Into the Bush

Finally, after an exhaustingly long day traipsing all over the State of Jonglei monitoring distribution of mosquito nets, I was able to crawl under my mosquito net at the Freedom Hotel and collapse into bed. Sleep came quickly, deep, and long. Until first light when my subconscious started picking up something in the distance. I have been in Sudan long enough to know when I hear that noise that it is NOT fireworks, and apparently I was still not tricked in my half-asleep, half-awake state. Granted, I very, very rarely hear that noise. But no, these were definitely gunshots. Still not wanting to open my eyes I listened to the pattern. PA PA PA PA PA. Then after a few seconds’ pause, from a bit farther away, pa pa pa pa pa. Then even closer, PA PA PA PA PA.

At this point my mind shook off the rest of the sleep and I opened my eyes. Oh right! Today, May 16^th, is SPLM day. “Into the Bush” day. Commemorating the day in 1983 when the South took up arms against the North by going into the bush (basically the wilderness) and fighting back. And how do we celebrate holidays in Sudan? By firing our weapons. Oh yes, on Christmas, New Years, and, apparently, SPLM Day, soldiers and civilians everywhere shoot their AK-47s off with glee with complete disregard to what happens to the bullets once they are fired up into the air. At 6:03am in Bor Town, the capital of Jonglei State and the home town of many of the SPLA leadership, it sounded like everyone was getting in on the action. The number of guns being fired increased, always in a call-and-response pattern.

My boss (the head of our office) as well as someone in the HR department from my organization's DC Headquarters was also on this trip, but staying at another hotel on the opposite side of town. Just to be sure, I sent them a text: “Please tell me this is because of SPLM day, right?” a few seconds later came the response, “Oh right. I hadn’t thought of that. Good I’m glad it sounds like it is really close over here.” I should mention that I was staying in a room in an actual building that the hotel had just opened the week before – usually hotels in the field are really just tents. My boss and the HR guy were staying in tents. Not somewhere you want to be when bullets are being shot up into the air!

Now this hotel had very good security – several guards on duty at all times. One of these guards happened to be stationed almost directly under my window (the building only had one story). I heard him audibly stretch, very loudly hock a loogey, spit, scrape his plastic chair across the concrete as he stood up, heard the metallic click of his AK-47 being cocked, and then he joined into the firing. Don’t worry it was away from the building of course! But damn, was that thing LOUD!!! There are basically no furnishings in the hotel building, just concrete, wrought iron window bars, and glass in the windows. The guard firing right next to the room made a very loud BOOM echoing around the room and it felt like everything rattled – nothing to absorb the noise.

At this point only about 5 minutes had gone by since the first gunshots. It dawned on me that what goes up must come down. I looked over at my window, realized my bed was directly under it on the other side of the room

(please refer to this incredibly high quality rendering of the floor plan to my room), decided that was not a very prudent place to stay should a stray bullet come through the window, and crawled out of bed over behind this weird outcropping that will one day house a bathroom (had not been installed yet – everyone still was sharing pit latrines) and made myself comfortable.

That’s when I realized I had to pee.

Seriously, that timing was SO BAD!

About 15 minutes passed, just sitting there, waiting. The gunfire began to taper off. It was then I realized that I had a video camera in my bag. We were doing a mini-documentary about the distribution, and the consultant we hired gave all the staff in the field digital camcorders to document some of what went on. So I crawled over around the outcropping, grabbed my bag, and turned on the camera. All you can see is the window, but you can definitely hear the gunfire. There is not much of it left, but still. Unfortunately I no longer have access to the footage, but I will definitely try to get a copy, at least for posterity.

Since I've been gone

Life goes on in Sudan, much as it did before I arrived. Roosters start crowing at 6am to accompany the scratchy sound of homemade reed brooms sweeping across the dust outside compounds. Builds discipline and an appreciation for cleanliness in all the girls whose chore it is. My boss starts her morning run at 6:30, after already being awake for 2 hours working away on her laptop and sending emails. The emails often start at 4am and don't end until 11pm. A squadron from the nearby SPLA barracks starts their morning jog which goes up the main road past the camp where we live. Residents can hear their singing and chanting in Dinka through the tent flaps where I more often than not wished away the dawn and hoped for just one more hour of sleep. The line for the shower starts to grow longer, people waiting their turn in towels and plastic flip flops, toothbrushes and shampoo in hand. The camp truly comes alive at 7, with residents tromping their way to breakfast. South Africans in sturdy boots and khaki speaking in a mix of Afrikaans and English. Kenyans joking in Swahili, sitting off on a table by themselves. Eggs, bacon, fried tomatoes, mushrooms, porridge, baked beans and toast. The NGO workers grabbing a Diet Coke and some toast before walking out in flip flops to the fleet of land cruisers which will carry them away to their desk jobs.

Do I miss this all? Definitely. Am I glad to be here, and not there? Absolutely. It's a strange dichotomy that I haven't quite figured out yet. Simba and I were talking the other day about how we don't know if we'll ever "get over" Sudan. Yes it was tough and yes we were ready to leave, but where else would we be able to watch men, women, children, goats, motorbikes and land cruisers, all stripped naked, all being washed in the river? To drive out past the town barrier to discover a broken bridge and therefore a perfect picnic spot to watch the sunset? Decide to drive a tractor to a party because the car wouldn't start? See the joy in women's faces when we go to their village to tell them about how to prevent malaria? Be able to lie together on a blanket under the stars, so so many stars you can't see anywhere in a city? Work 70 or 80 hours during the week but completely let go during the weekends - drinking slushies in the pool or dancing under a thatched roof?

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We met up for dinner with 6 other former Juba-ites who were in town on holiday. So strange to see everyone again in a completely different context. I'm not quite sure how, but we managed to talk about everything except Sudan for the most part of the meal. Because things are not in such a good place right now. Corruption and mismanagement of the government budget are so bad that it will take until 2012 for the government to honor the contracts they have signed for this year. Jonglei state is still awash in violence, with the armed groups now claiming militia status. The latest info is that there are 1,200 armed and organized men carrying out the attacks. That is two batallions worth.

And a little closer to home, at a barbeque at one of the UN agency compounds, a friend of ours, U, was leaving Juba and her husband flew in to help her pack, to move out, and to see where she had been living and working for the past year. The gathering ended but a drunk man (from a country that will remain nameless but rhymes with "Prussia") insisted on staying the night at the compound. He was told he had to leave by our friend A, but obviously he did not like that answer because he punched A right in the face. U's husband got up to try to deal with the drunk guy, but was punched in the chest. He fell down and never got back up. He died, right there. From the punch in the chest. Does this really happen? Ever? U went back to her country (in Eastern Europe), and the assailant got deported back to his country. No one in Sudan can officially charge or touch him because he worked for the UN, and no legal action will be taken against him because honestly no one cares back in his country. U is now taking things day by day. It's been about a month since this happened, and she is obviously still devastated. Learning to live on her own. She has never paid a bill in her life - she met her husband in college, he took care of everything until she finished grad school, and then she started working in international development where the agencies pay for everything. My god I don't know what I would do.

There is no rhyme or reason to any of this, and it seems like things are going to pieces. People ask me "how is it over there in Sudan" and half the time I don't even know what to answer. I think the only hope the country has right now is the referendum coming up in 2011 where at least the government has a chance to be legitimized and can "insha'allah" take responsibility and pull together. But once the element of a common "enemy" is removed, will the hundreds of tribes be able to rally together under one flag, or will they turn back against each other as has happened since the dawn of time?

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Apologies for the far from upbeat post, but that's where I am at the moment. Every year around September 11th I get more introspective, reliving that day, and remembering that in many places around the world that is the norm of life, rather than the exception. It was so good to see people from a different time and place that is still so familiar, but yet so far away now. The idea that I will never see or do any of the things in the first part of the post again still has not yet sunk in. But I am sure that no matter where I am I can create a sense of adventure, a sense of romance and fun because you can't have hope without first glimpsing dispair and you can't appreciate the good without the bad.

Independence Day

Happy (belated) 4th of July! After reading the New York Times on July 1st (Canada Day) I don't think I will ever think about this day the same. The NYT featured an Op-Ed where Canadians living in the US talk about what they miss the most about Canada. Among the contributors was Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of several books including “Outliers: The Story of Success.” There is a chapter in that book called the Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes about the cultural norms involved in communication in work environments between colleagues vs. superiors that is just fantastic - came in very handy as a managemnt tool with my multi-cultural team in Sudan! Very worth the read. Anyway, Mr. Gladwell's observation for the Op Ed was as follows:

In history class, in seventh grade (or as we like to say in Canada, grade seven) we learned the story of the American Revolution — from the British perspective. Turns out you were all a bunch of ungrateful tax cheats. And you weren’t very nice to the Loyalists. What I miss most about Canada is getting the truth about the United States.

That made me chuckle. So from this point forward, July 4th shall hereby be known as the day when the petulant teenage US of A declared itself officially too pissed off at England to keep paying taxes and stormed out of the British Empire's house. Rock on.

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I am in the US right now, taking some of my many, many unused vacation days. I think I was up to 28 as of my last paycheck. There's no way I can use all of these before I leave Sudan, but thankfully my organization will pay them out to me when I leave. I have to say, it's very good to be home. Tomorrow I begin my 3 day journey back to Juba to pick up where I left off in Paradise!

Last night my family and I, along with thousands (millions maybe?) of other Americans, packed up the back of our SUV with fried chicken, potato salad, brownies and beer and drove out to a field to watch fireworks. I know at least one other family that was doing the same thing! It has been a long time since I have seen fireworks, so I was very excited about this expedition. Anything less than complete enthusiasm on my part would not have been enough to pry my father away from the house to drive somewhere an hour away to interact with people we don't know only to be stuck in a traffic jam for hours afterwards. But along with the fireworks, we did play some pretty intense games of Crazy 8's and got to cringe when my mom started snapping her fingers and dancing to Outkast's "Hey Ya" when it came onto my ipod playlist. Fun times.

As the fireworks started and everyone let out a collective "ooooh, aaaahhhh" all I could think about was how ironically, twistedly similar the US is to Southern Sudan in how they celebrate their independence. Well, semi-independence in the case of Southern Sudan. In the US we set of fireworks. Loud, colorful displays representing the "bombs bursting in air" of our national anthem. The fireworks simultaneously scare and delight children like rollercoasters do (maybe thrill is the right word?), and make adults smile, both at the reaction of children and at the fact that the US is free, and does have independence.

In Southern Sudan, the "bombs bursting in air" is a tad bit more literal. When people are celebrating in Southern Sudan, they fire their weapons into the air. Mostly AK47s, no heavy artillery. But the big BOOMs of fireworks sound a bit too much like RPGs and the smaller version of firecrackers most definitely mimics the crackling of automatic gunshots. That's why a lot of expats from Western countries think that they are hearing fireworks the first, second and even third times they hear gunfire.

I sat on that lawn, full of food and Sam Adams Summer Ale, streching my neck upward to take in the beautiful waxing moon behind the firework display, and my mind kept drifting back to sitting on a concrete floor on SPLM Day, waiting for the celebratory gunfire to die down, and the way both those gunshots and the fireworks reverberated in my body, echoing the same way. I am working on another post about that experience, so stay tuned.

Has anyone else had this experience? Veterans, or otherwise? How long does it take for the assumption that every loud noise is a gunshot to go away?

I only hope that one day, Southern Sudan will have the chance to celebrate this way, that the bombs bursting in air need only be a colorful, gentler, happier representation of their past.

When those "situations" become personal

As we turned the bend on the way into work, my boss pulled the car over and said, "Get out and act calm." I swiveled in my seat and saw my colleague outside her vehicle arguing with a man who was visibly angry and yelling at her. Not one to be shy, she was standing up to him and yelling right back. A policeman from the opposite side of the intersection walked over to try to address the situation, and I got out of the car and walked over with my peacemaker face on. The policeman manged to get the two of them to move their collided vehicles away from the middle of the road, the passengers in the matatus silently got down from the vehicle to surrounded me, my colleague, the driver, the policeman, and a bystander who spoke English, and the negotiations began.

Standing outside by the side of a Juba road in the rain on a Monday morning trying to negotiate with a drunken matatu driver on how much money we would pay him for his broken light after he ran into my colleague's vehicle was not how I wanted to start my week.

However, my boss obviously wanted me to deal with the situation, not this other woman, so for the second time since I've been here I was the one to negotiate with matatu drivers on behalf of other woman colleagues who were unwilling or unable to do so.

Three times the market rate for the cost of parts and labor for the broken light? Come on, two times? Doesn't matter that we had our mechanic on the phone with the policeman telling him how much everything costs on the market, the policeman just shrugged his shoulders, said, "It's raining, give him what he asks for."

After 30 minutes we accepted, "fine, here's your money," and I got the translator to translate him a lecture about him being a "very bad person" (I'm so eloquent, aren't I?). But then my boss and the colleague said "what about him hitting her?" What? When did this happen? Turns out when the two vehicles collided and the matatu driver left the car, he opened the car door of my colleague, grabbed her arm out and started hitting her arms and chest. Because I did not see that part of the incident I had no idea, but was obviously approaching the negotiations in entirely the wrong way. This new element was addressed with the policeman, who again shrugged his shoulders pointing skyward at the falling ran, and proceeded to walk away.

Given some of the proscribed gender roles in Southern Sudan, including the attitude that "If you pay cows for a woman, then of course you can beat her. If you want to give me your daughter for free, maybe we can talk." it's not surprising that we were treated this way.

Here in Southern Sudan, even though there are many different tribes, marriage customs are very similar. Generally men get married when they can afford to buy enough cows to give to the bride's family - a reverse dowry of sorts - which means they are usually in their late 20's when they marry for the first time. Men can have anywhere from 1 to 4 wives, although I've met men that have 10. Whole families help the man out (uncles, father, grandfather, etc) with the 20 to 150 cows depending on the wealth of the family and the community. Cows cost anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a head depending on the size of the cow. Generally, the larger and more crooked the horns, the better. The man pays for the wedding celebrations too. Women (often girls really) are anywhere from 15-20 when they get married, even if they are educated in other East African countries. Babies come immediately after marriage, and men can even "return" a woman to her family if she is unable to have children. This has a lot to do with society as a whole - I know women that have directly asked their husbands to marry a co-wife so they can share the burden of chores and raising children with another woman.

If it seems to you that women here are treated as commodities to be bought and sold, you're not the only one, and it is quite difficult to be here seeing it first hand.

Driving away from the incident, feeling sick inside, my stomach turned into a bottomless pit of guilt. What could I, should I, have done differently? The answer is nothing. There is nothing I could have said or done which would change how the policeman or the matatu driver viewed the situation. All they saw was a woman, and a broken headlight, and a target on which to...to...to what? To take out their frustration of having peace but not yet prosperity? To take advantage of an opportunity to make a quick and easy profit? To assert their "manliness"? To be fair there really is no way to know whether the incident was a result of them taking advantage of women or whether it was them taking advantage of khawajas (white people). Maybe a combination of both.

In the end, the policeman and driver paid for their mistake but not by our design. The colleague driving the car involved in the accident was here in Juba working for the Minister of Labour. She didn't want to say anything to the Minister, but a friend of hers did a few days later when her bruises started showing, and he proceeded to find out what happened, and find the people involved. The policeman was fired, and the matatu driver was arrested. God only knows what happens inside Sudanese prisons.

What are those two men thinking about now, looking back at things? Do they respect the fact that the law (written or not) saw them in the wrong? Will they become more bitter and act even worse if a similar incident happens again in the future? I'm not sure. But I do know that we all have a long, long way to go.

And next time, you'd better believe I will spend all day if I have to filing an official report with the police, no matter how futile the effort may seem at first.

"Hope will never be silent" ~Harvey Milk

Breaking Security Update

Breaking Security Update: "Crocodiles entered an UN agency warehouse in Wau and destroyed some food items. Wildlife officers and local police attended to get rid of the beasts."

This is probably breaking some sort of UN confidentiality clause, but I've been chuckling about this for awhile now and I don't care, this is too good not to share! I love that this is the kind of thing that gets sent out on our weekly security updates!!! Unfortunately I'm sure this incident did not end well for the crocs (I'm imagining some handbags and shoes made by Sudanese women's groups showing up on your next pair of Manolo Blahniks), but can't you just see it - dozens of people trying to corral these crocodiles and stop them from eating the WFP sorghum and beans? NOM NOM NOM...

my shitty week

Just so you don't think everything is idyllic and rose colored here in Juba, here's a rundown of my shitty week last week:

1. I got back from Tambura on Monday and immediately started feeling ill. I thought it was the beginning of a cold, but no. It turned into a high fever, aches all over, and a pounding headache. Could it be Malaria? No, I took a rapid test and it came back negative. Then the next day the stomach issues started. Thank the lord for Cipro, everything turned out fine. But that was about 36 hours not being able to sit or stand up and not being able to do work.

2. Wednesday I still wasn't feeling 100% but went to lunch with this guy I had sort of been seeing but he dumped me before I went to Tambura because "I really like you and it caught me off guard, and I decided I can't handle a relationship but I also can't pretend that I don't care about you and just date you casually" blah blah blah. He obviously wants to get laid with no strings attached, but still. Loser. So I basically called him a coward because seriously, I've never been dumped before in my life and he treated me like crap and he sucks. I left feeling worse about the whole thing for some reason. Not sure why.

3. Thursday NOTHING went well at work, I said something wrong at a meeting, got bad news about some procurement quotes, and I just felt like I could do nothing right. And I missed home with a vengence. My friends, my family, all I wanted was someone to vent to and a hug, but I don't have friends here yet that I can do that with, so no luck. I was basically on the verge of tears all day.

4. Friday was better, until I went to play touch rugby after work, which was fine until 2 minutes into playing when I badly sprained my ankle. They had mowed the pitch and in the process left huge ruts form the wheels of whatever machine they used. And I rolled my ankle in one of them. Heard it pop twice. It's still all swollen and purple as evidenced here:


5. Saturday I woke up to find I could not put any weight on my ankle so hobbled to the bathroom to take a shower. Afterwards, in the process of manoeuvering myself out of the shower so as not to put any weight on the ankle, I leaned on the toilet seat cover which promptly snapped right in half. Great.

6. Saturday night was the Halloween party at the USAID compound. Costumes, beer, a pool, and a party guaranteed to go til 6am. In theory this was a great idea, except I couldn't really dance because of my ankle. All in all it was fine, except when at 5am I turned around to see the stupid boy described above making out with one of his good friends who he swore nothing would ever happen with. Fun times! So, feeling slightly ill and almost freaking out, I left.

And that was that. Thank God this week is going better than the last. Life makes sense again and loser boy is out of the country so I don't have to deal with that for about 3 weeks. Yay!