a small chocolate Easter egg from the freezer on my way to the laundry room.

Unbelievable - the washing machine cycle is finally over. Try as I might, I cannot find a cycle that takes less than three hours to complete. I have pressed all the buttons and dials in varying combinations, to no avail, 2.5 hours later the thing is still spinning, rinsing, etc. Maybe it's broken. Anyway it's midnight and I started the laundry at 9 pm. We have no drier, so I venture outside to the clothes lines. (Editor's note: several weeks later I later I would discover a way to put on the washer for just 30 minutes.)

It's dark. I notice for the first time, that at night, our security guard from Warrior Security is joined by an actual soldier with a machine gun. He is sitting in his fatigues in a plastic chair with the gun across his lap, inside the locked, gated yard. The guard and the soldier are surprised to see me emerge from the front door with an armful of wet laundry at midnight. I nod and they wave. I make my way around the corner to a kind of alley between buildings on the compound, to the clothes lines. It's a little darker back here, and loud from the generators roaring, but I'm not worried - there is a guard and a soldier watching over the property. What is there to fear?

I am stretching to hang up some pants and socks when I see numerous black-and-white animals dart underneath me from the grass. They come in low and fast from both sides and in front of me; behind me is a wall. There is nowhere for me to run and they are RIGHT BY MY BARE FEET. I can't grab the clothes line, it is not strong enough to hold my weight. Wild miniature pigs? Large African rats? I see little eyes gleaming in the dim light and almost yell out, begin backing up with wet pants held defensively in front of me when I realize it's just the compound's bunny rabbit family. But it's still a little scary - they're kinda close to my bare feet, hopping about. They do have teeth.

Someone at the house bought rabbits just for fun a while back, and now there are about five or six of them on the grounds. My house mate feeds them kale, leftover carrots etc., but she has been on vacation and I think they thought I was out there to feed them and came running over like a pack of ravenous hyenas. I step warily around them and go back in, waving goodnight to security.

25 Minutes to Bor

Another flight into the field. I am picked up early and head to the airport with four colleagues. This time it's a charter plane and we are able to skirt the terminal and walk straight out onto the tarmac.

"Does anyone know what plane we're looking for?" asks our leader, a senior advisor.

"I think it's got a T on it," someone says. "From the e-mail."

We figure it out quickly, because only a handful of the small planes we are walking toward look like they are preparing to take off - it's a red and white Cessna single-prop with a fuel line attached to one wing. We climb in and I get the seat directly behind the pilot, who materializes suddenly, climbing up a little ladder and putting a leather bag stuffed with bug spray, Marlboros and folded maps next to herself in between the seats.

Some guys finish fueling up the plane, which is tight but comfy, and without fuss, comment or instruction to us of any kind, our lone pilot switches on the engine and pulls out. In fact she has not even shut the door on her side of the cockpit; she is steering with her right hand and hanging onto the door with her left.

We pause to let a big World Food Programme plane launch, and finally she shuts the door.

"Twenty-five minutes to Bor," she says to us, before hitting the accelerator. She sounds German to me, but I learn later that she is a Bulgarian who grew up in Ethiopia.

Bor is in Jonglei State, north of Juba, where my company is being encouraged to expand. It's just a day trip, and I've been told some important government officials will be at a local university to initiate a training in which we're involved. I take a reporter pad and camera.

On the way there we fly over some interesting terrain - savanna and woodland, a lonely mountain, and swamps - big green swamps laced by snaking silver tributaries of the Nile. I look closely but cannot see wildlife in either the woods or the water, though we're not flying very high.

We land in Bor, another dirt airstrip with no actual building. Hop into a Land Cruiser and straight to the South Sudan Hotel. We park under a tree and order coffees, and tea and scrambled eggs. We are early for the big event at the university. Now a group of about six, we discuss land reform in Zimbabwe, the uprising in Yemen, the differences between typhoid and malaria, and order a second helping of some good fresh bread.

Later I attend the event and am impressed by the governor, who is the most important of the VIPs present and who is referred to as His Excellency. I notice that he carefully inspects the label on a soda bottle while some of the other VIPs are speaking. He is a big man and takes his time standing up and greeting us. He is the only person without prepared remarks, and he speaks for nearly 30 minutes, riveting the audience of 50 local government administrators present for training.

He notes that millions of their family members and friends were killed in war so that their people could govern themselves. That South Sudan has needed help from other countries to obtain enough food, recover and rebuild, and will need more help to get organized as a new nation. It is time to repay the world.

 "You have come to get knowledge of a new way of doing things," he says. "The most important element is the human element."

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.

The White Nile

4.30.11

We are jouncing toward the White Nile river in a Land Cruiser, entering a part of the city that is new to me. I have not yet seen the river, arguably the most famous in the world, up there with the Amazon, the Euphrates. What else is in its league - the Ganges, the Yangtze, the Danube? Anyway I'm excited. Most famous or not, it is definitely the world's longest, at 4,130 miles, and it flows northward right through Juba up to Khartoum, then through Egypt and out to the Mediterranean. I've been told there are some nice resorts on the river banks, so I'm surprised when we turn down a dusty dirt road into a run-down area. Goats galore. Soon I can see the tops of huge dark-green trees clustering together, and I know we are getting close to the river. First we drive through the poorest-looking place I have seen in my first few weeks here.

Here, homes are built from sticks, scraps of plastic bags, cardboard, newspapers and bed sheets. I see some shredded UN-issued blue tarps used as roofs. Most of the places are crooked stick-built lean-tos. There are small cookfires, discarded tires and car parts, trash piles, thousands of flattened water bottles and other debris, the ubiquitous yellow jerrycans for collecting water. Naked dirt-covered children. A lady has spread some things out for sale - I can't quite see what but it looks like a half-dozen cans of something. We drive past a tiny boy wandering naked with tears streaking his dusty face. He could be hungry, lost - or it could be that the two older children nearby won't let him play with them. I see my first herd of cattle, driven by a man holding a stick toward the river. Almost all of the cattle have magnificent long curving horns. There is no factory farming around here, so the horns are left alone. Cattle are a food source but are chiefly important as currency and are highly prized.

Our destination is the Oasis Resort. We get through the shanty town and are there. Past security and some thatch-roofed bars, down to a patio with umbrellaed dining tables, and there is the legendary river. Gray-brown water flows strongly past us occasionally carrying broken tree branches. It is a long way to the lush banks on the other side, the east side of the river - a couple of football fields wide at least. We are beneath a canopy of the tallest mango trees I have ever seen. The river bank on this side is lined with huge mango trees and we can smell the tangy rot of fallen fruit in the knotted roots around us. These mangoes are small, no bigger than tennis balls. I can see bunches of them dangling from long stems 200 feet above us.

I watch closely for crocs but my companions say this part of the river is too busy for them. The water is also too murky to see fish, though they are there. I ate fried Nile perch recently at a good South Sudanese restaurant called Mama Zara in the center of town. Here, I order goat masala biryani with butter naan and walk down to the end of the patio. I see the rusted hull of an enormous wrecked barge sticking up at a 45-degree angle from a small island in the river, but few other boats. Upstream, I can see a little muddy beach. Locals are bathing, doing their laundry, filling up jerrycans. Kids are playing, splashing, running around in the water. Someone is washing a motorcycle and a truck, which have been driven into the water. People have spread laundry nearby to dry on rocks and bushes.

Hundreds of miles north, in Khartoum, the White Nile is joined by its largest tributary, the Blue Nile, whose source is in Ethiopia. The White Nile gets its name from its habit of flooding and filling with silts at certain times of year, which it deposits during overflows, enriching the soil and making it productive for growing. The area near the river seems a perfect spot for a permaculture project. Plenty of good fertilizer from cattle and goats; tall mature fruit trees and smaller short-lived trees (papayas); abundant water; people with not enough to eat but some knowledge of subsistence farming. Maize and rice can grow here.

Another Westerner with an overly simplified view of things? But weirder ideas for advancement are under consideration - like redesigning South Sudan's cities into animal shapes. Juba would be rebuilt in the shape of a rhinoceros, with its major thoroughfare constituting the rhino's horn. The city of Wau would have a giraffe template, and so on. Food for thought.

Nadir and Tim Join Juba Airport All-Stars

I ask the driver to take me to the Living Waters Orphanage on the other side of town. There is a tiny pitch there where my ex-pat soccer team meets after work. The orphanage has one of the few partial-grass playing pitches in Juba, though it's very small and mostly dirt and rocks. When we pull through the gate, a hundred \South Sudanese kids are running around, more than I've ever seen there, before. I smell bread baking, and see people milling about near the kitchen - some kind of meal night, maybe?

Though I'm late, I'm the first and only expat to arrive and my driver is uncertain about leaving me there alone. I tell him not to worry, hop out and shake some kids' hands. Some kids are playing soccer; they are very good. A couple of the younger ones (8 or 9 year olds?) played with us last week and were better, barefoot, then some of the adults on my team. Seriously good. Forty years of war but there is still football.

I wait around for 10 minutes after my driver leaves but don't see any of my teammates, nor can I find the guy who runs the place. I sought him out last week to find out about the orphanage. He brought me into his office and sat me down, formally, and told me its history. It has been there for 30 years and started as a home for kids whose parents were killed in the fighting. Now it's a refuge for children whose parents can't or won't take care of them due to alcoholism and/or other probs. The land and buildings are owned by the government but operations are privately funded. "We have some friends," he told me. The place is pretty run down though.

Looks like my guys aren't coming so I start hiking back home when one of my team-mates, Nadir, a Lebanese contractor, pulls up in his silver SUV. Nadir tells me Juba now is like Paris compared to a year ago, when there were just a couple of Kenyan cooking huts and no paved roads in town. Today there are Indian, Ethiopian, Chinese, Kenyan and South Sudanese restaurants, along with a brick-oven pizza place and a number of decent hotels with swiming pools and well-stocked bars. Recently an ice cream shop opened up.

We're driving toward my compound, both a little bummed about none of our guys showing up to play this evening, when we see a group of tall Juba kids in uniform playing on a sloping dirt patch across the street from the airport.

Nadir wants to try to play with them, and I'm up for it, though I can see they are all big young studs, not a player under six feet tall -- and they are very good, playing a fast-paced game of two-touch keepaway, tucked shirts vs. untucked shirts. We find the coach and ask if we can join and presto, we're in the tight grid, about 10v10 now. It's lightening paced, pinball keepaway, backheels and tricks galore but also some inspired one-touch combination passes, Barcelona-style tika-taka. Nadir and I hold our own though it's hard for us to tell who's who because some of the tucked guys have come untucked. We play about 30 minutes at a frenetic pace and when the coach calls time, it seems as if every single one of them wants to shake hands with us. I guess they don't have foreigners pop into practice all that often.

We are the Airport All-Stars, the coach tells us. We play every night. You play with us.

 We'll come tomorrow, we say.

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  

UNMIS Dust Storm

4.24.11

I work all of Easter Sunday editing a big report. By 6 pm I am ready to escape the compound and get some air. What to do? Get in the Land Cruiser and drive to someone else's compound, of course. There's supposed to be an expat Ultimate Frisbee game at UNMIS - the United Nations Mission in Sudan. I played an Ultimate game my second night in town and did ok by keeping my throws short and employing an inelegant and loud yet effective two-handed clamper catch. I didn't want to be the new guy who drops the Frisbee, so I made extra sure with the clamper.

We climb down from the big Land Cruiser at the muddy entrance to UNMIS. This place is big and guarded, home to several thousand UN peacekeepers. We hand in our IDs at the front gate and put packs through a metal detector. Then start the long walk on flat dirt roads to the playing fields.

We get there - two Americans and a Brit, but no one else for Frisbee. In the distance we see some Bangladeshi soldiers wearing red and white gym uniforms enthusiastically playing volleyball together - there appear to be 25 to 30 of them on each side of the net, and they are having a good time. I was here last week at sundown when three Bangladeshi soldiers came outside to lower flags while one of them played a mournful military tune that sounded a lot like Taps. All of the Frisbee players stopped and stood at attention facing the flags while the bugler played.

I ask why there are so many Bangladeshis - the UN peackeeping forces are supposed to be from different countries, right? My companions shrug. Apparently it's Bangladesh's turn to pony up a bunch of peacekeepers for Sudan. There are more than 10,000 UN soldiers in Sudan, some posted in the troubled area that will become the new border between Sudan and Southern Sudan in July, when Southern Sudan officially becomes independent. Many are out in Darfur.

No Ultimate game - canceled for Easter but we didn't get the e-mail in time. So we take a walk around a dirt exercise track hugging the perimeter of the embanked, fortified compound. There are tall towers made out of canvass blocks filled with earth every couple hundred yards, manned by helmeted Bangladeshis holding machine guns. Coils of concertina wire spreading out in all directions.

My companions know each other well and I am new, so they do most of the talking between themselves. I have uninteresting questions that  no one wants to answer.

Do you guys know what kind of tree that is?

No.

It looks like a sea grape tree, but I'm sure it's not.

Polite pause before resuming their conversation.

Any idea what's on the other side of the bunkers?

Umm.....Sudanese landscape?

We see rain coming. The wind changes and we are a good ways from the sheltered entrance. A pair of 10-wheeled white-and-black UN tanks beep at us as they roll by. Fat drops fall and dust and small rocks sting our bare legs. Ahead of us the wind begins picking up curtains of dirt and sand from everywhere and blowing it across our path. We cover our faces with our shirts, turn our backs to the blasting dust and start running just before the rain begins dumping in buckets. We make for a thatched-roof bar with cheery Christmas lights ahead a hundred yards or so, and scramble inside. To my delight, Arsenal vs. Bolton is on a big flat-screen TV. We tuck into some Kenyan lagers and wait out the storm.

Hash Race

I decide to participate in a foot race organized by the Juba chapter of the International Hash House Harriers. Hash members refer to themselves as a "drinking club with a running problem." The goal is to run a little and then drink a lot of beer. There are Hash clubs in nearly every major city on every continent.

The meeting spot for this Hash is at a hotel called Asante just down the dirt road and on the other side of one of the few tarmac roads from my company's residential compound. It is the first time that I venture alone on foot outside my concrete-walled, iron-gated, razor-wired, 24-hour guarded residence. I am a little nervous. There is much emphasis on protection of expats here, though no one I've queried so far is readily able to remember any expats ever getting hurt in Juba. What do I know? I've only been here for a week, I feel I should have a little fear.

The guy in charge of organizing this race is called Fucktard. Hashers are christened with a nickname and then drowned in beer upon completion of their fifth race. There are about 40 of us milling about in the hotel's open courtyard. Lanky Scandinavians, Brits, Americans and Canadians, and Africans from different neighboring countries - Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia.

I understand why our leader is called Fucktard as soon as he opens his mouth. He impatiently gathers us in a large circle around himself and demands to know if there are any first-time Hashers present. I can guess what's coming but step forward anyway, along with a young Dutch woman in grey sweatpants, two skinny young African women, and a stocky British guy. Fucktard makes each of us tell the group our name, what brought us to Juba, what country we're from, and why we are at the Hash. He tells the British guy that he looks dumb and expresses doubt that he can successfully answer all the questions. He skips over one of the young African women because she does not speak English. My guess is that Fucktard gets punched in the face a lot when out drinking.

We start the race. The trail is marked ahead of time by a pair of pre-ordained "hares" whose job is nominally to lead but also to confuse Hashers with the occasional false trail. Eager competitive types are penalized in the race - if they are the first to reach a spot on the trail marked with a chalk circle, they must run to the back of the pack, find the slowest runner and tag them. This is designed to keep slow runners from becoming demoralized or lonely, and to keep fast runners working harder than everyone else.

One of my reasons for running this race is to get out of the protected compound environment and see what Juba streets look like. The trail takes us down pitted, rutted dirt roads, copper-brown sandy soil with deep mud puddles filling in the car and truck tracks. Bamboo, tin and mud shacks on either side of us; small goats in tall weeds; dogs, ducks and chickens. There is also a huge amount of trash everywhere. The government does not have the trash system figured out yet. Piles of it are everywhere, some burning, filling the air with a not unpleasant smokiness. There are flattened plastic water bottles, flattened aluminum soda cans, shards of ripped up plastic shopping bags EVERYWHERE, bottle tops and blown-out sandals and shoes in the streets.

Tall people (the Dinka and Nuer tribes people are among the tallest people in the world) turn to watch our strange assortment of mostly white people running in a pack through their neighborhoods. It occurs to me that one of the few times that locals will see expats out on the streets by themselves is during the Hash races, and how odd it must seem, with the two Hares in the lead shouting "On-On!" repeatedly, women in tights, guys with floppy hats and shorts splashing through mud puddles, stopping to examine chalk signs in the road, running this way and that.

We are regarded with a mix of amusement and interest. Children are the most curious - many of them run along with us barefoot shouting "Morning! Morning!" and squealing - they can tell something fun is going on. I can't stop myself from shouting "Morning! Morning!" back to them, looking back at them, waving and giving lots of thumbs up signs. It isn't morning, but "Morning!" has become a standard greeting by local kids to Westerners here.

We run through a subdivision of shacks - grids marked out by cut up tree fences, some empty grassy lots. There is some house building going on out here. A man is running power tools with a generator, working so hard he doesn't even look up to see 40 foreigners running down the muddy street in front of his home. Not much flora or fauna to describe. Papaya trees, acacia trees, jacarandas. I am surprised to see no vegetable plots. One one fence I see a dusty loofa vine. Ditches filled with muddy trashy water. There is no public water system and a very spotty, limited electric grid. Pit latrines and boreholes with handpumps for water. There is a campaign to stop people from defecating in the open.

I finish in third place, behind the two hares. The run was about five miles, and I am rewarded with a warm Tusker beer, brewed in Kenya. Fucktard gathers us up again and commences some drinking games that involve singing and require me and the other new Hashers to stand in the middle of the circle and answer more questions. I chit chat with a Canadian woman and talk to someone who runs a group called Confident Children Out of Conflict; they run a day center for homeless kids here. They are looking for sponsors for kids who want to go to school but can't afford it.

I jog back to the compound and settle in again in my womb like environment.

Entering Juba

4.13.11

530 am

For the final leg of my trip, to Juba, I'm flying out of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi. I get checked in and through Customs with enough time to look in a couple gift shops. In surveying cool-looking travelers, I have noticed that the carabiners I clipped onto my carry-on backpack, in hopes of looking like a rugged and experienced action man ready for anything, such as having to rappel down an airport wall, are quite wimpy compared to other people's carabiners, which are huge and scraped up, and actually used-looking. Mine are the cheapo kind people buy at gas stations to attach to key chains.  Theirs look like they get hooked to steel cables that pull Land Rovers out of mud pits.

On my company’s extensive briefing sheet for South Sudan, under the “things to bring” section, a bandana or a scarf for the dry season is recommended, apparently because it can get very dusty. It is the ONE thing I didn’t bring. I picture myself going Arab style with a white-and-red checked scarf. I actually find one in a store, but it’s as big as a bed sheet and I can’t picture wrapping the thing around my face - the volume of leftover fabric would mummify me. I also wonder about the wisdom of dressing in Arabic fashion in a place where Arabs and tribal Africans have been fighting with machine guns for 40 years. So I settle for a smaller one that’s only as big as a table cloth. In a dust storm with my tiny carabiners and large scarf, I should be ready for all contingencies.

The flight to Juba is full of people in business suits, young African men and women with BlackBerries, Android phones and laptops. Definitely some relief and development types too. There are some Chinese business guys. The man next to me is reading something on his Kindle. The flight is short and uneventful. As we descend into Juba, I catch a glimpse of the very wide, muddy Nile River and look closely for herds of large animals, a squirrel – anything.  But am disappointed. As we roll down the tarmac towards a shabby main building, I see some bright yellow and white-and-blue U.N. helicopters and planes. A few soldiers in fatigues with guns.

In the grass behind the U.N. aircraft is a chain-link fence topped with razor wire, but the fence has some gaps/open gates in it, and I see a few mud huts topped with conical thatched roofs, called “tukuls” on the airport grounds. People are living  in here, inside the airport landing area?

Outside, an unsmiling South Sudanese man holding a TIM MAY sign nods when I walk up expectantly, and leads me to a large white Land Cruiser with a 10-foot high black antenna mounted on the right side of the hood. He loads my bag into the back.

I will take you to the compound now, he says.

The tall antenna wobbles as we leave.

Are You Peter May?

4.12.11

5:15 a.m.

Getting ready to land in Nairobi. Glorious aisle seat. I watch "Conviction" with Hilary Swank and almost cry in spots. I am exhausted and emotionally raw from missing Tahra and the girls. The anxiety, stress and excitement of traveling into the unknown is taking its toll. A diaper commercial now would wreck me.

My little video screen shows the path of my plane. Exotic locations are in the vicinity, underneath and east and west of me - places I've heard of but only in the newspaper, books and movies. There is Mombasa, Khartoum, Kilimanjaro, Mogadishu, Addis Ababa. It's not marked but it looks like the plane is flying south along the Nile. We're over Sudan, the biggest country in Africa. To get to the south part of Sudan we have to fly south past it, to Nairobi. There are a few international flights into Juba, from Kampala and Addis Ababa, Cairo maybe? But no direct flights from Europe, so I have to fly into Nairobi and then backtrack north up to Juba on a Kenya Airways flight.

We land in Nairobi and I obtain a transit visa and clear immigration easily after waiting in line for a while behind some laborers. My bag comes out quickly downstairs and I head outside where a phalanx of drivers, maybe 50 or more, are waiting, many of them holding up white signs with people's names on them. I see one that says MAY and under it, "Palacina." I stride confidently up.

Hi I'm Tim May going to the Sankara Hotel, right?

Yes please come with me sir. Takes my bag and we hustle outside to a nice SUV parked conveniently close by.

Not much to see on the road from the airport. People driving very dangerously. Herds of men crossing the road in chaotic lurches, trying to avoid cars and trucks. It is morning rush hour and hundreds of people are walking along the airport road, heading to jobs in the industrial part of town out by the airport. Many people are well dressed, slacks and dress shirts, the women in colorful dresses. We hit a bad traffic jam closer to the city and wait in bumper-to-bumper for 30 minutes when my driver, Luiz, who is an Arsenal fan, gets a call. He speaks rapidly in Swahili and then pauses and holds the phone to his chest.

Excuse me sir are you Peter May?

No I'm Tim May.

More rapid Swahili, now in apologetic tone into the phone and Luiz hangs up.

I am sorry but I must turn around.  I am supposed to pick up Mr. Peter May and he is waiting at the airport.

Can you just take me to the hotel and then go back, or can you send another driver for the other guy?

No I am sorry, there is no other driver. I must go back. If your driver is not there I will take you back into Nairobi.

We make a crazy U-turn out of the traffic over a dirt median onto a ramp, turn around and drive even faster, now, back to the airport. I can tell Luiz is worried. I may have cost him is job - but then I DID tell him I was TIM MAY. I should have asked him why the sign he held said Palacino on it.

I am worried, too. It is now about two hours after I landed, what are the chances my actual driver will still be waiting? Slim I thought.

We careen back to the airport and Mr. Peter May and I meet and have a good chuckle. He works for a French bank and has a sense of humor about me stealing his car. My driver is still there, too, politely standing almost alone, now, holding a very nice printed sign that says MR. TIM MAY, very clear for all to see. His name is Nicklaus, a Man U fan, and he is understanding about the pickup debacle.

He gets me safely into town, pointing out some things along the way. The guards at the hotel use a mirror on a long stick to look for bombs under our truck before they let us drive through.

I'm in Africa.

Going Dutch

4.11.11

10 p.m. Atlanta to Amsterdam

Tight squeeze onto monster KLM jet. People all around speaking many different languages. I recognize German, maybe some Arabic. For the first time on this trip I feel like a stranger. I find my seat and am dismayed to learn I will be sandwiched in the middle for the nearly 9-hour flight to Holland, where I will make the connection to Kenya. There is a trim little old man with silver hair and a tweed blazer in the aisle seat. When I excuse myself and apologize for needing to get by, he looks up but doesn't move, and I realize he does not speak English.

Is he Turkish? Albanian? Each of his movements is precise and slow the way people move in bed after surgery. When I squeeze past, he silently motions toward the luggage racks. When I tell him I will put my bag under the seat in front of me, he shrugs barely, lifts the palms of his hands in acceptance.

I find Black Swan on the movie screen and poke it. When Nina begins masturbating in her bedroom, I wonder about airplane movie etiquette. There is a 30-ish woman with braids immediately to my left, but I dare not look to see if she is viewing the sex on my screen, a mere 24 inches or so from her face. The little man, however, has definitely noticed. He begins flapping his lapels back and forth. I hear throat clearances and some shifting around in his seat. I hope that Nina will be finished soon and ponder ending the video. Maybe I can find some Everyone Loves Raymond.

I disembark in Amsterdam into the giant Lego environment of Schiphol Airport. I have instructions to find a place called "Yotel" inside the airport, a hotel where I can grab a shower and few hours of sleep during the long layover before my Kenya flight. I find it easily, register, and get a swipe card to get in.

My Yotel room is modeled on Japanese "capsule" or micro-hotels and is smaller than my bathrom at home. The bed is on the floor, under a low overhang. A small, light-weight desk folds out from the wall across from the door, and I can touch the door and the wall opposite, at the same time with my arms stretched. I can almost reach the toilet from bed. The chair for  the desk is actually a tiny stool that folds up and hangs from the knob of the door. It is a little claustrophobic, but I take a shower and sleep about two hours.

I video Skype home from the Yotel -- my first time using Skype outside of home in Key West -- and am relieved it works and that I can see everyone - they're doing great in New York, but have colds. I pack up and prepare for the next leg, Amsterdam to Nairobi. Grab some sushi and coffee and find my plane at gate F1, a Kenya Airways Boeing 777, black, red and green with "The Pride of Africa" emblazoned on one the side.
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I cannot understand most of the languages at the gate. Africans in business suits, some white Europeans with backpacks probably headed on safari. It is 4,153 miles to Nairobi. We will have to fly either over or around Libya, where NATO is dropping bombs, to get there. Here we go.