The first change I noticed upon returning to Juba after the country's triumphant independence on July 9th was the giant new luggage X-ray machine inside the chaotic old baggage room at the airport. It used to be that upon disembarking, people would crowd around a hole in a side wall and wait for the bags to be handed from a pickup truck. Then you would take your suitcase to a soldier with a machine gun and watch as he disinterestedly shoved your clothing around before dismissing you. Now, however, there is a giant metal box through which all incoming baggage is screened. A tall woman seated at a small table sits next to the box watching a video monitor. A couple of airport guys then hand the suitcases up to an L-shaped, high wooden counter, crowded three-to-four deep with mostly very large men in suits waiting to grab their bags. I successfully retrieved mine by wrestling my way up front and wedging myself sideways within reaching distance of the counter. One of the other passengers, much taller, eyeballed me suspiciously as I lunged and yanked my second heavy suitcase off the counter, making a ripple in the pool of waiting people. The tall man asked loudly "He has TWO?!" but no one else seemed to care, and I left my quizzical fellow traveler in the dust and rolled for the exit.
Outside I got a close-up view of the new airport terminal under construction next door. Arching metal roofs, steel buttresses flying this way and that, a lot of tall, tinted glass windows facing out on the city. It looks like a real airport terminal. There is also a large new outdoor waiting area under a newly built pavilion with benches and a proper roof. And across the street are vast new parking lots with properly graded and smoothed grounds, still under construction. Up the main tarmac road to my company’s guesthouse, I was astonished to see that tall metal, solar-powered street lights have been installed in the medians, traffic lines have been painted on the roads, and thousands of tiny colored flowers (along with some garish large plastic roses) have sprouted up. They have even strung wire between the new lamp posts in the curbed medians to prevent humans, trucks and motorbikes from randomly slashing across them to make dangerous U-turns. What’s more, the city has been cleaned! Where are the water bottles, the blown-out flip-flops, deflated tires, broken billboards, floating scraps of plastic bags and smoldering heaps of trash? They are gone – at least on the main roads. Even the watery ditches on the side of the roads are cleared of debris – what have they done with my Juba?
My driver that afternoon is now a proud new citizen of the new Republic of South Sudan. He seems happy and relaxed. He told me the celebrations were wonderful, people filled the streets draped in their new national flag, soldiers hugged civilians. There was no trouble in the capital and, aside from the PA system breaking down temporarily at the start of the big formal ceremony in the stadium, everything went smoothly.
As I rode up the road on the second Sunday after independence, Juba looked quiet, calm and restful. I saw people sitting with their backs to their shacks and storefronts, children playing in earth swept clean. It was done. After centuries of oppression, 21 years of the most brutal conflict in the history of modern warfare, the loss of more than two million South Sudanese lives – somehow, these strong people not only survived – they prevailed. They kept their oil. They will grow their own food. They will open embassies and consulates around the globe. They will have a seat in the UN in New York. They will compete in the Olympics.
On Monday, in my office, I asked about the national anthem and a colleague in the cubicle next to me, a South Sudanese man with a specialty in livelihoods, stopped typing, turned to face me and sang it loudly from memory in a deep, rolling, pitch-perfect voice full of reverence. “My favorite is the part about the martyrs,” he said when he was done.
I didn’t even know he could sing.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Juba-Nairobi-Amsterdam-Atlanta-Key West-Atlanta-White Plains-Chatham-New Paltz-Woodstock-Manhattan-Albany-Detroit-Amsterdam-Nairobi-Juba
I am back in Juba after a good long trip home to see Tahra and the girls. When I had to leave, Gryffyn’s tear-riddled cheeks in the airport caused a huge lump to materialize in my chest. She knows I’ll be back, though she doesn’t understand clearly why I’m leaving again, and while mom wins in most departments, I tickle better.
The stone in my gorge accompanied me through security undetected and dropped into my gut when I sat down at my gate, alone. I didn’t know it then but another extra burden would be the source of some anxiety for me in Nairobi. I had a good many kilos of other people’s stuff with me in my checked baggage, necessitating an extra (second) full-size suitcase, and though I remembered something about weight limitations on Juba flights, I chose not to dwell on it when packing. Whilst in the States, an Ethiopian colleague who works in remote Northern Bahr el Ghazal desperately requested that I pick up an iPad for him. (I wouldn’t have done it for just anyone but he is a trustworthy friend and I may be crashing at his apartment in Addis Ababa sometime soon.) Also, a Juba co-worker had her mom mail me a box of noodles and granola bars from somewhere in the mid-west. (Couldn’t say no, she cc’s me on email whenever something fun is going on.) And headquarters asked me to carry back a sack of mail that included serious correspondence along with a book about how to make cocktails. All the extras went into my luggage, along with work equipment, clothes, toiletries and fancy food items for me including bags of dried papaya and mango, tamari-soaked almonds, and salted cashews and pumpkin seeds. My Juba larder is larger thanks to all that good stuff, which I got at the Chatham Real Food Market Co-Op, an awesome local-food supporting establishment that Tahra’s step-dad Seth Rockmuller helped start in Chatham, NY.
Despite the misery of parting, what a great trip, and what a relief to squeeze and smell my two daughters when I arrived. Words cannot describe the feeling when I heard their high-pitched squeals and saw them sprint at me like hungry little cheetahs in the baggage room, and then saw my beautiful wife smiling and sparkle-eyed, hands in pockets and long hair whooshing around her as she strode fast through the sliding glass doors to me. The world was whole again.
Loads of fun in Key West. Dinner out with the Hamiltons and their kids at Salute on the beach, where all four Mays slurped our favorite buttery mussels, and another supper out at Geiger Key Marina with Randy, Ellen and our quintet of little humans. One afternoon, Narceline and Michel took the girls (who are in love with baby Julien) while Tahra and I biked to the Tropic to see Midnight in Paris. Then up to Chatham, NY by way of Atlanta and White Plains for a stay in Tahra’s old hometown in the Hudson Valley, a locavore’s paradise where Seth and Tahra’s mom Katharine live, along with grandma. Visits ensued to Seth’s side of the family in New Paltz for the SIXTY-FIFTH wedding anniversary of close relatives, and then to Woodstock to see old friends Liv, Will and Liam. Liv’s mom and sister, a former Norwegian supermodel, were both visiting too. It was a reunion for the girls and Liam, whom they regard as half brother, half action hero.
We squeezed in a weekend in Manhattan, too, at the West Side apartment of Seth's sister Ellen and her husband Joel. Their place looks over Broadway and has views across the Hudson straight over to my old stomping grounds, Edgewater and Cliffside Park, in New Jersey. We had hotdogs and pretzels in Central Park, took the kids to their first ever marionette show, road the subway, took cabs, and had a Japanese barbeque dinner out with Tahra's brother Ben, who later showed us the view from the top of his skyscraping Midtown apartment, from which you can see the Hudson AND East rivers. You could also practically touch the gargoyles on the Chrysler Building from his rooftop. Tahra's cousins David, Anna and Tavi, all young city dwellers, stopped by to play with the girls. It was my first time back to Manhattan in a decade, and Tahra's aunt and uncle were perfect hosts, gracious and loving.
While in Chatham we got to see Emily Houk, Tahra’s recently matriculated sister and the girls’ favorite aunt. Emily is a crafter of fine things, including the stuffed Totoro and sprite sitting on our couch in Key West. Like her mother, she could make a fortune with her fingers if she wanted. And I finally got to meet Emily’s boyfriend, Jedediah Berry. I am reading Jed’s critically acclaimed first novel The Manual of Detection http://www.thirdarchive.net/book.html on my Kindle right now. I’m only a quarter of the way through but it’s a fantastic read - ominous and sly -- and puts me in mind of Magritte and Ray Bradbury. (Jed if you read this I swear I came up with that before I saw the reviews.) When your first book is fawned over by The New Yorker, and your writing is compared to Kafka and Paul Auster, you know you’re doing ok. Not only that, but Jed, who turns out to be a great guy, beat all of us at Balderdash one night after the kids went to sleep. I came in last, unable to bamboozle anyone with my made-up definitions except Tahra, once, and I think it was actually a sympathy vote.
To get back to Juba I had to go Albany to Detroit, then Amsterdam to Nairobi, where I discovered that I was 20 kilos overweight with my luggage for the last leg of my trip, the Juba flight. A friendly Kenyan baggage man at the airport spotted me before I checked in, and whispered that I should ask the guy sitting next to me, who only had a carry-on, if he would agree to check my second suitcase as his own. I furtively inquired, and the other passenger gave me a good look while he thought about it. We were both wondering if this was ok to do and whether either of us could get arrested. I played it cool, like it was no big deal either way, and the guy shrugged - he was game for a little luggage caper. Later, as I walked toward Customs with both of my big suitcases successfully checked, the helpful baggage man materialized again.
“I just saved you one hundred dollars in fees,” he said quietly and expectantly, which may have been true. I thanked him, gave him my last 200 Kenyan shillings and got on the plane, wondering what changes I would find upon landing in a country just seven days old - the infant Republic of South Sudan.
The stone in my gorge accompanied me through security undetected and dropped into my gut when I sat down at my gate, alone. I didn’t know it then but another extra burden would be the source of some anxiety for me in Nairobi. I had a good many kilos of other people’s stuff with me in my checked baggage, necessitating an extra (second) full-size suitcase, and though I remembered something about weight limitations on Juba flights, I chose not to dwell on it when packing. Whilst in the States, an Ethiopian colleague who works in remote Northern Bahr el Ghazal desperately requested that I pick up an iPad for him. (I wouldn’t have done it for just anyone but he is a trustworthy friend and I may be crashing at his apartment in Addis Ababa sometime soon.) Also, a Juba co-worker had her mom mail me a box of noodles and granola bars from somewhere in the mid-west. (Couldn’t say no, she cc’s me on email whenever something fun is going on.) And headquarters asked me to carry back a sack of mail that included serious correspondence along with a book about how to make cocktails. All the extras went into my luggage, along with work equipment, clothes, toiletries and fancy food items for me including bags of dried papaya and mango, tamari-soaked almonds, and salted cashews and pumpkin seeds. My Juba larder is larger thanks to all that good stuff, which I got at the Chatham Real Food Market Co-Op, an awesome local-food supporting establishment that Tahra’s step-dad Seth Rockmuller helped start in Chatham, NY.
Despite the misery of parting, what a great trip, and what a relief to squeeze and smell my two daughters when I arrived. Words cannot describe the feeling when I heard their high-pitched squeals and saw them sprint at me like hungry little cheetahs in the baggage room, and then saw my beautiful wife smiling and sparkle-eyed, hands in pockets and long hair whooshing around her as she strode fast through the sliding glass doors to me. The world was whole again.
Loads of fun in Key West. Dinner out with the Hamiltons and their kids at Salute on the beach, where all four Mays slurped our favorite buttery mussels, and another supper out at Geiger Key Marina with Randy, Ellen and our quintet of little humans. One afternoon, Narceline and Michel took the girls (who are in love with baby Julien) while Tahra and I biked to the Tropic to see Midnight in Paris. Then up to Chatham, NY by way of Atlanta and White Plains for a stay in Tahra’s old hometown in the Hudson Valley, a locavore’s paradise where Seth and Tahra’s mom Katharine live, along with grandma. Visits ensued to Seth’s side of the family in New Paltz for the SIXTY-FIFTH wedding anniversary of close relatives, and then to Woodstock to see old friends Liv, Will and Liam. Liv’s mom and sister, a former Norwegian supermodel, were both visiting too. It was a reunion for the girls and Liam, whom they regard as half brother, half action hero.
We squeezed in a weekend in Manhattan, too, at the West Side apartment of Seth's sister Ellen and her husband Joel. Their place looks over Broadway and has views across the Hudson straight over to my old stomping grounds, Edgewater and Cliffside Park, in New Jersey. We had hotdogs and pretzels in Central Park, took the kids to their first ever marionette show, road the subway, took cabs, and had a Japanese barbeque dinner out with Tahra's brother Ben, who later showed us the view from the top of his skyscraping Midtown apartment, from which you can see the Hudson AND East rivers. You could also practically touch the gargoyles on the Chrysler Building from his rooftop. Tahra's cousins David, Anna and Tavi, all young city dwellers, stopped by to play with the girls. It was my first time back to Manhattan in a decade, and Tahra's aunt and uncle were perfect hosts, gracious and loving.
While in Chatham we got to see Emily Houk, Tahra’s recently matriculated sister and the girls’ favorite aunt. Emily is a crafter of fine things, including the stuffed Totoro and sprite sitting on our couch in Key West. Like her mother, she could make a fortune with her fingers if she wanted. And I finally got to meet Emily’s boyfriend, Jedediah Berry. I am reading Jed’s critically acclaimed first novel The Manual of Detection http://www.thirdarchive.net/book.html on my Kindle right now. I’m only a quarter of the way through but it’s a fantastic read - ominous and sly -- and puts me in mind of Magritte and Ray Bradbury. (Jed if you read this I swear I came up with that before I saw the reviews.) When your first book is fawned over by The New Yorker, and your writing is compared to Kafka and Paul Auster, you know you’re doing ok. Not only that, but Jed, who turns out to be a great guy, beat all of us at Balderdash one night after the kids went to sleep. I came in last, unable to bamboozle anyone with my made-up definitions except Tahra, once, and I think it was actually a sympathy vote.
To get back to Juba I had to go Albany to Detroit, then Amsterdam to Nairobi, where I discovered that I was 20 kilos overweight with my luggage for the last leg of my trip, the Juba flight. A friendly Kenyan baggage man at the airport spotted me before I checked in, and whispered that I should ask the guy sitting next to me, who only had a carry-on, if he would agree to check my second suitcase as his own. I furtively inquired, and the other passenger gave me a good look while he thought about it. We were both wondering if this was ok to do and whether either of us could get arrested. I played it cool, like it was no big deal either way, and the guy shrugged - he was game for a little luggage caper. Later, as I walked toward Customs with both of my big suitcases successfully checked, the helpful baggage man materialized again.
“I just saved you one hundred dollars in fees,” he said quietly and expectantly, which may have been true. I thanked him, gave him my last 200 Kenyan shillings and got on the plane, wondering what changes I would find upon landing in a country just seven days old - the infant Republic of South Sudan.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Road Warrior
Musa is a young Maasai warrior-in-training from a village about 450 kms outside Nairobi. Today though, he has put aside his spear to make a few bucks as my driver, translator and shopping wingman while I’m in Nairobi on a 10-hour layover. I am embarking on the first of three scheduled “post rotation” trips home. In the middle of preparations to leave, I receive an unexpected bonus – my boss tells me to take an extra few weeks in the States due to mounting security problems in Sudan. It seems a relief worker recently was shot at during a drunken attempt to carjack her vehicle; also the northern army last week opened a new front on the border, invading and bombing Southern Kordofan in an attempt to push southern-aligned people out in advance of partition on July 9th. My company has cautiously decided to thin out the staff a bit during the buildup to independence, just in case.
A Kenyan colleague who works in our Nairobi office suggests I hire Musa to take me around. I meet him in the afternoon on Friday, after my flight gets in from Juba. Musa is about my height with a round face, short hair and a day’s worth of stubble. He is dressed for city work in jeans and a white polo and drives a silver four-door compact. My plan for the afternoon is to shop a couple hours, then have dinner at what is supposed to be a good Indian place, and get to the airport around 7 pm, about 3.5 hours ahead of my flight. Musa is affable and easy to talk to, and says it’s no problem. He knows I want to look for locally-made items and takes me to a store where crafts are hand-made by disabled Kenyans, who benefit from the shop’s sales. I had wanted to pick up presents in Sudan before leaving but could not find a gift-oriented market or any place selling arts/crafts of any kind, anywhere in Southern Sudan, except for one tiny shop in Juba called The Roots Project. The only toys I ever saw kids playing with were used rubber bike tires (rolled by stick-wielding boys up and down dirt roads), and once I saw two kids pulling small cars made from milk boxes with bottle cap wheels.
In Nairobi, though, at the store for disabled people, I find good stuff, including a bracelet made out of safety pins and green electrical wire and little animal pendants made out of scraps of Orange Fanta soda cans, for the kids. Musa next says he’ll take me to “Maasai Markets,” a big open-air crafts market that sets up in different parts of town on different days of the week. On the way there he apologizes for not wearing his traditional Maasai garb, which he sometimes does when driving Westerners around. He mutters a reason but I don’t catch it and tell him not to worry about it. We reach our next destination, which has the look and feel of an upscale mall in New Jersey. Big food court with stone fountains, tile flooring, recessed lighting, potted plants and flowers, plate glass store windows filled with expensive jewelry, watches, ceramics. Well-heeled Western, African and Asian clientele walking around sipping lattes and smoothies.
“This is the Maasai Market?” I ask, thinking maybe Musa decided I looked too much like a mall guy to take to a real market.
“It’s in the back,” he says.
There, behind the mall, an area about the size of a football field is packed with 500 vendors lined up in rows under a giant canvass roof, selling hand-made goods ranging from blankets and quilts, wood carvings and paintings, pottery and painted gourds, to jewelry, toys, bags, clothes, drums and wooden instruments – you name it. I go about two steps before a vendor reaches out to physically stop me, inviting me to look at his stuff. I politely demur but am pawed at gently and hopefully, again and again, by many merchants, and even followed around for a while by a guy who really wants to sell me a string of old magenta glass beads. He is tailing me and scribbling down figures on a tiny pad, scratching them out and then scribbling lower figures, tugging my forearm to get me to look at his pad but I keep walking. Musa is taking his cues from me. If someone gives me a price, I go through a process of asking them for “best price?” and they pretend to reflect seriously for a few seconds before citing a lesser amount; then Musa pretends to be staggered and asks in Swahili for the real best price and gets a couple hundred shillings knocked off, and then it’s my turn again. In the middle of our excursion the rain comes pouring down, and the tent leaks in many places, causing the vendors to whip out plastic sheets to cover their wares. Musa tells me the rain is not good for traffic.
I can only stand so much shopping even under the best of circumstances, so I’m done in less than an hour, after picking up two large pieces of brightly patterned fabric; a green antique glass bead necklace with a silver metal pendant; a toy helicopter made out of metal wire and yellow Tusker beer bottle caps and a toy snake made out of multi-colored soda bottle caps and painted wood. We boogie for the exit and the guy with the magenta beads is on me again with his pad for one last try. “Next time!” I tell him without making eye contact.
My flight out isn’t until 1030 and it’s too early to eat dinner, so I ask Musa just to take me to the airport, figuring I can grab a bite there with plenty of time to spare. Musa approves. “People panic when it rains, the roads are no good, it’s good to start early.”
It is 430 p.m. and only 15 kilometers to the airport, I remind myself repeatedly – NO WAY I CAN’T MAKE IT to the airport in the next five hours, right? But we are entering a traffic jam of biblical proportions. At one point, out of sheer desperation after inching forward about a quarter of a mile in three hours, I roll down my window to ask a driver on the left: “Would you mind backing up a few kilometers so we can get over to the left lane?” To which the driver responds: “Kilometers?” Eliciting an apology from me and the correct unit of distance, accompanied by my explanation: “I have to get to the airport,” to which the other driver would politely reply: “What time is your flight?” and amazingly back up a few meters, allowing us to complete a 20-point turn in bumper-to-bumper so we can eke sideways in front of him and around the tail of a giant bus belching diesel fumes straight into our non-air-conditioned car. At one point, we would briefly join a motorcade of diplomats in black Mercedes Benzes with bodyguards who jump out to threaten other drivers to move out of the way. The motorcade helps us move about 100 feet up a hill, but then the Mercedeses start going the wrong way up the highway on the opposite side from us, and we decide not to follow any more. Maybe we should have.
Steering one-handed through traffic that follows no actual pattern or regulation of any kind, and which seems to be actually worsened by the few police officials willing to stand in the rain to do anything, Musa explains that the source of the problem is the rain, which has caused apparently all of Nairobi’s six million inhabitants to leave work early, at once – combined with the horribly designed road system which involves a series of unregulated roundabouts, or traffic circles, which suck vehicles into a vortex from which there is no return. There is no way to get to the airport without going through the roundabouts, and there are six of them between us and the airport, Musa says.
As we inch forward over the next five hours, Musa receives upwards of 200 calls on his cell and successfully closes a rental deal involving a Somali friend and a landlord he knows in town. He uses his phone to wire some money to his dad, who lives in a house made of cow dung, soothes an angry client named Linda who requested a driver hours ago that Musa could not provide, and calls a cousin on the police force to find out a traffic captain is two roundabouts ahead, which means things should be flowing better up there, don’t worry. As I watch hours one, two, and three tick away on the dashboard clock, I go through various psychological stages. “Hey we’re moving again,” I observe joyfully after we move 10 feet during a good hour. I find some newspapers in the back of Musa’s car and Musa looks over my shoulder for a while, reading along with me as we sit in traffic. We converse about Bin Laden’s demise and Musa shares a story about a terrible cow-eating lion back home named Osama.
Musa entertains me by finding radio stations that conduct “gotcha” phone call setups with men cheating or willing to cheat on their wives and then by outlining what it takes to become a Maasai warrior (he makes it sound easy, noting he’ll have to spend time surviving alone in the mountains, demonstrate to elders that he’s never turned his back to run from someone wielding a weapon, and a few other things) and regales me with stories of wildlife encounters involving water buffaloes, hippos and lions (once, when stuck in a stand-off with a lioness with cubs at night, Musa built a statue out of stones and left his torch burning beside it so the lion would think he was still there and not follow him home.) I don’t have stories to match his -- he also teased hippos with sticks to get them to chase him on the riverbanks -- but I share my Smoky Mountains bear story anyway.
Somehow, by cutting through badly clogged streets in downtown Nairobi, Musa is able to get me past the six impossibly plugged roundabouts and to the airport by 930, after a nearly five-hour battle with the traffic. Musa and I congratulate each other. “You are calm,” he says appreciatively, as we near the airport. “You will make your flight.” I have pre-printed my boarding passes so it doesn’t take me long to check in. I am exhausted but ecstatic to be on my way home. It has been nine weeks and the anticipation of seeing my girls and Tahra has me standing in line to board the plane with a fat smile that won’t go away.
A Kenyan colleague who works in our Nairobi office suggests I hire Musa to take me around. I meet him in the afternoon on Friday, after my flight gets in from Juba. Musa is about my height with a round face, short hair and a day’s worth of stubble. He is dressed for city work in jeans and a white polo and drives a silver four-door compact. My plan for the afternoon is to shop a couple hours, then have dinner at what is supposed to be a good Indian place, and get to the airport around 7 pm, about 3.5 hours ahead of my flight. Musa is affable and easy to talk to, and says it’s no problem. He knows I want to look for locally-made items and takes me to a store where crafts are hand-made by disabled Kenyans, who benefit from the shop’s sales. I had wanted to pick up presents in Sudan before leaving but could not find a gift-oriented market or any place selling arts/crafts of any kind, anywhere in Southern Sudan, except for one tiny shop in Juba called The Roots Project. The only toys I ever saw kids playing with were used rubber bike tires (rolled by stick-wielding boys up and down dirt roads), and once I saw two kids pulling small cars made from milk boxes with bottle cap wheels.
In Nairobi, though, at the store for disabled people, I find good stuff, including a bracelet made out of safety pins and green electrical wire and little animal pendants made out of scraps of Orange Fanta soda cans, for the kids. Musa next says he’ll take me to “Maasai Markets,” a big open-air crafts market that sets up in different parts of town on different days of the week. On the way there he apologizes for not wearing his traditional Maasai garb, which he sometimes does when driving Westerners around. He mutters a reason but I don’t catch it and tell him not to worry about it. We reach our next destination, which has the look and feel of an upscale mall in New Jersey. Big food court with stone fountains, tile flooring, recessed lighting, potted plants and flowers, plate glass store windows filled with expensive jewelry, watches, ceramics. Well-heeled Western, African and Asian clientele walking around sipping lattes and smoothies.
“This is the Maasai Market?” I ask, thinking maybe Musa decided I looked too much like a mall guy to take to a real market.
“It’s in the back,” he says.
There, behind the mall, an area about the size of a football field is packed with 500 vendors lined up in rows under a giant canvass roof, selling hand-made goods ranging from blankets and quilts, wood carvings and paintings, pottery and painted gourds, to jewelry, toys, bags, clothes, drums and wooden instruments – you name it. I go about two steps before a vendor reaches out to physically stop me, inviting me to look at his stuff. I politely demur but am pawed at gently and hopefully, again and again, by many merchants, and even followed around for a while by a guy who really wants to sell me a string of old magenta glass beads. He is tailing me and scribbling down figures on a tiny pad, scratching them out and then scribbling lower figures, tugging my forearm to get me to look at his pad but I keep walking. Musa is taking his cues from me. If someone gives me a price, I go through a process of asking them for “best price?” and they pretend to reflect seriously for a few seconds before citing a lesser amount; then Musa pretends to be staggered and asks in Swahili for the real best price and gets a couple hundred shillings knocked off, and then it’s my turn again. In the middle of our excursion the rain comes pouring down, and the tent leaks in many places, causing the vendors to whip out plastic sheets to cover their wares. Musa tells me the rain is not good for traffic.
I can only stand so much shopping even under the best of circumstances, so I’m done in less than an hour, after picking up two large pieces of brightly patterned fabric; a green antique glass bead necklace with a silver metal pendant; a toy helicopter made out of metal wire and yellow Tusker beer bottle caps and a toy snake made out of multi-colored soda bottle caps and painted wood. We boogie for the exit and the guy with the magenta beads is on me again with his pad for one last try. “Next time!” I tell him without making eye contact.
My flight out isn’t until 1030 and it’s too early to eat dinner, so I ask Musa just to take me to the airport, figuring I can grab a bite there with plenty of time to spare. Musa approves. “People panic when it rains, the roads are no good, it’s good to start early.”
It is 430 p.m. and only 15 kilometers to the airport, I remind myself repeatedly – NO WAY I CAN’T MAKE IT to the airport in the next five hours, right? But we are entering a traffic jam of biblical proportions. At one point, out of sheer desperation after inching forward about a quarter of a mile in three hours, I roll down my window to ask a driver on the left: “Would you mind backing up a few kilometers so we can get over to the left lane?” To which the driver responds: “Kilometers?” Eliciting an apology from me and the correct unit of distance, accompanied by my explanation: “I have to get to the airport,” to which the other driver would politely reply: “What time is your flight?” and amazingly back up a few meters, allowing us to complete a 20-point turn in bumper-to-bumper so we can eke sideways in front of him and around the tail of a giant bus belching diesel fumes straight into our non-air-conditioned car. At one point, we would briefly join a motorcade of diplomats in black Mercedes Benzes with bodyguards who jump out to threaten other drivers to move out of the way. The motorcade helps us move about 100 feet up a hill, but then the Mercedeses start going the wrong way up the highway on the opposite side from us, and we decide not to follow any more. Maybe we should have.
Steering one-handed through traffic that follows no actual pattern or regulation of any kind, and which seems to be actually worsened by the few police officials willing to stand in the rain to do anything, Musa explains that the source of the problem is the rain, which has caused apparently all of Nairobi’s six million inhabitants to leave work early, at once – combined with the horribly designed road system which involves a series of unregulated roundabouts, or traffic circles, which suck vehicles into a vortex from which there is no return. There is no way to get to the airport without going through the roundabouts, and there are six of them between us and the airport, Musa says.
As we inch forward over the next five hours, Musa receives upwards of 200 calls on his cell and successfully closes a rental deal involving a Somali friend and a landlord he knows in town. He uses his phone to wire some money to his dad, who lives in a house made of cow dung, soothes an angry client named Linda who requested a driver hours ago that Musa could not provide, and calls a cousin on the police force to find out a traffic captain is two roundabouts ahead, which means things should be flowing better up there, don’t worry. As I watch hours one, two, and three tick away on the dashboard clock, I go through various psychological stages. “Hey we’re moving again,” I observe joyfully after we move 10 feet during a good hour. I find some newspapers in the back of Musa’s car and Musa looks over my shoulder for a while, reading along with me as we sit in traffic. We converse about Bin Laden’s demise and Musa shares a story about a terrible cow-eating lion back home named Osama.
Musa entertains me by finding radio stations that conduct “gotcha” phone call setups with men cheating or willing to cheat on their wives and then by outlining what it takes to become a Maasai warrior (he makes it sound easy, noting he’ll have to spend time surviving alone in the mountains, demonstrate to elders that he’s never turned his back to run from someone wielding a weapon, and a few other things) and regales me with stories of wildlife encounters involving water buffaloes, hippos and lions (once, when stuck in a stand-off with a lioness with cubs at night, Musa built a statue out of stones and left his torch burning beside it so the lion would think he was still there and not follow him home.) I don’t have stories to match his -- he also teased hippos with sticks to get them to chase him on the riverbanks -- but I share my Smoky Mountains bear story anyway.
Somehow, by cutting through badly clogged streets in downtown Nairobi, Musa is able to get me past the six impossibly plugged roundabouts and to the airport by 930, after a nearly five-hour battle with the traffic. Musa and I congratulate each other. “You are calm,” he says appreciatively, as we near the airport. “You will make your flight.” I have pre-printed my boarding passes so it doesn’t take me long to check in. I am exhausted but ecstatic to be on my way home. It has been nine weeks and the anticipation of seeing my girls and Tahra has me standing in line to board the plane with a fat smile that won’t go away.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Confident Children
It's a sunny Saturday morning and I head out to interview Cathy Groenendijk, a woman who helps street kids in Juba. I met her at a Hash race when she was raising money to pay school fees for some of the children.
The driver is busy and I’m running late. It takes five or six phone calls with Cathy to coordinate the meeting time and place. Finally I am dropped in front of a travel agency. Soon I receive another phone call.
“Tim where are you?”
“I’m in front of Muthaiga Travel agency.”
“I’m down by Quality Hotel near the boda-boda (motorcycle) guys. Can you walk toward the hotel?”
I find Cathy soon and she greets me warmly. She is short with braided hair and glasses and has a friendly, warm smile. She is from Uganda originally and came to South Sudan five years ago with a Dutch NGO called War Child. On a five-minute walk down a shady dirt road toward a house she is building for homeless street girls, she tells me how she became frustrated by the slow pace and indirectness of the intervention on behalf of damaged children by the bigger NGOs. She thought a smaller organization unencumbered by layers of bureaucracy could move faster and help more children. She spoke to some friends and contacts and launched her own NGO, Confident Children Out of Conflict (www.confidentchildren.org). An official in one of the new ministries of the Government of South Sudan liked her approach and awarded her a small grant to get started. She picked up donations and cultivated a cadre of volunteers.
Then she went into the markets to find the children she was previously unable to help. The little children are there, begging, picking through trash and digging through drains and ditches looking for food scraps thrown out by vendors and restaurants. At night they sleep in the dirt on the side of the road; children as young as four, five, six.
Homeless, here, doesn't mean that kids live in a shelter. It means THEY HAVE NO PLACE TO SLEEP AND NO ONE TO CARE FOR THEM. When she finds them they are filthy, sick and starving. They do not go to school because there is no one to pay the fees. Confident Children runs a day “drop in” center on Hai Malakal, across from the Mine Advisory Group’s main offices, where homeless children can eat, bathe, wash their clothes and rest in the shade during the day. Cathy and volunteers serve three meals a day there, seven days a week to the poorest and most vulnerable children. Without this food the children would probably starve; spoiled scraps from the market’s trash cans and drains are not enough to live on.
As we talk we walk by a large house on a hill. Cathy says it is the home of an Episcopalian Bishop by the name of Enok Tombe. The Bishop donated about an acre of gently sloping, grassy hillside surrounded by an iron fence topped with razor wire. Cathy is building a house here that will eventually house 25-30 street girls. “We were lucky to get this land," she says.
Here I meet some of the homeless girls. They are playing with balloons in the shade under a jacaranda tree, about ten of them; the oldest looks to be maybe 15 and the youngest, possibly five. They are happy to see Cathy. The younger kids are playful but the teens seem weary and sad. More so than the younger girls, they know that tomorrow is not likely to be much better than today.
The girls are so young and thin. I ask again – ok so where are they going tonight, where will they go? I cannot wrap my head around the fact that girls younger than my own daughters are literally taking care of themselves in one of the poorest and most dangerous countries in the world. I am looking at a girl of about five, covered in dust with a bandage around an ankle playing with a blue balloon.
“They sleep in different places, outside, usually near the market. If it is raining they might go on someone’s veranda until the morning.”
A young British man and a Western woman with a pained expression on her face are just leaving – volunteers perhaps. The British man tells me he works in the rural states, and is just visiting Juba. He seems dazed and subdued. “You see hungry children out there too but the level of squalor here….it just seems inhuman.” Apparently Cathy had taken them to see where the kids sleep and where they scavenge for food.
I take some pictures and draw a crowd of kids with my camera as Cathy gives me a tour of the cinderblock house, which has an attractive red and silver metal roof. It feels solid, with good light, and has cinderblock bathrooms, detached. It was started with money from the government grant, and a group of Canadian contractors are donating their labor at no cost, working on it as they have time, around their regular day jobs. Cathy has finagled most of the building materials as in-kind contributions and estimates about $80,000 more is needed to finish it. The money will go to put in a solar electric system with a backup generator and to dig a borehole (well) for water. She also needs to put in toilets, plumbing, a gas tank and an oven for cooking. An NGO has promised beds already. Cathy tells me the girls often beg her to move into the house right now, and as we are speaking, three of them sweep away some dirt and lie down on the cool tile floor in the unfinished bedroom. Cathy can’t say how long it will take to finish; it depends on funding.
The plan eventually is to plant a large vegetable garden to include maize, corn, cucumbers, lettuce and spinach, along with a huge field of coriander to sell to markets and vendors. She also wants to teach the girls to bake cakes for sale. The children will go to school and learn how to make a living and/or grow food to eat. Right now, they have no way to earn money other than to sell themselves. Some of the girls are already involved in the sex trade.
As we walk out of the property, one of the younger girls, Margaret Dokia, who looks about five, tells Cathy she needs to get a car so she can drive everyone around.
“I will be your car,” Cathy says, slinging the little girl onto her back and walking up the dusty road.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
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.
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.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
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.
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.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, May 13, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, May 9, 2011
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."
"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."
Friday, May 6, 2011
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.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, April 29, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
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
Monday, April 25, 2011
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.
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.
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