Ticket to Ride

Gach told me to be there at one. I thought the executive director of our implementing partner was finally giving me some time to talk with him about my community mobilization ideas and the work I’ve been doing this week. This, of course, did not pan out. Following our 2:30 arrival and a couple of revolting photos of our impending lunch, the reason for the visit arrived around 3:30; Commander, “the big man” as they called him, of all the military of Upper Nile state (one of the ten states of South Sudan) came. It was unclear to me, as we used our fingers to slop goat, ugali, and breadsticks for lunch, the real reason for our inclusion at the function.


We doted around. I listened to stories of ostrich slaughtering. For the majority of the time, I was one of two women present in the crowd of 20 or 30 guys, half with guns. After having two stucks that morning – we attempted to use the hardtop (landcruiser) despite last night’s rain, and lo and behold, we made it about 50 yards outside the front gates of the compound before getting stuck in the mud, and then had ‘the tow’ stuck subsequently – and a few lengthy planning discussions with both my newly returned education-program officer and new arrival intern Bret, I was getting itchy to leave. I nudged and hinted. Imagine a case of Judy restaurant anxiety to the max extreme. Gach disappeared and returned to make our introductions to the Commander (though we’d been sitting adjacent to each other for what felt like hours at this point). I was presented as an American intern who would be traveling to Ethiopia tomorrow and returning the following week. Jimmy was presented as another great intern who would be traveling to Ethiopia, but onwards and home to Kenya. The commander smiled and wished us well, jesting over the two others sharing names beginning over the letter J. I gave my ubiquitous (at this point) smile and nod. Jimmy beamed. Jimmy’s ‘case’ was finally closed simply with the big man’s word, after being kept in Sudanese-legal-limbo for the past month, being prohibited from leaving and consistently harassed. His crime? Catching an unmarked vehicle – happening to be a military truck of ammunitions – in the background of a photo. Following his subsequent arrest, computer and camera confiscation, and the accusations of espionage, I can see why he’s ready to end this internship and get back to Nairobi. Please note my deserved timidity of street photography these days. Singing Jimmy Mack probably won’t be bringing my buddy back any time soon. Here’s to praying for no rain tonight so that Jimmy can drive me on a quad bike one last time (and so that we don’t travel the 25 kilometer distance to Kuergeng by foot).

Backlog, June 26: How do you keep people from selling maxi pads?

When I showed these photos to a friend online he inquired what Sudanese women do when they menstruate otherwise. Learning that many girls and women are monthly relegated to staying at home and waiting to return to the field, work, school, or town because they have no sanitary way of publicly having their period, Scott was a bit shocked. From my education-policy research in Uganda I was aware that many girls wind up dropping out of school when they reach puberty, with lack of hygienic facilities and materials bringing shame that keeps them away from books, and so this was not such a shock for me...

Some donor (collapsed institutional memory means that no one here knows who exactly…) gave SC-US about a million maxi-pads. Being the first female on site in months, I was tasked with disseminating these “comfort towels,” as they are termed by my Kenyan colleagues, to about a 150 women. After multiple quad-bike trips schlepping heaping towers of pads to the Primary Health Care Centre and mobilizing community informants to tell people to come to said PHCC to collect the goods, the good times rolled.


I’m thankful for bringing modest undergarments with me to Sudan. Rounds of demonstrating how to apply winged maxi-pads to panties, how to remove said protective barrier, and how to either drop in a latrine, burn, or bury your used product, were translated into Nuer by my faithful friend Gloria.





The distribution process was equally laughable as we tried to pack 12 packages into the skinny arms of these ladies before they signed off a photo-release and receipt of goods document.


I would just like to note that, as a friend pointed out, I never would have imagined doing this. Nor would I have ever thought myself privileged for a) having a signature (90% of these women used a small dot next to their recorded name and have never in their life signed their own name), b) having access to tampons, nor c) finding myself in a position requiring the immediate sale of these humanitarian-aid-given products because the financial value of such would be able to feed me for yet another day. Driving back home after this long morning at the piss-scented PHCC it was heartbreaking to see girls hawking their maxipads at the market. I heard some even made their way to Ethiopia already.

Cheers for non-sustainable development.

Backlog June 25: Power Trippin

This woman's simply written piece about living a rugged life in the jungle, with a tribe untouched by modernity, got to me.

Getting back to the very basics in life does give you a different perspective on things.
It's all about needs not wants.
It shows you that people are more important than things.

In a way I would like to mirror that author's sentiments, by commenting on the joys of the simple life, but the mirror is fogged a bit in this (swamp/) jungle. Superficially, there are great similarities in our experiences - we're both caught dodging away from civilization into a place where cell phones are futile, porcelain toilets are unheard of, and where the slow pace of life forces you to reconcile an internal hurry - but there is no excessive vetting needed to recognize that here, nothing is so simple, nor do the needs of people become more important to the power-holders than the need for things. I’m sure that it was for the sake of BBC’s Magazine readership that she spared comment on anything political, but I’ve got to wonder where this idyllic jungle tribe survives in a state of simplistic people-centered needs that are unfettered by violence and calamity. I sit wondering if any communities within this dark and green continent continue to exist in apolitical isolation, living untouched by the crises of the world, most specifically those of Africa, surrounding them.

Mugabe's tyrannical grip on Zimbabwe and the staggering political/election violence was the talk of our office all morning. When I inquired what he felt the bottom line of the violence, obfuscations, and unending power grasp was, a Kenyan colleague didactically asserted that the despot's rule, which brought independence to Zim, is a case of the African dictator “gone bad.” Acknowledging that power corrupts, and that the octogenarian Mugabe will keep “winning” his power until he dies or until someone kills him, my colleague told me of the theories of why he holds on so tightly and engages in such atrocities, the most amusing being that Mugabe’s current (and second) wife has become used to the lifestyle of first lady and he therefore can’t retire, before positioning that “there are so many ways to kill a rat - you can trap it, skin it, or bury it alive; do you think Garang was just an accident?”

Eventually this devolved into an hour long debate on the role (and, in turn, value) of democracy in Africa. One colleague argued, rather obstinately, that democracy was not made for this continent and that the greatest violence and human suffering came as a result of post-colonial installations of democratic systems. I asserted that this western paradigm of democracy is meant to be an equalizing force, to bring higher social, economic, and political opportunity to more and more people, ahe told me that the highest indicators of human welfare occurred under African dictators. The lightbulbs of Libya’s Qadaffi, Uganda’s Musevni, Sudan’s Bashir, and countless others went flashing in my mind at the lunacy of this comment, and I couldn’t help but inquire why this coworker was engaged in this line of work if he believes such.

What to do about Zimbabwe came back to me just as fast however. UN or an AU deposition? In the face of Iraq’s terrible failure? Colleague X argued for a return to pre-colonial borders and traditional governance structures. Not going to happen. Another suggested highly coordinated sanctions – and given the recent moves on Pyongyang, I could maybe take this as an option. Maybe it’s the voice of activists and critics that will create change (ahem, Mandela). Or maybe hitting them where it hurts is the option - nice work on that cricket ban, guys. Or maybe SADC should step it up - Gaaaaahh!

(thanks Pernille)

Whatever the answer to getting Mugs out and something sane in, I find the complexity of Mugabe’s flinchless grasp and reign of terror– in my opinion due to power hunger (and a wee bit of madness, and not just being evil, able to derive joy from hurting others, nor due simply to poverty or gullibility, as another blogger suggested) in which any means become justifiable – to exemplify why we need political structures designed to limit individually held power. Given that systems where legitimacy is derived from shared investment and participation, through which culpability is more deeply embedded, I still feel lost on my colleague's advocating for dictatorships. In a continent – and world, for that matter -plagued by densely concentrated power holders, how can progress be felt in any other way but democracy?

Garrison Keillor put it far more eloquently than I am able:

"The fear of catastrophe could chill the soul but the social compact assures you that if the wasps come after you, if gruesome disease strikes down your child, if you find yourself hopelessly lost, incapable, drowning in despair, running through the rye toward the cliff, then the rest of us will catch you and tend to you and not only your friends but We the People in the form of public servants. This is a basic necessity in a developed society. If you are saddled with trouble too great for a person to bear, you will not be left to perish by the roadside in darkness. Without that assurance, we may as well go live in the woods and take our chances. This is Democratic bedrock: we don't let people lie in the ditch and drive past and pretend not to see them dying."

And while I agree with Friedman’s op-ed this morning, and believe that “people have to fight and win their own freedom, and that’s what gives their institutions legitimacy,” I think people – and sovereignty arguments - reach a breaking point. Give us all a break Mugabe.

Anyway, here is an interesting online community of Zimbabwean activists: http://kubatanablogs.net/kubatana/

Kombo and Jeff, I’m thinking of you and yours and hope for positive changes for your homeland.

“mystery brews interest”

In so many ways Sudan is a mysterious beast of a place. The brewing interests, stewing curiosities, and evolving complexities are forcing me to reevaluate and conceptualize things in new ways. The construction outside of my bedroom that begins at sunrise is ok, serving as an alarm clock, but an alarm clock I don’t really need, as for the first time ever, my body wants to sleep at midnight and wants to wake with the sun. Emerging at meetings caked in mud and grass isn’t a bother, as the bumpy quad-bike ride to reach said destination means a smile-and-wave, street-parade-esque, celebratory procession through town and my ego inflates beyond bother of mud. On the same note, my hair, breasts, and wardrobe have become obsolete markers of my identity, and – given that there are no mirrors here – I am ascribing very little of myself to much more than my ideas, understandings, and ability to transcend (even if only temporarily, thanks) these demarcations. I’m seeing the frog that lives in my bathing quarters as a symphonic accoutrement to the crickets, and the fireflies occasionally trapped in my mosquito net as a bit magical. Shy adolescents are opportunities to create changes – and my colleagues’ incessant, and sometimes annoying, discourse on American politics and the current campaigns as indicators of globalizing progress.

Things are still all types of screwed up, all around me, and I’ve not gone blind. But I’m easing into things, thankfully. Yesterday I visited one of the early-childhood-development centres that SC-USA has “constructed.” I use quotes as the center is little more than the fruits of an individual’s inspiration and Save has merely smacked their proverbial label on the outside. I haven’t seen much other work that can be attributed to the org on this project, aside from the construction of a latrine that I saw children urinating IN FRONT of. Accordingly, in reassessing, it would seem that I have come here in order to get the ball rolling. In a long-winded blog post I wrote in MS Word, and lost before posting when my laptop died, I examined the essential role of education in redeveloping the socio-economic fabric of communities. I don’t have time for that now, but will say that in this country, with some of the lowest social and economic indicators in the world – where a woman is more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than complete primary school (1:9 vs 1:100) and where there is less than a half kilometer of paved road in the entire country – and where tensions between those returning from exile and those who stayed and fought the war are rife, there is a lot to do be ‘done’ in the realm of community building and implementation of an education system.

That said, I’m working to create and empower or mobilize a group of community stakeholders (parents, teachers, religious leaders, members of the government, etc) to collectively determine the education needs and opportunities for the youngest members of society. Monday I visited the ECD centre that is currently serving hundreds of kids, without trained teachers, proper facilities, materials, or curriculum. Part of my vision for the core community group is developing the capacity of individuals to construct these elements, as well as develop their sense of ownership and responsibility concerning the education of the next generation. At the centre I was able to discuss this with the current administration and a group of parents present as volunteer child-care providers. The photos below are more telling than my words at this hour. For the record, and for those who haven’t yet realized, clicking on any of the photos will take you to my photo website where I have uploaded additional images that I’m not posting here.

I was graciously welcomed to the group with some great singing and clapping. Jimmy snapped this one:

In the center is KK, the jump-starter of the entire initiative as the ECD program founder. Following the return of so many refugees from Ethiopia, with children of all ages who had been deprived the opportunity to learn, he first began gathering children informally to sing, play, and engage with each other. Now, in partnership with a local NGO (our implementing partner, Nile Inter-Development Programme - NIP) and with SAVE, we're working to build the facility and local community at the same time. He’s a polio survivor and a dynamic guy, to say the least…


The lack of material goods is a serious barrier - one small blackboard for a group of twenty children is far from efficient. I'm working on securing educational toys, games, books, and implements in the near future…learning under a tree is fine on dry days only. Part of the goal of the parent discussion group will be to cultivate traditional toys and educational approaches and incorporate these methods into more modern practices. Likewise, I'm looking to link the education program and the local health care facilities with an efficient referral and documentation system.


A snap from the first meeting with parents, teachers, and school administration to discuss program goals... the guy in the tracksuit is the assistant headmaster. Not pictured, but essential was my translator Simon. I have no idea if he's actually translating, ftw.


Here are a few additional shots from today's visit to an adult education program – English lessons – led voluntarily by a Kenyan man working for NIP. I'm hoping to involve these parents in the community discussion group mentioned above.



Finally, in case you haven't believed me about the mud, here are some shots from first thing this morning!



So here's to this mysterious girl from NY brewing interest in Pagak. Cheers from the bush, y'all.

One of the best, and only, outings to be had in Pagak is a trip for Ethiopian coffee. Thus far I've visited two different homesteads for this thick, caffeinated delight, but this visit was more delightful given the company and entertainment.

goodnight moon

My mom told me to buck up - for public image - so I'm going to try and stop bitching as much about this crazy semi-autonomous polity.

The first weekend here was relaxing and full of frenzied football watching. The generator stays on late, and the TV serves as the biggest community builder I can think of. Maybe that's what all of SS needs. Lots of boob tubes!

When the generator is off I spend my time distracting myself from myself. During the electricity (and internet) free periods of time this weekend I was to be found doing one of the following: napping (something I am enjoying for the first time since highschool), exercising (ok, dancing like a fool to whatever electro-mashup I can pull from this external harddrive or yoga-ing on the dirty floor), bathing (bucket style, sometimes with hot water from the boiler) reading (in the middle of Dark Star Safari and The Emperor's Children), or complaining to Laura (what will I do when you leave next week!?) who thankfully commissioned someone to prepare doro wat for dinner and subsequently approved Wat as an accepted scrabble entry. Friday afternoon I did take a stroll through 'town' - which is a collection of empty mud/wooden stalls, drunk men, and kids smiling at me - and enjoyed a nice hot Bedele.

I'm excited for tomorrow, when I will be distributing about a million maxi-pads. Evidently SAVE has had them, ready for dissemination, for a few months but there hasn't been a gender-appropriate person to do the work, heh. I wonder what exactly this work entails. I brought some markers and colored pencils - maybe posters?

In other good news, I'm looking forward to August travels in Ethiopia with my good friend, Luellen, who is working there this summer on an education project. In researching our potential itinerary I stumbled upon wiki-travel. Any tourists looking for insights concerning Sudan shouldn't hesitate to tour this entry! Love the warning at the top and found the link to the Juba travel guide worth a read as well.

Electricity is waning and a muddy trek back to my casa is in store. Adios internets.

Fallacious Logic

Capacity building isn’t pointless, and it never will be, but it sure seems like a NGO paradigm that is yet to be applicable to parts of South Sudan. It’s much more depressing here than I was anticipating. Or at least I’m feeling more depressed than I anticipated. My hopes for an uplifting experience, which would let me feel connected to the work that I am pursuing through graduate studies, are being muddied. The idea of doing this type of work for the next 20 to 30 years is disturbing. I don’t want to sound as cynical as a I do, and nothing particularly bad has happened to me that is making me say this, I’m just realizing that to rebuild society in a post conflict situation like this one is unbelievably difficult.

Facebook updates from friends touting their fantastic summer internship experiences – through which they are seeing the fruits of their labors and efforts – from Nigeria to Cambodia to Brazil have left me as smug as I felt during my first encounters with the Economic and Political Development program at SIPA during orientation, when all others were beamy and delighted. Perhaps I’m not cut from the same block of marble as these sustainable development folk, nor the same block of steel as the rugged humanitarian aid people. I wish that I had left NY in better spirits so that I was more eager to return there in the fall, and felt more inspired by my career choice. I’m too young to feel this depressive about my future, right? So where does this leave me? I can’t articulate a ‘skill set’ pertinent to the for-profit sector, working for the government (should my countrymen fail me in November) is something I don’t see myself interested in, and the prospect of a desk job at a foundation is panic inducing. Maybe I’ll be able to perpetuate this protection-arts-refugees-community building thing for a bit longer, but it’s all a bit unclear and confounding in the face of such distress.

I’ve begun denouncing logic. Boss-man told me from day one that it’s not exactly applicable nor employed by the community here. David Byrne is echoing through my mind.

Whatever the case, my oft astounding naivety is humbling and there have been some fortuitously uplifting encounters. One of our partners called my idea to lead discussion groups with both adolescent and adult women concerning what is important to them, using a female translator, brilliant. I’ve received good feedback for my plans to develop a visual arts project as part of the shared education and health program social marketing campaign. Last week’s meetings with UNHCR’s education department, UNICEF, and the Ministry of Education were close to encouraging. And some of the Nyas agreed that I should have my hair braided in the local fashion; what do you think?

World Refugee Day

If you spend one day per year thinking about the nearly 40 million people that have been displaced from their homes and livelihoods by war, conflict, disaster, and persecution, make it today.

The high commissioner of the United Nations agency for refugees - UNHCR - visited the world's largest refugee camp, calling for attention to the plight of those so often left voiceless.
.

Angelina upped the ante with her video:


Even Facebook is letting you give a hand!

life in Pagak

I can’t stop thinking about my six summers in Minnesota. Pagak is like sleep-away camp in that I’m spending plenty of time in the sun, walking around in tevas or riding a quad bike, discovering new breeds of spiders, and there are plenty of little fires around me. The smell of Ethiopian food, distinct lack of sailboats and Jewish girls, and my visit to a PHCC/VCT (Primary Health Care Centre/Voluntary Counseling and Testing) clinic today should be enough to remind me that I’m no where near Cass Lake. But it’s still a bit fun in a cheeky kind of way. I’m sure it will hit me by tomorrow – after a subsequent day of goat and using a wooden-box-sitting latrine – that this is no paradise (haha) but until then, I’ll keep this plastered smile.

It seems like my little house is one of maybe 15 permanent structures in the entire ‘town,’ with the others belonging to other iNGO compounds or facilities they’ve developed within the community itself. Even the local government is housed in a traditional structure. My space is great though - it’s bigger than my apartment in NY, far more light and airy, and I’ve got room for sleepovers if any of y’all want to visit. I can’t stress enough how delighted I am with my battery powered i-pod speaker, nor how I consistently surprise myself with the fluctuations in my cleanliness standards (note, Emily, there are no Clorox wipes here). It looks like there is a blood stain on my curtain.

The compound has about five of these small houses, four other tukuls, a few unnamed structures, including a chicken shack, and then a central area with the office, kitchen, ‘store,’ and canteen or dining hall. It seems that all Nuer women’s names begin with Nya, making it a challenge to remember names and properly communicate with our support staff of cleaning and cooking ladies - Nyanaka, Nyamwuon, Nyapuka, Nyarwach, Nyalwal, Nyamwach, and Nyaduoth – oh and that only one speaks English compounds that difficulty. No worries. A big smile and guffaw gets me far. The dining hall was under renovation today; I should have inquired how frequently the place gets remudded. Again, huge language barrier. Zoom into grandma-in-red’s outfit; talk about easy access!




Some shots around the compound:

Jimmy, another intern, brought me to the health center that ‘we’ have put in place, though Save isn’t operating it directly, and it is under the control of the local health ministry, if you will. I say this, because it functions at a depressingly low capacity. The nine to five, five days a week signage, made me ask him, “What happens if someone is really sick?” he straight-forwardly replied, “they die.”




On that note, Kate wrote a really beautiful and striking piece about health and the massive implications on human, social, and economic development:

Think about the last time you were sick...
I mean really sick, with something infectious. None of that stuffy nose and cough type thing. What was it? The flu? Strep throat? What if it was tuberculosis? Or malaria? Or leprosy? Or river blindness? In the short time I've been here I have seen more people with diseases that have been entirely or mostly eradicated from the North (or the West, however you like to phrase it) than I can count. After seeing a blind man making his way along the main road by himself with nothing but a stick, it was explained to me that river blindness has left 1/4 of the people in villages nearby blind. One in four people. Take a minute to think about that. If 1/4 people in the US were blind how would it impact our capacity to run our government, let alone our economy. …. So if 25% of the population has river blindness, and the leprosy rate is somewhere between 10 and 30%, and 70% of the world's remaining burden of Guinea Worm is in South Sudan, not to mention the worms crawling around in the bellies of most kids (ring worm (okay it's a fungus, still pertinent) is particularly obvious as you see kids with black hair with white polka dots), the micronutrient and calorie deficiencies of kids and whole families. The list goes on. Where does that leave the people living here? There is development under way and with immunizations slowly becoming commonplace there are less disease outbreaks, and the menningitis and measles outbreak that occurred last year was contained relatively quickly with the efforts of NGOs, the government and the community. But even so, the impact that ill health can have on development has never been more apparent. Consider that many micronutrient deficiencies can lead to slowed mental development and mental retardation if not corrected within the first years of life, or that anemia makes children and adults alike tired, think more slowly and have less energy for daily activities. You have a huge proportion of the population that is entirely absent from productive activities because of their health. So, as many workshops as you do and as much capacity as you build in the community, the physical capability of the population is severely limited by its ill health. …. But then there's nodding disease. Ever heard of it? That's because it only exists in South Sudan and no one knows what causes it. It mostly affects young children, causes seizures that make the children look like they're nodding, and leads to mental retardation, and then as it progresses is almost 100% fatal. A few people are studying it, google it for some more in depth info. But I've visited schools and looked at the rosters and you see so many kids listed as "nodding" or having "fits". So if you've got all the issues listed above, plus anywhere from 5-25% of your children will have retarded mental development or will most likely die, it's just one more giant pothole in the pathway to development. So, for anyone who wonders what on earth I'm doing in South Sudan, it's doing the first survey in memory of the health status of Southern Sudanese children in this county. And hopefully, as with all data, it will be put to good use, will move and inspire donors and other organizations, and all the other big things I imagine happening. But at the very least, the kids here won't be invisible anymore, because someone will have documented what it's like to live here.

home in Pagak

Midnight - June 18:

They just cut the generator and I can only hear crickets, bats, and the occasional mosquito. It’s great. Pagak is even breezy. The soil is black and the kids have bugs in their eyes, but for the most part I feel substantially calmer here than in Juba. At 7:30 this morning I heard our support staff loading the landcruiser and knew the time had come – by 9 we were in the air after a short and breezy security check at Juba International Airport in which I had to show no ID. The views from the air were verdant and sprawling – we flew low given the size of the Cessna Caravan plane – and again I felt a bit of serenity in this crazy country that I’ve done so much griping about.

The views of the
Sobat river, which flows into the Nile, were breathtaking, as I sat listening to my ipod reading Dark Star Safari.





A quick dive to see the muddiness factor, and a loop over Ethiopia, brought us home to Pagak! It was awesome seeing peoples’ faces from the windows of the plane as we landed, and a bit of a warmer welcome than I am accustomed to. A two-minute walk from the airstrip and I was already within the office compound. Pagak is tiny.

Pagak is complex. The boss-man here explained to me that nearly 50% of the population is part of the military and that the bulk of the people don’t feel that the war is actually over. Security seems relatively fine, though there are, as he put it, plenty of “funny militias” just over the border in Ethiopia, where the people are ethnically the same as those of this part of Sudan. Secessionist tensions – against the Ethiopian government – are aplenty. I’ll have to post more on this later – internet is about to peace out!

trapped in Juba

Juba jail:



I was supposed to be writing this from Pagak, and for that matter I was supposed to be writing this from my laptop. But, as I’m realizing, little in this country comes to fruition as planned (abyei CPA failure?). My excuse for the delay in updating this blog and responding to respective emails: my laptop bit the dust. Week one in Sudan, woohoo!! Thanks Noah for encouraging me to be demanding; I’m now writing from a work computer (windows – yuck!) and my lovely MAC is en route to Nairobi, though something tells me it wont be functioning til the end of August upon my return to NY. To continue the cynicism/irritation: heavy rains and bad logistics have resulted in three flight cancellations and so, I’m still in Juba, unsure of when the next charter flight (a Buffalo cargo plane) will take off. I’m totally ready to get out of this crazy shit hole. Summering in Sudan is a lil like summering in NY, in that I went dancing in a tanktop and open toed shoes, spent time on the water, and bar-b-qued with friends, but honestly, I really just can’t wait to get to Pagak (my field site in Upper Nile) so that I can start working. Despite having a good number of new comrades, and a handful of old, I’ve been more or less consistently on edge since arriving. The cadre of 15 y/o boys with AK47s, the impossibly slow internet, movement restrictions, and lack of work for me to engage in, is taking its toll.

Laptop gaffe aside, I’ve been spending too much time on the computer. This is partly due to the fact that it takes roughly a minute to get any website to load but also because I feel like I don’t have anything else to do, which if you know me at all, you know that my impatience grows exponentially with downtime and that I do not handle boredom well. Shit, I certainly didn’t come to Sudan because I have a penchant for inactivity. I’m growing frustrated that my work for the past two weeks has involved reviewing project documents that amass to little more than rhetoric. I have a hard time imagining that the data and information I am looking for – who are our partners? What are our defined expectations of said partners? Who is and how many are being served? What has actually happened over this grant period? How many trainings have occurred? What documents were involved in those trainings? What are the national policy frameworks in place supporting this engagement? What did that consultant do? – is simply non-existent. How could this organization not have reporting frameworks for such a big project?

I’m desperate to get to the field, meet the education manager, talk with people on the ground, and figure out what is actually going on. I suppose these calamities are endemic to this part of the world, at least at this point in time. NGO politics and government politics (which in this case are more or less enmeshed in NGO politics, as so many of the government’s ministries are propped by NGOs on the ground) aside – Sudan is a straight up incredibly difficult place to be. I never knew how severe seasons could be and no-one has hesitated to tell me how impenetrable the rainy season in Pagak will be. The rains begin in June and every day until September, the skies drop more and more. I’m told that I wont be able to leave the compound for days and weeks on end and that the likelihood of me being able to leave (given the mud that prevents both cars from driving and planes from landing) the village drops exponentially as the summer moves towards fall. I am beginning to ask why exactly, knowing that essential to community development work is access to the community, the country director accepted an intern to this location during this season. The how of departure (medical emergency departures, that is) was already answered; UNMIS will rescue me and their helicopters don’t have to actually land…

Mike reminded me that my life here is as worthless as anyone else’s (thanks, bud…) and today, on the two year anniversary of my step-sister’s tragic death, I am thankful for the opportunities and protection that I’ve been afforded. Knowing full well that I am not here to fix or save Sudan, I will try and take this for what it is and shut my face up long enough to appreciate the undeniable opportunity for learning that I have. It’s times like now where believing in God would make things make more sense in a way. My newest friend, Sammy, has a profound belief in God, and for one of the first times, I don’t find it unsettling. Sam’s story and life is nothing short of incredible. He fled his home in Bor, in Jonglei state, where John Garang (former leader of the SPLA/leader of the secessionist movement of south Sudan) was from, with his younger brother, barefoot with other children in 1987. It was the last time he saw his father alive and the last time seeing his mother or home for nearly 20 years. After 8 days and nights of walking/running through the jungle – no roads then either - to the sounds of gun shots, bombings and air raids, he reached a refugee settlement established for youth in Ethiopia. When war broke in Ethiopia he moved, again by foot, with others to Kakuma camp in Kenya. Thus far his story is not unique – there were over 350,000 stories like this from southern Sudan alone, not including the millions who were internally displaced – but it was hearing this story from a man my age, who is now my colleague, who’s brother was resettled in the US, but who himself was unable to be resettled because of a database spelling error in his name/ID cards, who put himself through school and university in exile and alone without family, who has now returned to his own country as a logistics manager for a huge international NGO with aims to go to law school and become a politician in the near future, and who has the most positive outlook and earnest, soulful expression of anyone I’ve ever met, that really effected me. I’ve heard the first part of Sam’s story multiple times and read it even more often. I’ve worked with resettled refugees and in refugee camps. But it was this time that I felt his story and felt the conviction of southern Sudanese. I suppose that it’s this sentiment that leaves me with an iota of hope for this place – and a taste of the sweet irony of the arrogance of ‘empowerment’ and ‘capacity building’ programs that cant even put a basic assessment together.

Here are some photos from screwy Juba – that I had to take from the window of a moving vehicle lest my camera be confiscated... Send me good thoughts.

Street scenes:
There aren’t too many streets lined with shops in the part of town where I am living, but if you drive through rocking “downtown Juba” you’re sure to find many storefronts to this effect:


You’ll undoubtedly encounter plenty of mud and reckless trash/pollution - this is a beyond mild example:


Not entirely sure what these rocks are used for, or if they are sold by weight within the emptied jerry can, but thought the scene photo-worthy:


Street scene, a shot of what I am told is the old Juba movie theatre:


typical local homes - tukuls made of mud, grass and generally whatever plastic sheeting is available: