i <3 NY

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Originally uploaded by judester1213.

I tried to leave today.
The plane didn't come.
It would seem I love Pagak.

not exactly.

Backlog, 3 pm, today

A lot of friends have written about their monumentally moving experiences this summer, these Hakuna-Matata, revelatory moments where all the synapses are in sync and the linkages that traverse humanity glow vividly under the sub-Saharan sun. I’ve just been complaining and posting photos, it would seem. Today was somehow the same as any other day here and at the same time a tad bit different.

I’ve been struggling to write a success story – max 600 words – for the past three hours. This is both a result of my incorrigible distractability – ooh new news in the google reader! A bird I don’t yet have a photograph of in the waterhole! FACEBOOK!! – and that it’s really hard to write this narrow focused piece giving a succinct example of our organization's direct impact on one individual. The writing style requested is completely not my own and the content requested isn’t something I’ve thoroughly borne witness to either.

So I moved to my room to try and write from there. All of a sudden a foreign sound filled the air: a tiny charter plane was descending! I looked at the computer calendar to make sure I hadn’t insanely confused the days. Charters come on Thursdays. No movement. Today is Wednesday. I looked up and blinked: it's really a plane and it's landing. I ran to find Joseph who was running toward me, shouting, “Pack your bags! You go! I’ll go tell them you’re coming!”

I darted for my external harddrive and scrambled to back things up from the comp I’ve been using since mine died my first week in Sudan. I started cramming lenses and ipods and prescription drugs into my neatly and anticipatorily-well-folded clothes. I ran and grabbed all my wet clothes off the line and was ready to use the latrine one last time when I heard the propellers. I climbed atop the big mound of dirt adjacent to our toilets and saw Joseph amongst the 75+ onlookers surrounding the plane. A military man yelled at the kids to scram out of the way of the excitingly foreign technological delight while I stood watching from inside the fence that separates our compound from the airstrip.

For about 60 seconds I had one of those feelings of hakuna-matata connectedness.

Though we were physically separated by a dilapidated fence and some muddy puddles, I stood with those kids, gazed silently while berated by the general, and watched the world take off in front of us, with no one to grab and nowhere to go and nothing to say but to utter a slight sigh as it left us longing for something more.

The rain started falling as soon as the plane lifted and the moment in which I felt the weight of the world outside coming and going passed just as quickly as it had come. All the onlookers began running for shelter as their likely only t-shirt became instantly saturated; Nyaraka ran to hand me an umbrella and my gumboots. She took my wet clothes and walked barefoot through the mud.

It’s still raining an hour later. If the other charter lands tomorrow I’ll get on and go, and leave this place and these people like so many before me have done. Maybe in a week’s time, or a month’s or a year’s, I’ll think about Pagak, never really missing the place, but with a slight sigh at the tragedy of waiting for something that never comes. And I’ll feel I accomplished so little for this place, seeing that I can’t even write a one page story on the lives affected, except my own.

lots o pop

Today was really stressful, but somehow popcorn made it alright. I had been holding the precious kernels since Nairobi and had basically forgotten them in my suitcase. And yes that means I'm packing up in Pagak. I'm writing final reports, burning CDs of photos for nearly everyone that knows me, and enjoying some good pre-departure hijinks. Joseph broke out the Ethiopian wine and East African tunes.

It's time to return to the partying - before we cut power - enjoy the fruits of globalization:





and my absolute favorite:

blabberings in the middle of the mud

So, I've been watching alot of Ultimate Survival instead of blogging. My life seems pretty pale in the face of Bear's adventures. Things are really just kind of calm and boring here lately, and I guess that is symbolic of the sense of comfort I'm feeling with everything here in Pagak. Of course comfort isn't the right word, and of course I am only feeling this way because I'm leaving here this week. But it's been decent to try and take in Africa and just roll with the punches a bit... I'll update you, dear blog, with details of my hard work soon. But for now, just a bit of my daily appreciations:

The upside of rain:




dinner party - nyama choma! - Jean's going away party, for the plane that didn't land:




The three stooges that make life entertaining:


Fun times in the middle of the night and the crazy things that come out of zero light pollution:

saturation point

It’s crazy to think I’m supposed to leave Pagak one week from today. I say supposed to as I’m really beginning to doubt this will happen. It’s been raining every day for the past week. Not a little drizzle to be easily dodged with an umbrella, but a mean, drenching, overwhelming downpour. The sky turns black and dumps the weight of a thousand swimming pools all over our mud houses. We sit and wait. The satellite internet doesn’t really work under these clouds. The mud is too deep to use the quadbikes, let alone the hardtop (landcruiser).
Thanks Bret for the shots.







The mud-walk at least has some cardiovascular benefits: schlepping through the shin-high sludge of black-cotton soil is work. And today I’m thankful for even those few minutes of work – experienced only as I stop reading my novel to trek to the bathroom across the compound - as the rain has limited the opportunities I have for engaging in my actual work. The art workshops have been on hold. It’s hard to draw on A4 paper under a monsoon. It’s impossible to ask mamas and babies to sit and talk about the value of school and communities when the earth below is not solid enough to sit on. It’s hard to write reports on an electricity-dependent computer when the generator is breaking down and your fuel supply has been flooded with rain water (for the record, we’ve evidently got less than a week’s worth of fuel supply remaining).

My departure plans are further muddied. Not remembering the size of international visas and the oft recklessness of immigration officers who stamp your passport upon arrival, my passport was nearly filled after arriving in Nairobi. I tried to get extra pages in Addis during the last visit to Ethiopia, but time and political circumstances limited this option. There is neither an American consulate nor embassy in Juba, and I’m not allowed into the north to visit our offices in Khartoum, at which I would be able to have additional pages added to my document. And so, I’ve sent my passport with Gach, our local partner, through Ethiopia to Nairobi where Josephat is purportedly going to the Embassy.

Now this is where it gets complicated. Gach is meant to return to Pagak next Friday (August 1) and I am meant to leave for Juba next Thursday (July 31) if the UNWFP flight is able to land (which is only willing to do without rains like this and hence unlikely). As the flight is domestic I don’t need the passport to travel to Juba, but I will need one to leave, requiring that my passport be sent directly from Nairobi (or Addis, depending upon where Gach is) to Juba.

An alternative: talk of a charter plane from Juba, bringing long-awaited drugs and ECD materials to Pagak has been brimming for months, but has recently (as in within the past two days) been set ablaze following heated threats against our program staff for "neglect to care" for the community. An intern trying to get out of the field is certainly a valid consideration for sending a plane, and a hospital without drugs for eight months is rightfully of concern, but it is evidently the threatening that raises the urgency of getting the charter here. If the supplies can be mobilized, and the charter is physically able to land, then I can hope for this second option of transport to Juba. But the two logisticians in Juba are both conveniently on R&R, and each time I call HQ to discuss this with support staff, the satphone connection snaps.

The other remaining possibility is to get myself back to Ethiopia (at this point - given the condition of the roads - on foot), both without passport and visa, in hopes of meeting Gach (to collect the passport), while he's in transit at the local Gambella airport, flying from Gambella to Addis, and then Addis to Juba to debrief, and then back to Addis, from where I am meant to fly to Dubai – which ultimately will cost the organization an extra $1500 USD.

If this saga has been confusing to you, take comfort knowing that I am still confused as well. This serves both as an update on my status (or lack thereof) and a clue to the tremendous challenges of coordination and the realities of my whereabouts. When I bitch and moan with cynicism about the lack of action and my impotency in creating deliverables, I will re-read this entry. I’m also planning to mentally re-echo what I’ve been repeatedly told: Upper Nile is the most difficult state in which to work or see changes in South Sudan. Regardless of it not being my fault, I’m growing tired of being stuck in the mud.

p.s. And while I’ve written on the afflictions of the community facing the move from recipients of emergency-relief to participants in development, and we feel it internally with the heavier organizational prioritization in logistical coordination than in programmatic application, the coordination is abysmally low. How have we gotten to the point of 8 months without drugs and to one week’s worth of diesel?

backlog: deworm this

I’ve been reading around 20 news articles a day on the Bashir indictment. And I’ve been following mass emails from my girl Gabi who has recently returned home to Zimbabwe. And I’m talking with colleagues about their crazy days back in ‘Mogs’ (Mogadishu). But there is nothing like a de-worming event with 200 worm-infested kids to make you feel the wrath of mother Africa during July.




What started as a seemingly benign ‘health action event’ (remember the maxipads?), in which mosquito nets and de-worming medications were to be disseminated to children attending the ECD centre, with welcome songs from children being busied and proper use of bed-nets being modeled, eventually became a mad scramble. We started at the centre around ten simply explaining the link between children's health and wellness and their ability to do well in school. I got a few decent portraits in the early moments, when expectations, and accordingly spirits, mine included, were high:






The following four hours were perhaps my most stressful in Africa. Worse than an econ exam: I had translators and mamas and old men and babies crying for drugs left and right. I actually found myself practicing deep breathing exercises and replaying the lyrics to a favourite song in my head in between herding angry people into different groups for registration and distribution. I have no idea what I was expecting, but a semblance of order and organization was somehow part of that vision. Evidently they were part of my camera’s sensor as well, though, I swear these photos don’t do justice to the chaos that was a result of our poor planning.




As per colleagues' suggestions, I'm trying to reassess the successes here. We DID get essential drugs into the gritty hands and mouths of kids needing to be dewormed. About 200 of the 300+ people will now be protected by insecticide treated bednets. While we didn't necessarily accomplish the registration goals I had in my head, and the linkages between the ECD centre and the health centre are still slight, I DID learn a thing or two about planning in advance (and how many people will show up when promised new goodies).

Sigh...

NGO coordination? I think not!

UNICEF stole our thunder!! Donors are visiting a local/Sudanese Indigenous NGO (SINGO – my new favourite acronym), and said SINGO showed up at the Save-the-Children pre-school facilities about thirty minutes before our planned parent meeting. The teachers and parents were swooped up. We waited and tried to tell the unengaged ‘care-givers’ that hitting children with sticks does not add up to giving care. Our cross-
cultural sign-language wasn’t so effective needless to say. After a series of pictures of portraits of cute lil kids, the donors were ready to go and it would seem our golden moment had arrived. Wrong! It was spontaneously lunch-time (or as the case may realistically be, the one meal these kids eat per day). The WFP distribution is evidently supporting a make-shift school feeding programme (which, in my opinion we should be privy to, given that the entire centre is a save-program, in theory). At least some folk got what they came for. Meeting postponed round 3.

art days

It’s good to be able to answer the question “What can I do or bring that another person (another intern?) can not?” with an action that you really enjoy. It’s also really great to feel experiences transforming your understandings, in real time, on a day-to-day basis.

I find it rather amazing that my experiences with Sudanese youth are coming full circle through markers and cameras, despite the fact that I’m a terrible artist. In January of 2003 the youth program coordinator of Refugee Family Services told me that once I began working with refugees I wouldn’t ever stop. New to Atlanta, finding that my new University lacked both fine arts and communications departments, I was seeking some way to get my feet on the ground. I never though a monster-track advert for judging a children’s art contest would lead me to where I am, but as per her predictions (and after two years volunteering as an art teacher, then a year of research looking at refugees’ art and photography as a tool for community building, followed by teaching art in refugee and IDP camps in Uganda), here I am in Sudan teaching art to returning refugees.

Over the past week and a half, I’ve been holding daily sessions with anywhere from 10 to 25 adolescents. The objective of the engagement has evolved in parallel to their expressiveness and excitement. What began as an activity to get me out of the compound for a bit in the afternoon has grown into a support structure for our social marketing agenda for the early-childhood education work and community mobilization ideology.

Self-portraits were the first step in getting these ‘kids’ – some former soldiers, some orphaned, some attending school, all survivors of war and returning refugees – to open up and think about how visuals and pictures can help us share ideas and feelings with other people.

Experience has shown me that it’s best to embarrass myself before expecting others to do the same:






I initially found myself feeling intimidated by the age of these participants – in the past I’ve worked almost exclusively with young people between the ages of 8 and 13. Despite being much closer to me in age – ranging between 15 and 28 – the image quality and sophistication was quite similar to that of previous students. My guess is that extremely limited exposure to visual arts as well as limited participatory involvement in the arts are to blame. The biggest difference however was the sense of humour and intellectual engagement with the workshop’s agenda.





Over the next few days our subject matter evolved. The following assignment was a depiction of our respective experiences of education. For many this meant formal school buildings in Ethiopia, for others, images depicted where they found themselves before being in school, and accordingly, what school/formal education had brought to their life. Following this, we focused on how to represent the ideal school, and what educational institutions should look like. Some of these pictures really impressed me – ranging from students aspiring for masters degrees, which represent the epitome of educational attainment (snarky har har from me on this one), to images of diverse student bodies, indicating a sense of cross-cultural acceptance, unity through the equalizing structure of education, and progress over tribal differences that abound here.

If nothing else, the kids like me and it’s good to make some friends here:






Diversity at school:




We next explored how the community can support the educational development of youth – the crux of my research and interests for my summer stint in Sudan. The images and dialogue, masterfully recorded/transcribed by Bret, were nothing short of awesome; the ideas and vision that these ‘youth’ have is incredible. It’s great when you approach something thinking that you have to explain it, slowly, and repeatedly through haphazard translation, but people actually get it. Like, really, truly, get it.




They told me how the parents must come together and meet to plan how to physically support (build) the schools, provide the food at the schools, and make demands of the government for trained teachers. The images showed people coming together through opportunities like sporting events, which could also serve as a forum to resolve conflicts and disputes. I was told that the community must demand the schools be located close to homes/villages so people can attend (there is only a primary school system here; students aspiring to attend school after grade six must either return to Ethiopia – a financial impossibility for most – or attend secondary school in neighbouring Maiwut town (22 km away) - a logistical impossibility for the others). Some pictures showed the lifestyle before school in which children found themselves sitting and eating mangoes all day; with school to attend for the children, parents must take responsibility for some of the work, such as firewood collection, fishing, digging, to maintain the way of life in the community, that the youth otherwise take responsibility for.

I find myself continually humbled by the simple privilege of education.

This of course has not been problem free. The ever present ‘dependency syndrome’ I’ve written on, a somewhat natural by-product of receiving aid (i.e. living in an environment in which basic necessities - that we in the west tend to turn a blind, unappreciative eye toward – like housing, food, water, pens, soap, glasses, vitamins, can not only be obtained, but are provided for free by the humanitarian community), is making its cruel mark on this project. We’ve stalled for the past 48 hours. The participants took issue with the motive of the program; fear that I’m a researcher not offering remuneration for their service and commitment, concern that this training merits financial compensation, and general confusion as to the purpose of the work, have made me look quite critically at a multitude of factors. We met again today and I explained the voluntary nature on both of our parts, apologetically accepting the poor job of explanation I may have done, trying to justify my position by telling them of the fluid and organic development of the activity. We’re on track for a few more workshops with a big finale in the works.

Stay tuned!