and now i live in a swamp

I arrived in TLT in a rundown, pimped-out minibus. There were ragged paper pineapples hanging from the rearview mirror, along with green Mardi Gras beads. The radio had two settings: off, and horrifically loud. Every few minutes the driver would reach up and adjust the radio, find a station, and settle in to sing along. Then the radio would turn itself off and it would be a few more minutes before he noticed and tried again. Eventually I mimed horrible ear pain and he laughed at me and turned it off.

After the plane dropped me off at an airstrip with apparently no population anywhere nearby, I stood in the sun next to a UN car and debated whether I should go with them to a bigger town or wait until someone showed up for me. After twenty minutes, the tops of my suitcases were almost too hot to touch. I scrambled through my bag to find a phone number and we called on the satellite phone to ask exactly WHEN the car had left to pick me up. Then suddenly I heard a rattling, clattering noise and an ancient van pulled up next to me. “Well,” I said to the UN people in their shiny new Land Cruiser, “I think that’s my ride.” And people started piling out.

We got stuck in a mud hole on the way back, with thousands of little kids running about laughing. One of them stood outside my window and, after I smiled at him, he very cautiously reached up and touched my arm, just to check that the strange pink color was real skin. After the third or fourth try at getting the minibus out, I got out and walked further up the road, looking back at the men rocking the bus back and forth, back and forth, and finally all the way back out. It accelerated forward and came slip-sliding through the muddy patch.

Another swarm of kids splashed about in a creek along the side of the road further up, shiny naked little wet bodies in the sun. One of them stopped so suddenly to look at us that he slipped on the gravel and fell – plop! – on his little behind. By the time we passed, he had already popped back up, surprised but not hurt.

...

I woke up early this morning because we had plans to go to the slightly bigger town two or three hours away after dropping someone off at the airstrip in the middle of nowhere, but it turns out that she is actually flying directly out of TLT. Actually, I knew this, but I forgot it until I was luxuriating in my outdoor shower this morning.

I’m skeptical of this TLT departure, because the airstrip in TLT is full of deep tire tracks from when it was recently mud, bumpy with cow prints from when the cows sunk into the mud, and has little pyramids of stones where the kids delineated their soccer fields. I hope this plane is like a hydrofoil, but for land. Otherwise they are going to have a rough landing.

…

It worked, somehow. The little Cessna flew over to scare the kids and goats, and then landed in a huge puff of dust.

Funny thing about TLT: it was two-feet deep in mud when I arrived and now it is mud in some places and finely powdered dust in others. While eating plain rice and fried fish last night in the dark, we were listening to the BBC discuss the “flooding across the Sahel, from Senegal to Somalia.” It doesn’t mean much until you are in the Sudd, the swampy part of Southern Sudan (I’m told Southern Sudan is the biggest swamp in the world) and praying that it won’t rain so the mud won’t get any deeper.

There are tall grasses all around, but in living areas it’s only dirt, which turns to mud when it rains. This morning, coming out of the dirt-floored dining room, I noticed one of the workers carefully digging up every tuft of grass. I went to consult with the guy in charge, who said, “I told them to cut it, not get rid of it completely!” We need those tufts in a desperate way, to keep some fraction of the dirt in its proper place when it rains.