choices made

I have been thinking lately about the one time, when I lived in Sudan, when we went to Bigger Town Three Hours Away. Bigger Town lay over the river and through the woods, er, over the oil fields and through the swamp, and there was really, genuinely nothing there. It is a mark of the extreme deprivation I was experiencing, trapped in a compound of five mud tukuls and a cement office, that I still remember this trip in so much detail. The big deal in Southern Sudan is permanent structures, as I have recently mentioned. One finds oneself, like a builder, asking questions like, "Are there permanent structures in your town?" Let's put it this way: I could probably have counted on two hands the number of permanent structures in Bigger Town. (I could count on one hand the number of permanent structures in Tiny Little Town.)

From the way my colleagues had described Bigger Town, I expected something of a, I don't know, grocery store. My expectations were not high. I had seen what passed for a grocery store in Elsewhere and in Juba. (Think neighborhood convenience store in most of Africa or Latin America - a few bottles of water, a few packets of Omo, a few shelves of biscuits.) But I expected something. DO NOT BE SILLY. There was no grocery store. There were market stalls. Oh, and a shelf of BEAUTIFUL, GLORIOUS Pringles, at the petrol station.

My favorite part, other than the little three-wheeled, motorized cart-things that I called rickshaws (and desperately wanted a ride in, but that wouldn't happen until Ethiopia), were the water carts, and they are the part I keep seeing in my head. The town was full of men and young boys driving donkey carts that were nothing more than a barrel on wheels, carrying water. Half the town was flooded from the rains, but potable water was scarce, and therefore valuable - worth carrying around in barrels. I was fascinated by these things.

(Please-ignore-excessively-pale-arm-and-armpit-in-mirror-thank -you. This photo was hard to get from a moving vehicle.)

Only days before the trip to Bigger Town, I had faced the decision about whether to stay or go. As some of you know, I came very close to leaving Southern Sudan early, for a thousand different reasons. (And that is not a decision I ever expected to face in Africa, because living in Africa has always felt so familiar to me - and yes, I know Africa is not a country, obviously I know, but there are some similarities within continents, even one as vast as Africa.) One night just before the Bigger Town trip, Visiting Colleague and I were talking about various things, including how there really was not much in the way of concrete things for me to do and so on top of culture stress and heat and pit latrines, the days stretched endlessly before me while I tried to think of useful (or at least not harmful) things to do when it was too hot to move. I came very close to breaking down, and Visiting Colleague asked me straight out, "Do you want to leave?" and I said, "I don't know." (Mostly I said "I don't know" because I would have started crying if I'd said anything else. I really wasn't sure, just then.)

One of my Sudanese colleagues used to make me laugh when he quoted another Sudanese friend of his who said, about the state in which we lived (and by state, I mean governance area, not condition), "Ai, ai, ai, ai, ai. I don't know why God created [this state], and I don't know why people live here."

I didn't actually say that I did not want to leave, but somehow the mere fact that I had the choice and I chose to stay changed my attitude completely. By the time we went to Bigger Town, I was finally beginning to enjoy my stay. It feels, when I look back, like the beginning of the good stuff. By the end, I didn't want to leave. And now? Now, I would go back, even to that same Tiny Little Isolated Town, in an instant.

(More on the trip to Bigger Town can be found here. I just went back and read much of October and November 2007 and I laughed out loud, several times. I was funny in Southern Sudan.)