East Coast Ramble - Part 6 - Hawthorne Valley

Heathsville (VA) - Chatham/Spencertown (NY) - Windsor (MA)

We've made it from the southernmost point in the U.S. to the Hudson Valley in New York. The loose plan was this: crash for a few months in Joel and Ellen’s woodsy summer house in Spencertown and hope Gryffyn would be accepted into the Hawthorne Valley School – a Waldorf school on a 400-acre working farm a few hills over in a wide hollow with big fields, forests and a clear, cold stream running through it. We weren’t sure she would get in, but Gryffyn and Ursula spent summer in a camp there, and Gryffyn really wanted to go back, for school.

Tahra went to HVS for a few years and enjoyed it. Kids get to be kids there – going outside in all weather, exploring the farm and hills around it, walking, growing and making things, studying animals, music, art, languages like German and Spanish, movement, handwork and myth are all part of it. The farm sustainably produces good food that is consumed locally, and there's an inviting farm market in the middle of it, the kind of place you could spend an hour just admiring the cheeses. Our friend Rachel Collins works in Hawthorne Valley’s visiting students program – kids from all over the U.S. and the world apparently come to see how this school-inside-a-farm works, and spend time there learning and exploring.

After a two-day classroom tryout and a nerve-wracking parental interview, during which I sat paralyzed while Tahra coolly fielded questions about pedagogy and child development intended to determine whether we were Waldorfian fiber, Gryffyn got in. (It’s probably good I never got to ask any of my prepared questions, including: “Are the sports teams any good?’’ and "Is it cool if I text Gryffyn once in a while?’’)

With school squared away, we switched our focus to Massachusetts, where, after the school year ends, we’ll move full time into a 150-year-old farm house on 25 forested acres high in the hills in Berkshire County, just across the NY state line. It’s a big old house with a wood stove, a loft, a couple of barns and enough open space to do some growing, located on a dead-end dirt road with old fieldstone walls criss-crossing the property, and I was excited to see it. Our friends from the Keys, Stephanie and Tony and their boys, have a house and land nearby, and turned us onto this place, with warnings that we'd see bears in the yard on quiet early mornings. I hoped to see one before heading back to Juba, but didn't. I think we're going to like this place.

Above: Windsor house.

Above: view out the kitchen window, Windsor.

East Coast Ramble - Part 5 - The Northern Neck

We have arrived in the Northern Neck of the Chesapeake Bay, a place you could see easily from space, since the Bay is so huge and distinctive, surrounded on three sides by jagged rips of land inter-stitched by rivers that look like freon-filled capillaries and arteries in all the satellite pictures. The Northern Neck is one of those big rips on the west side of the Bay, and my parents’ house is perched on the edge of one of those blue capillaries – the Great Wicomico River. It’s a stunning natural environment, and the house is sited and designed to help you bask in it. There are so many windows in the place that it heats up almost instantly when the sunrays begin blasting and bouncing in off the surface of the picture-perfect cove below. Ice House Cove, overlooked by the house, is an intertidal work of art, meandering back into a grassy saltmarsh, separated by a slender spit of reed grasses from the thick river beyond.

“Heaven and earth have never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation.” So wrote Capt. John Smith, the English explorer of the Bay, in his journal, sometime around 1607 to 1609, and you might agree after a stay at Mont May, as my parents have playfully named their estuarine Xanadu.

It takes me about fifteen speechless minutes of staring out windows at the river and cove and trees to adjust to the peaceful beauty of this place, whenever I arrive. Which works out fine because the girls usually instantly cleave themselves unto grandma and grandpa with the kind of grateful desperation that should evoke self-doubt in me, but doesn’t. I wander around and look at the various ways and means that my parents have enhanced their retirement castle since previous visits. Over here, for instance, there’s an entirely new wall of Frank Lloyd Wright-ish stone pieces, framing a new stainless steel hearth in front of the fireplace. Upstairs, dad installed radiant heat flooring in the bathroom along with a magnificent new tile shower in which my entire nuclear family could comfortably stand, complete with auxiliary jets that squirt water horizontally from the wall. Outside, there is now a lovely screened porch with mechanized screens that go up and down at the touch of a button. I have no idea how he and my mom are able to repeatedly pull off these incredible feats of do-it-yourself craftsmanship, each more impressive than the last, but there seems to be no mountain of improvement they cannot scale.

Time slows down for me at Mont May. Returned to the protective loving bosom of my parents, who always think of everything, I tend to lose my socks, my keys, my ball cap. I have trouble making simple decisions, possibly because more experienced adults who once completely and successfully ran my life for me are so nearby. A sort of pubescent dumbness strikes me, exacerbated by good wine. Which made it all the more gratifying when I beat Tahra at Scrabble there one night, for the first time in five years. I fully acknowledge that her loss had more to do with the powerful doses of six different meds she is currently taking than anything else, as well as the fact that she let me make a word that probably wasn't, but I happily savored the victory nevertheless. One doesn’t win at Scrabble with Tahra very often, in sickness or in health.

Other Heathsville highlights: dad taught me how to use a chainsaw without dismembering myself or others and shared with me the results of his ongoing arboreal research project, in which he is gradually identifying more and more different species of trees living on the property (he only chainsaws the fallen or dead ones). I think he’s got eight or ten different species of oak trees, alone, nailed down, among a couple dozen others. And during a long walk with mom and Tahra, we all saw an osprey locked in aerial combat with an eagle, apparently in a dispute over a fish. In the end, the fish fell to earth and the raptors flew empty-taloned back to the river.

East Coast Ramble - Part 4 - Do Not Hump

Key West – Miami – Sanford – Lorton

Leaving the Florida Keys for destinations north, we stopped at Baby’s Coffee for cafes con leche, at Curry Hammock State Park for our customary nature trail leg stretch, and at Denny’s Latin Café in Key Largo for another con leche and lunch. Goodbye, Cuban coffee, rice and beans. You served us well.

We took Card Sound Road out of the islands, as we always do, and at the zenith of the bridge, with all the Keys behind us – the osprey, ibis, egrets and pelicans and spoonbills, the incredible family snorkeling and kayaking expeditions, our friends and all the little things we love about the Keys – the White Street Pier, Blue Heaven, Sandy’s and Salute, El Siboney, Bahia Honda, Fort Zach and our house, our garden – to the south, I thought about the character from that Carl Hiaasen book who strapped himself to the top of this bridge as a hurricane bore down, to experience the full force of it. We took some storms in the face, too. Hurricane Wilma destroyed our Pathfinder, pushed saltwater over the top of our three-foot-high porch and into the house, made the walls buck and blew water through the window seams, even with the shutters down. That vulnerability, that way-out edginess combined with extreme weather, contributes to the vitality of the islands, I think. I know Tahra will miss the big tropical storms, too.

On to Miami, to the home of Josh, Karla and Xavier, for one night. Josh is related to Tahra through Tahra’s mom’s mom. We discovered this several years ago, and have been having fun with this amazing family ever since. Josh spent time in Mali with the Peace Corps after UVA, where my brother went to school, Karla -- who wrote a book about the Maroons in Jamaica -- went to Yale, and their son, Xavier, is brilliant and sweet, a champion chess player who can also do perfect flips on the trampoline. We got in a little late but enjoyed a spaghetti and meatballs dinner cooked by Josh, with really good tomato sauce made by a Saudi college exchange student staying at the house. We’ve met college kids from all over the world during our visits to Josh and Karla, who seem somehow involved in everything good going on in Miami. We also have Josh and Karla to thank for introducing us a few years ago to sustainability idol Mario Yanez, founder of Earth Learning and The Farm at Verde Gardens down in Homestead. Mario introduced me to Florida-made avocado wine, which surprisingly, isn't as bad as it sounds.

From Miami we drove up toward Orlando, where we excitedly boarded the Amtrak Auto-Train in Sanford, pre-Trayvon Martin. The Auto-Train is THE longest passenger train in the world and was a thrill for all of us; we splurged for our own deluxe sleeping cabin, with four fold-out bunk beds, little fold-out tables, and windows looking out from both sides of our narrow t-shaped cabin. The Volvo would ride in style behind us somewhere on the double-decker train with approximately 250 other vehicles stacked inside enclosed car carriers. This may have been the only day in history that Gryffyn and Ursula actually looked forward to bed time. After climbing a short ladder and tucking themselves into individual, tray-like bunks suspended from the ceiling, the girls looked like weary but happy rock climbers hanging from bivy sacks on the edge of vibrating cliffs. The only down side to riding the Auto-Train: there are some puzzling policies, including one well-posted rule that forbids humping. (See photo, below.) Possibly to prevent derailment, or maybe because Amtrak gets federal subsidies, I surmised.

Seventeen hours, 900 miles and four states later, the train deposited us in Lorton, Virginia. When I stepped outside into near-freezing blustery weather, I had my first second thoughts about our planned move north, and flashed back to the day when I was a kid waiting for the school bus on a frigid day in Springfield, and suddenly realized my nose hairs had frozen together.

East Coast Ramble - Part 3 - Bury My Wounded Heart at Blue Heaven

My turn to get into a hospital gurney. Time for knee surgery. My doctor is a top-class orthopedic surgeon who has patched up many pro football players, soccer players, and other athletes. He has described my knee problem as a “pretty good’’ lateral meniscus tear. I could let it go, but it would haunt me. Better to let him use his tiny video-camera-on-a-stick and buzzing alligator-jaw implement to remove it. “Your meniscus is like an o-ring,’’ he said. “Take the bad piece off and the rest of it still works.’’ Manfully, I pretended to understand what an o-ring was, imagining it has something to do with car engines. The doctor and I have had a few chats about Africa, because he volunteers for Doctors Without Borders when he’s not repairing bones in the Keys. He has been to Haiti already three times since the earthquake. He has been to Africa before, and they are sending him to Somalia, next.

The girls and Uncle Brent, who arrived safely for his visit in Key West from Phoenix last night, all stayed home when I went to the hospital. Who cares about a middle-aged guy getting elective arthroscopic knee surgery for a soccer injury, even though I could have died?

But I didn’t. In fact I was home a few hours later and felt well enough to hobble around without crutches, even though my left knee had three small, sutured holes in it and my leg was swaddled in white muslin from ankle to thigh. Now it was time to finish packing up the house. With a bad knee, two over-excited children and a still-recuperating Tahra.

Uncle Brent to the rescue! This guy -- this sensitive hunky deep-thinking adrenaline-junky doctor-of-physics Grand Canyon hiking landscape photographing Ultimate Frisbee all-star uncle, who parachutes out of planes every weekend and plays kickass guitar licks, who once starred in a band called The Revolvers who opened a Tucson show for The MONKS OF DOOM (Camper van Beethoven, anyone?), who drives a fast BMW and makes a lot of money doing something complicated on computers, who once took a U-haul filled with all of MY old junk from our parents’ basement in Virginia all the way to Key West, by himself – had come down to help us out with moving stuff once again, and to see the girls and see us off. The reasons this man is still single are as hard to fathom as the elusive Fifth Quark*. Girls: he won’t last another year. Book your tickets to Scottsdale, quickly, but walk softly when you get there. Hunters have had more luck snaring snow leopards in the Himalayas, though outdoorsy supermodels from Stanford might fare ok.

Anyway, last week in Key West. Tahra and I packed up the house, with much assistance from Brent, who knows I don’t get much time with Tahra and tried hard not to be in the way while simultaneously maximizing his helpfulness. The girls helped, too, by thoroughly taping shut completely empty boxes, making fully-furnished houses (for themselves) out of large boxes while we were trying to pack them, decorating boxes and the floor with Sharpies, popping costly bubblewrap and thwarting us in the midst of trying to give away a small fraction of some their never-used toys.

Five days and a lot of packed boxes later, we reluctantly said goodbye to Brent, put him on a plane back to Phoenix and hired our fantastic babysitter, Kelsey, from down the block to watch the kids for a few hours so we could go out to dinner on our last night in Key West. Kelsey showed up for the job with her live pet duck, Prissy, in a stroller. Is it any wonder the kids love her?

Fitting that our last dinner out in Key West should be at Blue Heaven, site of my first dinner out in Key West, more than ten years ago, when I was a lonely wounded man incapable of experiencing love -- until I met Tahra at the restaurant a week or two later. On this, our final night in town, we sat under the boughs of the great Spanish lime tree and enjoyed the company of friends Liv, Will, Hanrow and Ashley with lobster, snapper and scallops, hand-picked bottles of excellent wine and a lot of funny stories. Richard and Suanne, our good-hearted friends and owners of this famous, iconic and for us – intimately historic – restaurant, showed up at the end of our meal, stole the bill and gave us hugs, and wished us luck. “You’re off on a new adventure!” said Suanne.

* Editor's Note: For anyone interested, I believe the Fifth Quark is/was something important that may or may not be real, and which after great effort by Nobel Prize winners was actually discovered at Fermilab, a giant underground particle accelerator where Brent once worked as a research physicist trying to discover how the universe was created. Brent can (and will) correct me if I'm wrong.

* New Editor's Note: Brent May clarifies that it was actually the SIXTH Quark, also known as the Top Quark, that was such a big deal. It was "postulated and then observed'' at Fermilab (DOE lab outside Chicago.) Kinda scary that he knows what this means.

Above: Ursula meets Prissy on our front porch steps in Key West

East Coast Ramble - Part 2 - Minor Procedures

Key West–Miami–Key West

Friday -- At Key West Airport I’m smothered by my children, who always look a little disbelieving that it’s really me, really there again, with them. For my part, each time I arrive I’m surprised, too, by these little energy pockets whose arms and legs are longer each time I see them, in eight week increments. It’s not enough. Tahra is usually quiet but shiny-eyed when I arrive, letting the girls get their fill. For the kids, the excitement of me wears off as soon as the baggage belt lurches to life, however, and I’m struck by Gryffyn’s urgent motherly protectiveness of Ursula. When the conveyor belt’s flashing light comes on, she clamps an arm firmly around Ursula’s shoulder and pulls her near, every time. These three girls look out for each other.

Saturday -- I’m up early. I have to go to Key West hospital for a blood test and EKG in advance of my knee surgery, scheduled for Wednesday, the day after Ursula’s oral surgery in Miami. (I tore my meniscus playing soccer in Juba just before Christmas, couldn't walk much for about a week.) At home later, in between playing with the girls, Tahra and I work on getting the house ready for our move, scheduled for the week after next. And Uncle Brent is flying in, from Phoenix, on Wednesday night -- the same night we come back from Miami after Ursula’s surgery. It’s a crazy mess of a schedule, during which I also have to visit a urologist to make sure my vasectomy is still working. Long story, but everything is ok in that department.

Tuesday – Tahra has an appointment with a rheumatologist in Miami in the afternoon, who refers her immediately and unexpectedly to an allergist a few miles away for a biopsy of some mysterious and disturbing new spots on her lower legs. Turns out it's vasculitis, not a good sign considering the powerful meds she is on. More to worry about. Ursula’s surgery is on Wednesday morning at Miami Children’s Hospital, so we decide to stay overnight in Miami at one of our favorite places, The Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables. We like this historic old place, which has giant bird cages in the ornate, wood-paneled reception hall, along with what is reportedly the largest outdoor swimming pool on the East Coast. We’ve stayed here three or four times during trips through Miami, and always enjoy it. There’s really good sushi nearby and a little Moroccan restaurant we like just off the Miracle Mile, and the girls are crazy about the huge, L-shaped pool. Seemed like a good idea to rest in luxury after a long day of driving and before what was certain to be a traumatic and stressful medical event tomorrow – Ursula’s surgery, which would entail full anesthesia for several hours and much painful work inside her little mouth. Also, the Biltmore is right around the corner from Miami Children’s, where we were scheduled to check in the next day at 7 a.m.

Wednesday – Oral surgery day is here. We have given minimal information to Ursula up to this point, but now we casually let her know that the dentist is going to see her today to fix her cavity and give her teeth a good cleaning. Never-had-a-cavity Gryffyn is in on it – she knows it’s a bit more serious than that and she has done a good job keeping quiet so as not to terrify her sister, who doesn’t do too well with dentists or doctors.

Ten minute drive to the hospital from the Biltmore, still dark out, and we’re all quiet in the car. I’m nervous, Tahra’s nervous, and the kids are still sleepy. At the hospital, we are checked in quickly by a no-fuss receptionist and the girls set about puttering around the kid-friendly, art-filled waiting room, occupied by other grim-faced parents and wary-looking children. Upstairs in the ‘’minor procedures’’ area, numerous friendly people check on us, ask us lots of questions, flip through paperwork, and finally, the dentist arrives. Ursula mercifully takes a little liquid medicine to make her sleepy, which is great because by now she has figured out something big is going on, what with the hospital bed, hanging wires, beeping machines and other small children walking and rolling around in pastel gowns, not to mention ladies with clipboards and stethoscopes whisking our curtain back and forth.

“Ok Ursula, can you come up here on the bed now?” one of the nurses perkily asks, when the surgeon is ready.

“Cool! A rolling bed, wanna get in a bed with WHEELS on it?!” I croak.

No. Even a half-drugged Ursula will not get willingly into a hospital gurney, no matter how much fun her lying daddy says it will be, and she clings heavy-lidded and moaning to her mother’s neck, and stays stuck on as Tahra walks through the big double-doors into the OR, after which, Tahra later told me, she succumbed to the pharmaceuticals and was laid out, noodle-like, on the bed with a gas mask strapped onto her cherubic Ursula face.

Three hours, seven cavities, two crowns and one root canal later, I would see her again, and she was not happy. By late afternoon, however, we were back in the Volvo heading for Key West, with Uncle Brent somewhere in the skies above due to meet us in a few hours, and Ursula mowing through bananas in the back seat while watching Angelina Ballerina.

East Coast Ramble - Part 1

Juba-Nairobi-Johannesburg-Atlanta-Key West

I’m going home again but this time, it’s not for rest and relaxation. There are frightening things in the near future including discovering for myself the true ramifications of Tahra’s recently diagnosed illnesses. An ominous appointment with an oral surgeon involving full anesthesia for our cavity-riddled four-year-old at Miami Children’s Hospital. Arthroscopic surgery to repair a torn left lateral meniscus, for me. And after that, but before my 36-hour return trip to Juba, many sad goodbyes to be said in Key West prior to a scheduled interstate family expedition involving a trucking company, the Amtrak auto-train, and a long haul in the Volvo through Virginia and up to New York and Massachusetts, where we’d be moving into TWO different houses – one in each state. To get it all done I cobbled together four weeks off using comp days, my regularly-scheduled post rotation R/R, and both sick and annual leave.

Logistics couldn’t get me a flight out of Juba on the morning I needed to leave, so by happy circumstance, I’m bumped up a day and departed in the afternoon on the hour-and-twenty-minute flight to Nairobi. In Kenya on the way to my hotel, I spotted a giraffe and zebra herd off the highway. I looked over at the driver to see if he saw them too, but he was concentrating on the road. I got in early enough for a light workout in the small gym at the Ole-Sereni Hotel, then treated myself to a long hot shower – much appreciated, since the running water at my house in Juba had been contaminated with diesel oil for a while. Then, a good dinner – my first decent meal in two months, a spicy tandoori platter with naan and most of a bottle of South African red. No one to talk to at dinner so I dug into a Philip Roth novel on my Kindle and found myself reading a saga involving glove-making factories in Newark. America’s greatest living novelist (whose middle name is Milton, by the way) lives in and writes about NEW JERSEY, it turns out.

Next morning I’m up early to finish some briefing papers for a diplomat who is potentially visiting some of our work sites in South Sudan. Big breakfast of eggs and sausage, Kenyan baked beans and potatoes, good coffee and a tall cold glass of fresh-squeezed passion fruit juice. Filled out my time sheets, emailed some reports and spreadsheets to my colleagues to tide them over while I’m gone, and then it was time to head to the Nairobi airport. On this trip I’d be flying through Johannesburg, a much shorter first flight than my usual jaunt to Amsterdam, but it involved a tight connection and would leave me with a whopping 14 hours in the air from Jo-burg to Atlanta, so I was a little anxious, though relieved not to have to fly through Lagos, Nigeria, as I did during my previous trip home. The airport in Lagos has a horrible reputation. I’ve read that airport guards on the tarmac have shoot-on-sight orders due to problems with thieves who’ve stolen luggage by breaking into the baggage holds of planes as they are getting ready for take-off. My suitcase and I made it through ok, though, last time.

Uneventful flight to South Africa. While walking through the airport in Jo-burg to find my connection, though, I strolled by a place I thought I’d never in a million years see again – a little shop where Tahra and I bought a few last-minute things at the end of our big African safari adventure nearly a decade ago. We visited Cape Town and went on a once-in-a-lifetime camping trip in Namibia, where, atop a giant sand dune on the edge of the Namib Desert, overwhelmed by her beauty, intelligence and spirit, I spontaneously pulled her close and asked her to marry me, whereupon she wrinkled her nose and told me I smelled like a Cape Fur seal. I knew I still stunk from our visit to the seal colony that morning, where we incredulously watched jackals leisurely stalking seal pups on the beach, but I really wanted her to marry me and couldn’t wait any longer to ask, and she said yes.

"It bites you, and you fall asleep"

I have been in a dusty state capital called Bor, in Jonglei State, for the past few days. We are rolling out a new 12-month work plan and presenting it to our Jonglei team in the field, all of whom are currently grounded in Bor due to deadly cattle raiding between enemy tribes in other parts of the state. The fighting has caused massive displacement and claimed nearly 1,000 South Sudanese lives since December. Our Jonglei staff, a team of about 11 young educated South Sudanese men working in governance, financial management, planning and budgeting and in the education sector, are working and living out of a hotel built on the banks of the Bahr el Jebel, a fast-moving tributary of the Nile. The hotel has spotty electric generators and internet service, and there is no air conditioning, so we have the windows open in the office we are renting here. About 50 yards outside our window there is a borehole with a hand pump where area residents fill yellow jerry cans with fresh water, seemingly round the clock. The empty cans are piled high around the hole as people wait patiently, sometimes for hours, for their turn to pump and fill. The work of obtaining fresh drinking water here is hard and never-ending, and children as small as two and three are enlisted to carry little buckets and containers from the wells.

During a Powerpoint presentation on the work plan yesterday, the team leader raised his hand and pointed at a large brown fly that had entered through the window. All 15 of us in the room silently watched the fly zip around for a minute or so. If it buzzed anyone, the person would duck and swat with wide-eyed alarm. I seemed to be the only person in the room who did not know why this particular fly was cause for such concern.

When it went back out, we closed the windows to prevent if from flying in again, even though it was sweltering in the room (temps are now higher than 100 degrees during the afternoons.) Everyone seemed greatly relieved, and we got back to our business. Later I asked a colleague what would have happened if that dread-inspiring fly had bitten me.

You would be sleeping, she said.

The fly makes you sleep?

Yes. It bites you, and you fall asleep.

Turns out I had just had my first known encounter with a tsetse fly, whose bite carries a disease called Human African trypanosomiasis, also known as sleeping sickness. The disease is endemic in 37 sub-Saharan countries and killed 48,000 people in 2008, according to Wikipedia. This insect, which only lives a few weeks, injects a parasite into its victims that invades the central nervous system, causing confusion, reduced coordination, fatigue, mania, insomnia and progressive mental deterioration leading to coma and death. I now understand why the bug was so deserving of our attention. It is an airborne serial killer.

I kept my eyes peeled for large brown flies when a colleague and I walked down to the river's edge after work. About 100 yards away, on the other side of the water, a cluster of a few hundred Dinka cattle herding families were encamped, with their animals. They were just shadows in a haze of dung fires lit to keep down the mosquitos, but we could hear laughter and the clinks of pots, and make out lines of tents and stick-built huts built on the very edge of the river. We could also occasionally see sets of huge, magnificently arcing cattle horns poking through the smoke, and hear the lowing of the cows, which sounded startlingly close, rolling across the river top. We watched a wiry man hard-paddling a canoe hand-carved from a neem tree and patched with sheets of tin, from our side of the river to the camp, and back.

I want to go across and see them, one of my colleagues said a little wistfully.

I will do it soon.

Update

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

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

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

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

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

Juba Nights Part Two: Ordinary Juba Nights

This will be the last installment describing what a typical 24 hours is like for me in Juba.

Work day ends around 5:30 pm usually and, upon return to my room in the company guesthouse, I get ready for football, which I now play almost every night. I put in contact lenses and toss two bottles of water into my backpack, along with an extra tee-shirt, some South Sudanese Pounds (money), my work ID and my cell phone. I have a little pre-football work-out routine in my room, too, during which I imagine myself in solitary confinement doing pushups and sit-ups to maintain fitness in case of attack from other inmates. Then I grab my backpack and scoot downstairs.

The guards at the gate seem enthralled whenever I go outside in my football garb, even though it's a nightly occurence. I suppose it is unusual here to see any middle-aged white man heading out for football, but clearly, this is a first for someone from my outfit, and the young guards are full of surprised smiles and approving nods for me when I walk out, no matter how many times they've seen me do it previously. “You are going for football again?” they ask while sliding open the heavy iron gate for me. “Ahh, it is good!” they say, or “You are very fit!’’

I hustle out to the main road to catch a boda (motorbike taxi) to UNMISS (United Nations Mission in South Sudan) compound just down the road. Twice a week on weeknights, I meet up with members of my expatriate football club, Juba Unathletic, at a nice little dirt field in the compound belonging to BanBat, a battalion of Bangladeshi UN peacekeepers who allow us to train there. Near the BanBat field, I look for my favorite cow, a rhinoceros-sized bull named “Ban Ki-Moo,” rumored to be owned by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. This all-white bull has a camel-sized hump behind its head and enormous gray horns like scimitars, one of which droops downward like a mammoth tusk. The horns are so heavy that the bull’s head is dragged low, and as it lumbers slowly around the UN compound, always alone, you can see its gigantic neck straining. The animal is as big as the white UN pickup trucks whose drivers unfailingly give it the right of way. The bull goes where it pleases.

On nights when my team does not have training, I leave my backpack at home and jog down to a rocky, slanted pitch across from the airport near UNMISS to play with a team of tall, athletic South Sudanese men called the Juba Airport All-Stars. Though I've never seen another white person there, the All-Stars always invite me to jump in with them, and there is no fuss, just a perfunctory nod or two, maybe a handshake. They see and share my love of the game, enough said - pass the ball. I have arranged a few matches between the All-Stars and Juba Unathletic. In fact my expat team, which is quite competitive, has matches somewhere in Juba against different South Sudanese teams almost every Saturday afternoon, often attended by a hundred or more local spectators. Recently, we borrowed the All-Stars’ pitch to play a game against a club called Konyo-Konyo, but the match ended abruptly when players on the other team began yelling and criticizing the referee, who in response pulled a semi-automatic handgun out his sweatpants. My boys and I quietly exited the field, climbed into our trucks and drove away, though from what I heard, no shots were fired and everyone is friends again. When I informed my boss of my adventures at the airport field she was nonplussed. “Has it been de-mined, I hope?” she asked.

After football each night I return to the guesthouse, where I find 10 or 12 people from my company gathered for dinner, catered by a hotel called Logali. The food is brought in trucks and set up by hotel kitchen staff in warmed chafing dishes. There is usually plenty of it – chicken, beef, rice, maize porridge, sautéed local greens. I shovel down a plate and go upstairs to shower, then look for Tahra and the kids on Skype. Video chat and get caught up with the girls, a little email, then climb into bed. Sometimes I read or watch a downloaded movie on my laptop. Recently I saw the painfully funny “Borat,’’ recommended by my brother, and enjoyed a documentary called “Bill Cunningham New York’’ about an unusual photo journalist in Manhattan. If you never caught it, a low-profile Denzel Washington movie called ‘’The Great Debaters’’ is outstanding, and “Man on Wire,’’ about a French tight-rope artist, is brilliant.

I pull up my fuzzy bedspread and wish my family a good night in a westerly direction, leaving only my nose exposed in case any malarial mosquitoes have penetrated the defences.

Third Rotation

Above: View from the patio at the Ole-Sereni Hotel, Nairobi. I've seen real giraffes from this porch, as well as zebras and ostrich Ole-Sereni Hotel, Nairobi

I now feel like an expert traveler. Seven months after first flying into terra incognita, gone is the bowel-twisting sweaty anxiety before hopping on and off planes in places like Wau, Aweil, Rumbek, Juba, Nairobi, Amsterdam. These days, trip preparation is fuss-free. Packing lists I once pored over and revised are now brief afterthoughts scribbled on the backs of envelopes in between doing other things. Yawn. Another trip across the continent.

It's my third rotation, my third company-approved trip for R&R outside of Juba. The company pays for a round-trip ticket from Juba to Nairobi every eight weeks. I pay for the ticket home to Key West and back, a steep $2,500 with four connections and 36 hours of travel, but worth it to see the girls and Tahra even briefly.

Inside the Juba Airport, waiting for my flight out, the chaos now seems normal to me. Surly six-foot soldier in camos and machine gun demanding suddenly to see my visa? I wordlessly whip it out with a bored and unintimidated expression. When he flicks his eyes toward the right I know he is ordering me into another queue, to sign a passenger list. My motions in transit are now mechanical, designed to ensure maximum comfort and minimal expenditure of energy. In the crowded, hot and smelly waiting room all the seats are taken. I spot a stack of brown plastic chairs in a corner and help myself, grab one swiftly, hold it over my head and place it on the end of a row directly in front of the door out to the planes, because there will be a breeze from the door and also because I can jump instantly into the line for my plane when the barely audible call is made. I wedge my pack firmly between my legs and dive into my Kindle, flaring my arms out to ventillate damp armpits while losing myself in another Jeff Lindsay Miami murder mystery.

On the one-hour Kenya Airways flight to Nairobi I skip the in-flight meal of chicken whatever. The sodium-laden airline food, with its infused cardboard and plastic, upsets my stomach, I have realized. In Nairobi I turbo-walk past slow passengers and speed down the tunnel to the visas area. My connection to Amsterdam doesn't leave until 11 p.m. and it's only 4:30 pm or so now - no way I'm sitting in the dank and dark Nairobi airport, which reminds me a little of the old Rolling Valley Mall, for seven hours. So I take the trouble to fill out the forms and find the shortest line possible to purchase a transit visa. I produce a crisp U.S. $20 bill with no marks or writing on it (they won’t accept any other kind of US money at the visa counter, I now know), get my visa stamp and skip downstairs to get my suitcase. I find the baggage belt for my flight, even though it’s incorrectly marked as a flight from Dar es Salaam, because I’ve asked a bright-looking baggage guy and I know the belts are usually mislabeled here. Miraculously, my suitcase is one of the first around the bend. I grab it, whiz by the airport cop telling her I have nothing to declare, and exit into the sea of drivers – maybe 100 or more -- waiting behind the fences holding signs with people’s names. The drivers hush down a bit and look at me expectantly – each one of them hoping I’m their guy so they can get out of there and hit the road. As I stroll by looking for a sign with my name on it, a short Kenyan woman who works for the Universal Car Company pops out of the crowd.

“Timothy!”

I am astonished to be greeted by name.

“You remembered me from last time?”

“How could I forget?” she said.

I ponder the meaning of this. Of all the travelers passing through, she would remember ME? Is it because, the very first time I arrived in Nairobi, I got in the wrong car? Is it because I tipped one of the drivers $20, once, after drinking two double bourbons at the Ole-Sereni, and he told me he had no money to eat? Is it because I’m a freak?

In any case, she handed me off to the Universal driver who took my bag and led me to the parking lot. Twenty minutes later I was seated in the luxurious Big Five restaurant inside the gorgeous Ole-Sereni Hotel, deposited by my driver, whom I asked to return at 9 p.m. to take me back to the airport. I like this hotel because it is close to the airport and you don’t have to pass through any of the murderous roundabouts or get stuck in the notorious Nairobi traffic in order to get to it. In addition, there is a very good restaurant with a balcony overlooking a game preserve, with scrubby acacia trees and tall blonde grass, and great sunset views. However, the only animals I’ve ever seen at the hotel so far are bronze sculptures.

This evening, I have parked myself on the balcony at a table for four looking east over the preserve. When my waitress comes I order my customary double bourbon (I feel really cool saying “Make that a double!”) and an aloo tikka appetizer (shallow fried potatoes with crushed pea paste and hot peppers), and then a pan-fried leg of duck.

I drink my first bourbon while watching the sun set over Nairobi, and think about what I’m going to do when I get home again.

Juba Nights Part One: Tim's DYN-O-MITE Juba Night

I finished my can of Heineken in the back seat of Nadir’s SUV on the way to the party. Just like in high school, only now I’m in South Sudan, 43 and married with two children. Nadir by contrast is a young stud. He is Lebanese but grew up in Sierra Leone. He plays striker, of course, on my football team, often scoring fantastic goals. He runs a contracting business, has friends in high places, a full head of lush movie star hair and a young American girlfriend, the one who gave me the Heinekin from her insulated “goody bag,” which Nadir gallantly wore strapped over his shoulder as we entered the big bash at Oxfam, so as to have a supply of chilled Heinies handy at all times.

I should preface all this by saying I don’t really go out, in the serious sense, “to party,” very often any more. After all, my beard is gray, my hearing is going, probably from listening to Iron Maiden at high decibels in the eighties with mom’s big earphones strapped on, and I have a few stiff joints. But here in Juba there is a cadre of young, post-university relief and development professionals from various Western and African countries, with degrees from the Kennedy School and Johns Hopkins and Georgetown, not to mention the hundreds of young United Nations soldiers and advisors, and European Union and World Food Programme and World Health Organization people. And on weekends in Juba, they like to party – especially if they’ve experienced the deprivations of the field any time recently. In addition, the lads on my football team, most of them much younger and much less married than I am, are more than a little fond of tossing back a pint or two on Saturday night, especially after we’ve played a game, and especially if we’ve won, as we did this afternoon.

So it was that I found myself loosening up with my third beer of the evening in the back of Nadir’s truck as we jounced down a dirt lane around the corner from the colossal walled, fortified, razor-wired, heavily surveilled U.S. Embassy compound. In fact I was in a convoy of approximately seven SUVs, all packed with expat NGO type people, all of whom had decamped simultaneously from a kind of pre-party party at PACT Sudan, another NGO where the captain of my football team, Edd, a really cool young Welsh guy, works. I’d say it was about 10:30 pm and I could hear the pulsating music coming from Oxfam, a place I’d never been, over the top of the 10-foot-tall iron gates. I’m unsure exactly what Oxfam does in South Sudan but I’m guessing it’s in the hunger department.

As soon as we walked in, I could tell this wasn’t a sit around in chairs kind of party. It was a DANCE party, as in, nobody was doing anything BUT dancing inside, under a giant grass-topped tikki hut. They even had a laser machine shooting purple and red and green lasers everywhere. Hmm, what does a married guy do without his wife at a LASER DANCE party? For starters, I did the same thing I’ve done for the past 30 years at dance parties: I stood on the fringes looking in at all the exuberant bopping and hopping and spinning and shaking, while tapping my foot meekly to the beat and shouting in my buddies’ ears in vain attempts at conversation. For example:

Me: (shouting into Dave’s ear) WHERE ARE YOU WATCHING THE MANCHESTER GAME?

Dave: (shouting back in my ear) WHAT?

Me: (back in his ear, as close as I can get without putting my lips actually on his ear) THE GAME TOMORROW, THE MANCHESTER UNITED GAME, WHERE ARE YOU AND NIAL GOING TO WATCH IT?

Dave: YEAH. AT BEDOUIN. YOU COMING?

Me: I DON’T KNOW.

Dave: COOL. SEE YOU THERE. (Nods and sips beer.)

But at a certain point, maybe Beer Number Five, I reached my tipping point, and I actually gave in and began to try to dance, using Edd’s girlfriend as my foil, so as not to appear to be actively dancing directly with any of my group of nearby men friends, some of whom were also tentatively beginning to dance, while studiously avoiding making either eye or physical contact with another male. I guess it would be more accurate to say I was dancing alone while pretending that Edd’s girlfriend, who was actually dancing with Edd, was part of my dance group.

Me, dancing, involves a lot of upward finger jabbing and karate-style arm movements with my hands balled into fists. As if practicing a faux form of martial arts might somehow make the dancing seem more masculine, to anyone watching. Also, I do some squatting while finger jabbing and martial arting with my arms. Possibly to create a lower profile – not sure why the squatting but it has become one of my standard dance floor moves. An occasional squat and slow rise takes me out of the line of sight of people looking out across the landscape of bopping heads.

So then this song came on which I’m sure all of you have heard, it seems to be very popular. I hesitate to say it’s a new song, because it could turn out to be three years old, but it’s definitely a popular and modern dance song and if I had to recreate it here, here is what seem to be the only actual coherent lyrics from it, repeated over and over:

AAAY-OHH I’m saying AAAY-OOH

It’s like a DYNO-MITE, It’s like a DYNO-MITE

(then more)

AAAY-O I’m saying AAY-O

It’s like a DYNO-MITE, It’s like a DYNOMITE

I realize that it’s actually spelled dynamite but this singer is really saying it DINE-OH-MITE. The young sweaty people seemed to go crazy when this song came on, waving their arms to the “AAAY-O” parts and shouting out DINE-O-MITE at the top of their lungs, and there was even more energetic jumping, Bouncy House type jumping. When my friend Simon grabbed me and twisted my nipple, and Edd and his girlfriend began passing around a bottle of Johnny Walker for people in the dance circle to take turns swigging from, I knew it was time to leave, and I drifted away unnoticed and took the short walk home, passing unseen through the Juba night like a rustle in the wind, and thinking up words that rhyme with dynamite (gonna have me a PLEB-I-SCITE, gonna get me a PAR-A-SITE, gonna do the WALK-ON-WHITE, wow it’s a SCAR-Y-NIGHT) to give the catchy song pulsing in my head a little extra pizzaz . When I got home, the guards let me in and I went to bed.

Juba Afternoons

After catered lunch in the office compound, I head back to my pod to work on my company-issued Toshiba laptop. Lately I am writing a lot of narrative reports, Power Points, and program overviews and updates for our teams in the field, who’ve been doing presentations for the new fiscal year with the governors in the four states where we work.

At about 2 p.m. I go for “tea,’’ which for me means a mug of hot Nescafe with sugar and milk. In the kitchen, there are usually some cleaning ladies doing dishes. They wear plain blue frocks reminiscent of prison garb, but in the evening are transformed into glamorous beings with beautiful dresses and done-up hair before leaving the compound. I tip-toe around them, trying not to make a nuisance of myself while getting my hot water ready. I am conscious that they know a lot about me, because they make my bed and replace my towels. They know I’ve been looking at New York real estate and reading a Paris Review book called “Writers at Work’’ because they wipe down my nightstand daily. They know I like Toblerone and pistachios because they empty my trash. They know I like to let the morning light in because my drapes are unfailingly half drawn when I leave the room each day. They even know I keep my toothbrush next to my razor on the right side of the sink, and the floss and soap on the other side, because each implement is carefully returned to its rightful spot after the sink is cleaned.

I’ve tried to start conversations with them a few times but get the vague sense from their whispered replies and abrupt departures that they would rather not talk to me. I should know their names, but I don’t, which bothers me. So for now there are just a lot of nods and smiles between us, and that seems to be ok with them.

Back in my pod with my Nescafe, one of my office mates, a contracts manager from Madagascar, begins his daily shtick.

"Tim." He says, without looking up from his paperwork.

"What."

"We go now?"

"Not yet. Soon." I say, whilst pecking my keyboard.

Really we don't leave until 5 pm or later but for some reason, this silly exchange has become part of the afternoon repartee and everyone in the office (about six of us, all guys, I am the only non-African) seems to get a small chuckle out of it.

Between five and six we cram into a company Land Cruiser and one of the drivers (we usually have two and sometimes three on duty) takes a load of us on the short drive from the office back to the guest house, where approximately 12 of us live. One of my colleagues consistently claims the comfy passenger seat up front due to her self-proclaimed "wide diameter."

At home, I trudge upstairs to my room, a nice corner room overlooking our dusty street and from which I can see over a tall cinderblock wall into the property across from us, which includes a modest house that reportedly belongs to the son of the Vice President. I sit down in my padded swivel chair and commence one of my favorite activities of the day: freeing my feet from sweaty socks and wiggling my toes while watching school kids and tired workers walking home from behind my tinted glass window.

To Yei and Back

I’m back in South Sudan after a too-short trip to the Keys, where I ate great food, caught up with old friends, and soaked in as much of the girls and Tahra as possible in 10 days. Happily wrestled with weeds and dead banana branches in the yard. Swam at Fort Zack in wind-smacked chop one day, then floated atop water like glass the next, half-submerged ears muffling the happy squeals of kids up the beach. Tahra’s blessed cooking and my own sheets; the smell and feel of my family’s skin, the pleasant mustiness of the old apartment; Gryffyn and Ursula’s bellies, and laughter; tears over missing tutus, hair brushing and shoes. Home.

A few days after returning to Juba I invited myself on a working trip down south, where I’ve not yet been, with a colleague who oversees my company’s education programs. The place is called Yei, and there seemed a good deal of envy and interest from my co-workers when they found out I was going. “You must try the honey!” “You will like Yei, the weather is nicer!” “It is greener and cooler than Juba, and there is much rain!” Someone even said Yei is known as “Little London” though no one could say why. Our mission: to check on the status of four young school teachers from states in the north, for whom my company is providing full scholarships at the Yei Teacher’s Training College. And some higher-ups asked me to do a little outreach on the company’s behalf at the Yei Crop Training Center and the Women’s Empowerment Program, two big projects we have supported.

We drove southwest out of Juba in a direction I had never been, skirting some low hills on the edge of town. There, the asphalt ends, and white signs stick out of the bushes marking the future sites of big new national ministries – immigration, social welfare, water resources and irrigation – they will all be out here on the edge of town in new buildings, miles away from the crowds and bustle in downtown Juba where everything is currently located. Now, though, the area is used for dumping; every 20-30 yards or so, I can see a two-wheeled track beaten through the grass and acacia shrubs and little forest enclaves strewn with thousands of flimsy empty and flattened plastic water bottles – some of them could have been mine. I admit that I don’t know where my trash goes, though there definitely is not any recycling program here. Why not? Everything is expensive here. Taking care of trash is very low on the country’s priorities list at the moment. I do, however, see a future for a recycling-based NGO.

It will be a four hour ride on very bumpy dirt roads to Yei, which is not far from the border with Uganda and the dreaded Lord’s Resistance Army rebels, possibly the most insanely inhuman rebels on earth. We are transporting the wife of the principal of the Teaching College, who has clearly done some shopping while in Juba. We load up her stuff in the back of the green Land Cruiser Prado, cushy inside but with an unwholesome smell emanating from the dashboard, apparently, on my side of the car. The further south we drive, the more jungle-like the landscape becomes. The northern areas I’ve seen have lots of savannah, but down here it is hillier, some low mountains and escarpments, and the landscape is lush, and green, and suddenly a new type of tree pops up – teak trees. There are groves and groves of them, mostly immature – harvested for buildings and furniture and flooring, certainly. I’ve not seen these trees in Juba or in the north. Other highlights of the drive: my first wild monkeys. I had not before seen monkeys in South Sudan though they are here. These are just little guys, three of them, reddish-brown, loping along like monkeys on all fours across the road, scampering into the green. And a monitor lizard, big and brown, crossed the road in front of us. My colleague says he has seen cobras out here too.

We arrive in Yei, which bears no immediately discernible resemblance to London, and interview the young teachers at the college, in a computer lab. They are tired at the end of the day and a little wary of two inquisitive guys asking a lot of questions about how they are doing. Emotionally they are fine, they say, but academically they are struggling. The college is rigorous, classes are taught in English and these young women spoke other tribal languages and Arabic mostly when they arrived. So they had language challenges in addition to adapting to a new environment far from home (they are all from the northern parts of South Sudan, culturally and ethnically distinct from the south part of South Sudan.) But they are relishing their time at college, in particular, the on-the-job training which involves teaching actual classes in Yei-area primary schools, under the observation of college instructors.

We next stopped by the Yei Crop Training Center, without an appointment, at about 6 pm. We got through the gates and drove past well-ordered plots of maize, sorghum, okra, pineapples, sesame, peanuts, eggplant and hot peppers, interspersed with papaya trees. Food is growing here, and not just staple crops, I was happy to see. Yei is known as a self-sufficient agricultural zone where small-holder famers grow a lot of food, I found out. Melons and pumpkins were growing in abundance. We found David Bala, the principal, who graciously showed us around his home on the center – he is a farmer, and he leapt at the opportunity to give us a private tour. Next to his house, I saw a papaya tree growing fruit the size and shape of nuclear missiles. His goal when he retires from teaching is to launch a pineapple farm with 4,000 pineapple plants, and to add 600 beehives for honey. I commented about his beautiful passion fruit and voila, his wife Mary, whom he calls Madame, brought out a glass pitcher of cold, bright orange passion fruit juice, squeezed from his own fruit, and cookies she baked herself. I tried some of his avocado juice, too, which was delicious and rejuvenating, and he wouldn’t let us go without taking a half-dozen ears of freshly harvested maize.

Our night in Yei was spent in the New Tokyo Hotel, billed as the nicest hotel in Yei. It was almost clean – Spartan, with no discernible Japanese influence or connection, other than the name. No internet and one channel only on the TV (reggae music videos); no AC and no hot water. But the twin-sized bed was ok and there was a working fan. I slept under a mosquito net and awoke sweaty at 1 a.m. to find the power had gone off. It came back on at 6 a.m. in the morning. I ate a boiled egg on a dry bun for breakfast with my Nescafe, and at another ag training center we picked up some honey, which indeed was good. Said a quick hello at the Women’s Empowerment Center, where war widows were running a nice micro-enterprise project (a guesthouse) on the green banks of the Yei River, and then embarked on our four-hour bump back to Juba. On the way, we successfully avoided a crazy-eyed, drunken soldier (allegiance unknown) who flagged us down for a ride that we declined to provide, without rolling down the windows, after determining he was unarmed.

Busy market, Yei (aka "Little London")

Boda guys with Man U jersey and stickers, Yei

David Bala in his eggplants, behind his house at the Yei Crop Training Center.

Field Journal: Guns, Goats and Gospel in Kuajok

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

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

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

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

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

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