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!
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