Relief at Last!

I’m so glad to be out of Bor. Back in Juba---but not loving the attention of some people who want to take me out. No offense meant, my friends, but I don’t feel like going out this time round, not on a date, and especially not with all these insect bite marks all over my body.

You see, the problem is the rainy season. For here we are living in a bush.  The river is just a walk away. So since the rains have started, insects seem to have come out from wherever they were hiding and they buzz around in swarms as though this were a doomsday sci-fi film. I use insect repellant lotion, but it seems it only repels mosquitoes. Now I have red and dark spots all over. And they're soooo itchy. I scratch and scratch and scratch until my colleagues wonder if I’m dancing to some music!

I am allergic to insect bites. I had flea marks in Ethiopia as well. I should get a swat, you know one of those tools for killing flies. But problem is you can't swat the small insects. And there seems to be no way of stopping these bugs from feasting on me.

Then there’s  this bee that is so in love with me that it never fails to give me a visit and buzz around my head every single day! My colleagues keep on teasing me that maybe I smell like a fruit or a flower. Normally that would make me laugh, but these days even innocent remarks like that irritate me.

Maybe the stress of work has finally set it, and I am getting burnt out---after only about 2 and a half months on the field. Last weekend I lost my voice, as in completely lost it. I woke up and started my morning singing exercise, but only a croak came out. Panic! My singing-superstar dreams are sooooo over! At least, I have gained my voice back, but now I sound like a man.

Well, I wanted an adventure. I am not complaining. For if you pray for rain, don't cry over the mud.

At least now I’m in Juba, and there seemed not to be too many insects. It being a city, and not a bush. And above that, at least I can finally get myself ice cream and pizza! In Bor, I’ve been stuffing myself with rice and eggs so much that now I feel like a hen that’s about to start laying.

Oh, what else can I write here? Is my life really this boring? I thought I was coming to have a lot of fun, but Bor is so Boring for now, and it’s all full of work, work, work, and more work. Even on weekends, I find myself in front of my computer---actually working.

But now there is the R&R coming up soon. Rest and Recreation. And I’m going to do just that. I’m going to escape from this madness for two weeks, and maybe I’ll have some fun! Get some relief. :-)

House Arrest

It’s a really bad weekend. First, Internet is on and off, flashing like the cheap jewelry on a prostitute to drive me crazy---okay, why exactly am I using the prostitute as a symbol? Maybe it just shows how anoyed I am this weekend.

No Internet and now we are in a kind of house arrest. We can’t leave the compound until Tuesday, not even peek outside the gate. Security has been tightened around Bor Town, not because of the ongoing cattle raids and tribal clashes, but because of a major celebration on Monday to commemorate the day the SPLA started the war against the north. And as with such celebrations, there is bound to be some shooting. The locals told us not to worry because people shoot towards the sky anyway---maybe they haven’t heard about gravity yet.

During the referendum in January, the shooting lasted for 3 hours! I wasn’t here yet that time, but my Kenyan colleague had recorded the “shooting symphony” on his mobile phone and now he’s using it as his ringtone.  

Actually, a few days ago, stray bullets fell into our compound! The thing is that we have SPLA (they call themselves “police”) for neighbors. There is a camp just next door to us, and maybe they had some of kind of internal fighting and as is often with these people, they just started shooting  wherever and stray bullets fell into our compound.

Luckily, no one got hurt. But next time, maybe someone will. Shouldn’t we be looking for a safer position, somewhere a little bit far away from military camps? But the government gave us this land, and I am not sure how much say we can have on where we pitch up our camp! For the moment, we have to pray, and hope that nothing goes wrong. At least for all the years that HI has been in this compound, with the military camp right next door, there haven’t been any incident. So that’s a good sign, and it means that probably nothing will happen.

Well, maybe the way we can make sure that these SPLA men don’t create accidents is to supply them with a whole trailer load of girls from the neighboring countries. Prostitutes, I mean. Oh, that’s probably why I mentioned it up there. 

Well, the Sudanese women are so far very traditional, and they won’t sell themselves for money. They do get bought off during their wedding day, for the husband has to pay scores of cows to take the bride home. But that is different. That is not prostitution exactly. It’s bride price, and it means you become the property of one man for the rest of your life. With prostitution, you become the property of one man for a few hours, maybe a night.

With the large number of expatriates in this land, they say there is one expatriate for every five Dinka! That’s really a lot more than in reality, but it’s a joke, just to stress the fact that this place is flooded with expatriates of all sorts. Humanitarian workers, relief workers, development workers, engineers, well-drillers, farmers, construction workers---name the job and you’ll have someone doing it here from somewhere.

And because of the conflict situation, you can’t bring your partner along. Which means a lot of the expatriates are lonely men. And women. There have been cases, actually lots of cases, where the expatriates (even the married ones) pair off. In fact, aid workers have this joke going around that “aid workers do it for relief.” But the number of foreign women here is far less than that of foreign men. For example, there are two (and sometimes three) men in our compound, and I’m the only woman. So people are now wondering which one of the three I should help in his times of need. Fortunately, I am still traditional when it comes to these things, so they can go on wondering.

Anyway, what I was saying is that because of the large number of lonely expatriate men, there are some “expatriate” women who come specifically to give them comfort in the loneliest of their times. These women mostly come from Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia. There’s a flood of them in Juba, and I hear there’s a “community” of them here in Bor as well. And they do make a pretty big sum!

What was I talking about before I got distracted with these “expatriate” women? Oh yes, the SPLA. They have a major celebration on Monday, and it’s all happening here in Bor. All the SPLA commanders and high-ranking government officials---including the president himself---from all over the country will come to Bor to feel good about the fact that they started the way, and are on the verge of victory, so there will be pretty high moods, drinking, dancing, and shooting.

Which means we have to stay indoors all weekend! House arrest! Not cool! And especially not cool when there is no Internet to kill off the boredom! Someone shoots whoever provides us with Internet!

Who Drank My Juice?

Just before I could write this entry, I fell sick! And this unfortunate turn of events changes the tone I was going to use on this blog entry, for I would have started it like this, “God is punishing us! Nature is taking revenge!” 

The thing is, we only drink imported water here, because well, they don’t have local water-bottling companies in South Sudan and everything here is trucked from Kenya and Uganda, anyway. And though I’ve been drinking liters and liters of this bottled water every day, it kind of gets me thinking. Imagine, there are three of us expats here in Bor, and each of us drink and brush our teeth with at least eight 300-ml bottles per day. And each bottle costs around 3 Sudanese pounds (1.14 USD). I’m not good with calculations but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that it’s an obscene expenditure. Makes me wonder whether it really is worth it. I mean, there are millions of people in South Sudan who drink the water from boreholes and they don’t fall sick. And here we are importing water for cooking and drinking all the way from Uganda!

Being expatriates, we get treated differently, for they assume our stomachs are not like that of South Sudanese. And it’s not. And I know at any time I can catch a tummy bug from the water and dehydrate to death. But there are expatriates from many African nations, whose water situations back home is similar to that in South Sudan, and I ask myself, when they are back home, do they drink imported water? Do they drink only bottled water? Why then should their lives be different when they come into Sudan on the expatriate ticket?

I guess it has something to do with the big salary they earn, the big budgets their employers have, and maybe the paranoid higher-ups who develop policies from the comfort of their European and American living rooms.

Although it might be a big risk to take, maybe, just maybe we should stop importing water, and to instead look for solutions from within Sudan. And while we may not be in the safe-water supply business, if we can find an affordable solution to the water problem, then maybe we can pass this solution on to the people we are working with, and that might help improve their lives. Certainly, advising them to drink imported water will not in any way contribute to fighting poverty. But if we, say, start very cheap water-treatment practices, or get water filters, or something that can be easily, cheaply, and quickly replicated in a rural and godforsaken place like Bor, then we would be inadvertently contributing to the safe-water solution.

Anyway, while I was wrestling with all these questions in my mind, I fell sick---of typhoid. And to think I got typhoid shots before I came here. Which brings me to another question, “Are vaccines really effective?” But let’s save that for another blog entry.

What actually happened is this. For a few days, there was a very foul smell around the bathroom, something stunk so bad,  like rotting flesh. We all thought it was either of us who was responsible for it. Or maybe there was a dead animal somewhere or maybe the people in the other compound ate fish and threw the remains in our compound. But because we couldn’t find the source of the smell, we didn’t know whom to attack over it, so we just kept our opinions to ourselves. It turns out---tada!---there was a dead bird in the water tank! Yes, you heard me---a decomposing son of a hawk!

The bird

And the tank.

To make matters worse---which makes me think it was a punishment from God and Mother Nature---this big bird dove into the tank at a time when our supplies of imported, bottled water was running out. So we had to use water from the tank to cook, bathe, brush our teeth with, and boil rice. So some things that we thought were grains of rice were actually boiled maggots? Ewwwwwwwwwwww! Anyway, someone had commented that my cooking skills had greatly improved, and yet it’s this bird that was adding flavor to our food. Bwahahaha!

The poor late Mr. Hawk. We had this really heavy wind the other day, almost like a tornado. It lifted the cover off the tank, and Mr. Hawk came in for a swim, or a drink, or it decided to commit suicide by drowning because it's partner ran away with a hen. Whatever its reasons, it really did a good job of getting into our "nerves"---and he sure did get into your stomachs as well!

Within a few days of us making this macabre discovery, I fell sick. Some said it was stress, others exhaustion, the doctor said it was typhoid. I at once thought the juices of the dead bird were responsible for making me sick.

But I remembered Mary Mallon, otherwise called Typhoid Mary, who was responsible for making many people sick of typhoid. It reminded me that even if you are very hygienic, and drink only the purest of water, you can still get infected. You only had to eat food prepared by someone infected with typhoid. By extension, even a handshake with such a person can make you sick.

Which brings me back to the issue of imported water. For we eat in local restaurants, where they don’t cook with imported water, and I can give many other examples of places we could get the disease from, not just dead birds in our water tanks.

Well, at least now I’m fine, and back to work, and longing for my R&R, which is due in 15 days’ time!

A Not-so-sweet Escape from Bor-dom

A Quiet Easter in the Capital

Just before the Easter week, I left my little home in Bor and flew to Juba (yes, the capital of South Sudan for now). The UN flights are scarce, and we are not allowed to go on commercial flights (read: charter planes) and not allowed to go by road either (even if Juba is just a mere 3 hours by car from Bor), so I had to spend a whole week in Juba to catch the next one back home.

Our only means of escape.

I wasn’t very happy at all, not only because I’ve now settled in Bor and I can finally call our base camp my home, but also because the guest house in Juba doesn’t have wifi. So I can’t chat late into the night and watch Friends episodes on YouTube. And boredom can kill.

But one of the nice things Juba has and Bor doesn’t is the big western supermarket with all the goodies my heart desires. In a place like this, a well-stocked supermarket like Jit is like an amusement park for an expat, and you could spend hours going from one aisle to the next, reveling at the different brands of biscuits and bath soap and food seasoning . . .  I even found myself getting so ecstatic when I found Pantene shampoo with matching conditioner on the shelf. Ah, life’s simple pleasures. That's what's good about being in a place like this. You get to appreciate the simple pleasures of life that you often ignore at home. And here’s the best thing, I found Datu Puti (a Philippine brand) soy sauce and vinegar on sale, and man, did it almost give me a heart attack! Now where to find pork so I can cook adobo and indoctrinate my colleagues on Filipino cuisine?

But on my last night in Juba, I ate pork at a Chinese restaurant. It’s such a long time since I last ate this one heck of a tasty animal. Can’t seem to find it in Bor. It’s one thing that is making me fail to adjust to life in Sudan, for I love pork, and if I don’t eat it for a long period of time, I go into fits of convulsion. Just kidding. Oh, the thought of bacon and chorizo and humba and chicharon---kill me now.

Fishing For Condoms!

Anyway, I got tired of going round and round the supermarket so I decided to join the guys (my colleagues) at the Nile to catch some fish. Needlessly to say, I was excited! After my river experience in Bor, where I ran into all those naked men swimming in the water, I thought I was in for another great treat! Maybe this time I’d meet a real, credible Dinka man who would not only offer me a thousand cows, but also a nice home and a position in the new government of Sudan, and who has enough money to buy for me a private island on the Nile (if there are such islands) to which we can escape every now and then---okay, that’s wishful thinking.

So we went to the river, and it’s a total opposite of what I experienced in Bor. No, this time I didn’t run into crowds of naked women. It was a very uneventful trip. I was bored all the time. And the guys who were fishing, they didn’t catch any fish! To think we were there for five hours and I almost finished an entire case of Coca-Colas.

And I thought we were going to have fish for dinner.

Instead, they caught loads of condoms! It’s as if every time they threw the hook into the water, they fished out a condom! It makes you wonder how these condoms got onto the hooks. It’s not like they are alive and took the bait like real fish! Or maybe they are alive in a way we can’t understand, but I won’t delve into that. Anyway, the current was fast, and the water had a lot of rubbish, which is how the stuff got onto the hooks in the first place.

Of course, they were used condoms. You wouldn’t expect one that’s been torn out of its packet to be unused. But what were they doing in the water? Why were there so many condoms in there? Do people here do it on the riverbanks? Do these have a connection with the crowd of naked men I saw in Bor? Or well, maybe someone had a big party and ran out of balloons!

It certainly wasn’t an experience to write home about, this fishing trip, not like the first one at all. Apart from the condoms finding their way onto the hooks, which inspired me to at least write something about it, nothing else happened.

The Mystery of the Peeping Guard

I have tried checking the back of my hut for holes, something that peeping tom would use to spy on me while I’m inside my hurt, but I don’t know if I’m just being paranoid or if I should buy special hole-detecting gadgets to help me lay my fears to rest. For I fear someone might be spying on me from a secret hole behind my hut.

What could possibly be interesting in this place?

You see, we have four guards who help to keep us safe. They are all okay, apart from one, whose intentions I can’t figure. He is always staring at me. Well, I know I’m short and I couldn’t pass for a Dinka woman. And that alone makes these giants to look at me wondering what planet I come from. But the way this guy stares at me is creepy. It reminds me of the birds in Alfred Hitchcock’s horror, that would just sit on the electric wires staring at the human beings with eyes of a demon that seem to be dreaming---okay, I borrowed a line from Edgar Poe. But that’s what this guy makes me feel like.

I’ve caught him several times staring at me like that, and when I ask him what is the problem he merely smiles. A creepy smile. You should see him in the night---all teeth and no face! And when he starts to scare the hell out of me, he starts to sing!

On second thought, maybe he has good intentions. Maybe he stares at me hoping to spark that moment we often see in movies, when two people stare at each other and the audience immediately knows that they are going to fall in love and get married and live happy ever after. J Sometimes, when I see him looking at me, I think he is trying to calculate how many cows he should offer. Haha!

And this love angle makes me wonder what it is that he goes to do behind my hut. It’s a great mystery. I’ve seen him several times going behind there, where there is nothing, and he spends a lot of time there. It made me think that probably there is a hole somewhere in the back, and when he goes there, he goes to peep at me through this hole---peep at me while I’m inside my hut, hoping that I undress?

And with this heat, it’s easy to think that someone would get naked while in the privacy of their rooms, which might encourage this guy to go behind there to his secret hole. So now I’m worried about stripping while alone.

Now I’m getting scared. L