meet

I keep checking the weather, hoping that the 100% chance of rain every hour for the next twelve hours will change. It doesn't. The good news is that it has changed for Monday, making my hopes of a little hike more possible.

I have some friends coming into town from Universe City today. This makes me happy. Sometimes I forget that I have friends all over this country - and the world, really - because I am caught up in the daily business of getting up and going to work, and it's fun to realize that the people you leave behind - or who leave you behind - aren't really gone. 

I was walking to work in [new work city - I haven't come up with a name yet] the other day and suddenly someone screeched to a halt across the street and jumped out to hug me. It was one of the same friends I am meeting tonight. She just happened to have something going on in my new work city. 

As my friend said long ago in South Sudan: the world is small and round, and people always meet.

I like that about it.

Overheard in Sunny Ski Town

"Not many people use chamber pots anymore."

That is an accurate observation, sir, although I did use a powdered milk tin as a chamber pot in South Sudan.

Priorities

I have my priorities straight: I took three shirts with me to the Mitten, and four books. As I just told my mom, you can wear the same shirt every day, but you can't read the same book every day. (Well, you can but it gets boring. I only brought six books with me to South Sudan for three months, and I read them over and over. Fortunately, three were The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which can be read over and over, and one was Blue Shoe by Anne Lamott, ditto.)

I did also bring two dresses and I left one here three weeks ago, so it isn't like I am going to smell bad. Most of the time.

misplaced snake

E. - the E. who was born in Liberia when both of our families lived there in the 1980s, and somehow we ended up in the same little town in State of Happiness lo these many years later - and I climbed the tiny mountain just outside of town today. 

It was that perfect sort of day that is cool in the trees and hot in the sun, and we lingered at the top, lounging on rocks.

Two girls were walking by on the little path just under our rocks when one of them startled and fluttered. 

I didn't believe E. when she said there was a rattlesnake down there, but I looked down, and there was a rattlesnake.

I was... displeased. I have been reassured over and over that there are no rattlesnakes west of the Cascades, and guess what? THOSE JERKS WERE ALL LYING TO ME.

E. took a picture. I stayed far away.

I really hate snakes. 

But at least I didn't jump up on the nearest high object and scream like a frightened toddler.

So then on the way back down the little mountain, I got to tell the story about how I watched episode after episode of Untold Stories of the ER while I was in South Sudan, and one of them involved a doctor who specialized in rattlesnake bite treatment, and his little son was bitten by one, and the kid's mom knew exactly what to do while getting him to the hospital where his dad was on duty, but the dad still had to make a terribly difficult decision about whether to give the kid so much of what might be the wrong anti-venom that it might permanently damage him, or risk him dying of the snake bite. 

It all turned out okay in the end.

(I went back and looked, and for some reason snakes and these crazy Discovery channel shows seem to go together. Also, I really hate snakes.)

the pox

I am fairly certain that I have never in my life had as many mosquito bites as I do right now, not even in South Sudan* where I bundled in a raincoat in the heat at night to avoid the mosquitoes that bit me through my jeans. The mosquitoes yesterday bit me through my clothes, too, including on my butt. THROUGH MY PANTS. (The mosquitoes in South Sudan bit me through my jeans. Similarly stubborn. Although they only came out at night.)

I didn't bring insect repellent, of course. Only wimps bring insect repellent. I don't even bring it to Africa, except to South Sudan, because when I was in Nairobi on the way there, my coworker told me that it was an absolute necessity.

I bought some 100% DEET in Nairobi and took it with me to South Sudan, where I applied it on several occasions and found that mosquitoes seemed to view it primarily as a marinade for the delicacy of my blood. Yum. Literally the only thing that worked was to have a mosquito-impermeable barrier between me and the blood-thirsty little suckers.

The mosquitoes on the trail yesterday had the same persistence. My friend T. and I ran into exactly one other person on the entire 5+ mile hike (I think everyone else had gotten the memo about the strange fact of hordes of mosquitoes in the normally insect-free Pacific Northwest), and that person had insect repellent and shared it with us. It didn't help. The mosquitoes feasted, unnoticing. Or perhaps enjoying the extra flavoring.

Only wimps bring insect repellent, but yesterday I was (metaphorically) curled up in a little ball on the trail, sobbing for some insect repellent.

Not actually, of course. What do you think I am?

We climbed up a snow-slope until it got too steep and slippery (I dropped both of my water bottles half-way up, when they fell out of the side pockets of my new backpack, and watched them slide faster and faster down the hill until they hit rocks; we rescued them on the way down), and then we climbed through the trees to the left, the slope so steep that I clung to bushes and trees to pull myself up.

From the top, we could see mountains:

(Hey! It's me! I have no photo of the mountain without me, and this one is at least somewhat identity-obscuring. Unless you know me. I think I am trying not to fall into the crevices between sharp rocks. Not visible: hundreds of chomping mosquitoes.)

On the way down, I hurled myself downward, over and over, in the direction of stable-looking trees that could break my fall. The only other option was to slide all the way down on my ass, and that seemed like a painful proposition. Too many splinters.

But it was this bad, mosquito-wise: we sat down for lunch at the top, were driven off by mosquitoes, and ended up sitting on the rocks in the middle of the snow field to get away from them. They still followed us there, but once we killed off all the ones that had migrated with us, no new ones seemed to be able to find us in the middle of the snow. So we sat there in the snow, in July, eating lunch.

The snow was actually much easier to descend than the mud, and after we ate lunch on it, I put on my rain pants and slid down the snow.

Plus: my brand new hiking boots made it the entire trip without pain or raw skin (I rarely get blisters - it goes straight to raw).

Minus: hundreds of mosquito bites.

Plus: mosquito bites don't itch me as much as they do some people.

Minus: I look like I have the pox.

(I didn't worry overly much about the mosquitoes because the bonus of living this far north is the lack of malaria and dengue fever, until my dad asked this afternoon, "Do the mosquitoes there carry West Nile virus or anything?" There is always something.)

* Interesting tidbit: with the split between Sudan and South Sudan, I have added a new country to my list without going to a new country. I was in Sudan, when South Sudan was part of it, and I was in South Sudan, except that at the time it happened to be part of Sudan. Obviously there are many far greater ramifications to South Sudan becoming an independent country, but I do find it kind of interesting that I can now put both Sudan and South Sudan on my list of countries visited, while actually only having been, back in 2007, to one country.

back there

People are voting in Southern Sudan today. Every one predicts that South Sudan will vote to secede from North Sudan, and everything I know of South Sudan, the few months I spent there, leads me to predict the same.

For once, South Sudan is in the news, and I look at the pictures, and I want to go back. I know, insane, right? I was so unhappy when I was in Southern Sudan. But you cannot blame a country, or even a semi-autonomous region, for where you are in your head.

If I didn't have to go alone, I would go back right now.

phones

I never had a cell phone until I moved to Rwanda. About a week after I got there, J. and E. took me to the MTN Rwandacell office (there were not yet all the stores that later sprang up, although there might have been one or two) and bought me a sturdy little M0toro1a. I liked it. I put the language on Spanish, which was helpful because it meant that no one but me could figure out how to unlock it. Not that it mattered if anyone else could unlock it. I had no friends, at that point, to do anything crazy with my phone. I had been in the country for a week and the only people I had met were J. and E. (who were leaving in three weeks) and two coworkers who, while they were nice, had families and kids and stuff. It's not like we were hanging on the weekends.

I've had a cell phone ever since. A SIM card is the first thing I pick up in most countries - Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Liberia - anywhere I am going to be for more than a week or two. I usually walk directly to a kiosk in the Arrivals Hall of the airport and throw down the cash. I have become accustomed to the idea of being able to call someone to check in - "Ok, I'm at the restaurant. Are you already inside, or should I get a table?"

The only place, since 2002, where I have been without a cell phone for a significant period of time was Southern Sudan, and that felt strange and vulnerable. When I first arrived at the big airstrip an hour and a half from Tiny Little Town, no one came to pick me up. I stood there in the 100+ degree heat for a few minutes, looking around at the options. There were soldiers (and only soldiers) lounging about in the single hanger. There were a couple of white mercenaries in khakis and white t-shirts who rolled up in an unmarked Land Cruiser, jumped into helicopters, and took off. There were fellow passengers loading into NGO-marked Land Cruisers. And there was me, alone, with no phone. Fortunately, the other NGO-type people had satellite phones and were willing to share them (despite the $1/minute cost). Still more fortunately, the pimped-out minibus with the paper pineapples dangling from the rear-view mirror, the one that my organization had hired after our Land Cruiser broke down, arrived just before I hitched a ride to Bigger Town Three Hours Away. If I had a cell phone, though, I think I would have been much more comfortable waiting there with the soldiers and mercenaries.

I spent my whole three months in Southern Sudan watching the progress on the cell phone tower that was, in theory, being built. I didn't see it completed, but I got a text from a friend there a few months later: cell phone coverage finally reached TLT at the beginning of 2008. It is virtually everywhere in the world now.

This is how ubiquitous cell phones have become: when I turned on my US phone in Vietnam, it had network.

I can't imagine, anymore, a world without cell phones. I feel lost when I forget mine, or when I travel without one.

I will be arriving in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on Wednesday morning, and my sister is supposed to pick me up from the airport. I am so dependent on cell phones now that it makes me a little nervous to know that I won't be able to turn on my phone and call her from the airport. And yet, when I lived in Honduras before, none of us had cell phones. We simply had to meet where we said we would meet. Imagine that.

ramble

On my weekly Sunday afternoon ramble, I came across a money clip on the sidewalk. It contained a credit card and a driver's license and some receipts, and I picked it up tentatively, as one does, for fear that there is someone who is watching and about to yell at you for touching their stuff. No one yelled, so I checked the license to see that it belonged to the house in front of which I was standing.

No one answered the doorbell when I rang it. At length, I put the money clip in the mailbox. I took out a piece of paper and wrote "Your ID is in the mailbox - I found it on the sidewalk :)." I folded up the paper and tried to shove it under the door, but these new-fangled doors, I tell you, have no opening under the door. I finally stuck the note in the side of the door, above the latch, and walked away.

I'm sort of mad now that I didn't put my phone number on the note. It isn't that I want recognition or thanks, because I did what everyone I know would have done, but how will I ever know that the right person got it back? As I walked away, I kept thinking of all the possible scenarios that could result in the person not getting it back - someone stealing it out of the mailbox, etc. I guess I will never know.

It seems like more and more in life, as one grows up, there are things that one just cannot know.

...

I had brunch with some new friends yesterday, and I started, again, telling Southern Sudan stories. It's unfortunately, really, that the stories from there are so very amazing, because they give a false impression. I lived very comfortably and happily in Africa for 12.5 years, and three little months in Southern Sudan are the ones that get the press. THE SNAKES THE SCORPIONS THE FLIES THE LOCUSTS THE FROGS THE SPIDERS THE PIT LATRINE THE RAIN THE HEAT. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The problem is that people often DOUBLE OVER laughing when I tell them the story of losing Wallace in the pit latrine. Making people laugh like that is pretty addicting. That is one good story. Now it is. Now that I have Wilbur to replace Wallace. Now that I have access to music any time I want. It was not such a good story at the time.

"I really think the plagues in the Old Testament came from Southern Sudan," I said. And then, "Oh. Wait. Are you Jewish?"

They were. I HATE it when I use the phrase "Old Testament" while talking to Jewish friends. "YOUR BOOK. I MEANT TO SAY 'YOUR BOOK'." I am an idiot.

But anyway, at least the flies and the locusts and the frogs had to have come from where I was in Southern Sudan. I saw them myself. I felt the grasshoppers launching themselves off my head.

I always end the story by saying, "I would totally go back. It was absolutely worth it." And it was. Despite the culture shock and the critters and the loss of my dear, dear Wallace. It is impossible to put my finger on why, but it was. There was culture shock, yes, but there were also friends who danced with me in the center of the compound on the last night to the tinny music from a little boombox. There were critters, but there were also stars like you never see here, and bathing in the open air shower under a blue, blue sky. There was the loss of Wallace, but there were also women who sat with me and told me about their lives and asked about mine.

After months of telling my family that I wanted to leave, wanted to leave, wanted to leave, about two weeks before I actually left, I announced that I no longer wanted to leave. I was happy, and I wanted to stay.

I think their heads exploded.

satellite

Every now and again, I get absorbed in satellite images of the world. I am mesmerized by the fact that I can zoom in on my actual house in Rwanda or Liberia. I can see the little white rectangle of aluminum roof next to the lake in Rwanda, or just in from the ocean in Liberia. Both of those are actually pretty easy - in Rwanda, I just go straight west from Kigali to Lake Kivu and then find where the road hits the lake: Kibuye. In fact, I can see the shape of the peninsulas more clearly on the satellite than I ever did when I lived among those hills. In Liberia, I follow the coast down from Monrovia and then backtrack a little north of Buchanan.

I cannot, for love or money, find that Tiny Little Town in Sudan, and today I finally figured out why: what looked to me, on location, like one river (the White Nile) actually splits into a million little bits in the Sudd north of Juba. I learned this thanks to wikimapia.org, which has little rectangles around places that people have marked as various landmarks. I found on there Bigger Town Three Hours Away, and the Airstrip in the Middle of Nowhere, and some other oil fields, which pointed me to a road, which then disappeared, but I followed the biggest of the bits of river until I found the road that intersects with it here:

I can't really follow that road back to Tiny Little Town, though, for two reasons. First, the map doesn't have enough detail (silly map. doesn't everyone want to see detail in the middle of the Sudd?). Second, the road disappears into a patch of sand. Hmph. Not that I would be able to see much of the town, anyway, being that most of it is made up of thatched huts that aren't very visible from the air, but I am curious. I do know that it is somewhere at the intersection of that road coming west from the Nile and a road coming south from one of the oil fields.

It's quite satisfying to have nailed down the location of the town more precisely. I used to just scroll aimlessly through a huge section of Southern Sudan, hoping to happen upon something I recognized, but now I (sort of) know where things are. It's actually much further west than I had been looking.

Here is an illustration of why I had so much trouble finding it:

Go ahead. You try finding towns that look like that on a satellite image. And that's in rainy season, when things are green. In dry season, everything is the color of, oh wait! the roofs of the houses.

...

(If you are easily grossed out by hygiene issues, please look away now. Thank you.)

When I was in Southern Sudan, I didn't wash my hair every day. Okay, I never wash my hair every day. Generally, here in the US, I wash my hair every three days, but in Southern Sudan, due to water shortages, I washed it about every five or six days. By the fifth day, it's getting a little bit gross, so I tried to keep it to five unless there was a serious water problem.

And... it's been five days since I washed my hair. I don't know why. I just wasn't doing anything exciting this weekend, and it seemed like a waste to wash my hair when there is no reason for it. I acknowledge, though, that this is slightly distasteful and culturally inappropriate, and I have spent the whole weekend paranoid about people standing close to me because of it.

(Now you are wondering: why wasn't I paranoid about people standing close in Southern Sudan? The answer is AIR FLOW. We didn't live all cooped up inside buildings in Southern Sudan. Also, everyone had to carry their water from bore holes, so everyone was much more understanding about the water issues. People here... not so much.)

"it's still not as hot as southern sudan"

The only thing people talk about these days in Gone West is the heat, and I am that well-loved person who cheerfully says, as we walk out into the rush of hot air, "It's still not as hot as Southern Sudan." It isn't as hot as Southern Sudan. I mean, technically, by the thermometer, it might be, but it doesn't feel as hot. This is a function of trees tall enough to provide actual shade + lack of humidity + air-conditioning in many buildings that you can duck into cool off + roofs that are made of something other than tin + windows that open + availability of cool beverages.

About three weeks after I arrived in Southern Sudan, I sat, sweating, one evening, and tried to remember what it felt like to drink something cool. I could not. I had forgotten what cool water felt like in my throat, or ice cream, or basically anything at a temperature other than room temperature (at 100+ degrees F). When I had soft serve strawberry ice cream a few weeks later in Juba (I don't even like strawberry ice cream), I willed myself to remember the sensation of eating something cold, so I could take it back with me.

You get used to lack of cool things, though. After a few more weeks, I found the barely-cooled mango Vita at the little store in downtown Tiny Little Town as satisfying as any ice water I've ever had, when combined with a rickety wooden bench and a sunset.

When I step out into the sun now, here, in these brilliantly hot, dry days, I lift my face to the sky while those around me run for shade. I tried to sit in the sun on a metal bench in the park, but it was too hot. It burned me even though my clothes.

I've been to the K.'s pool twice this week. Last night it was still 98 degrees (37-ish, for you Celsius people) at 7 p.m., and I laid back on an octopus floaty, my head resting against its maniacal face, its wide mouth grinning like something off the midway at a carnival, and floated around in circles.

I would take years of this weather over one single winter.

heat of the day

I left my bike at work last night because I was going out with friends, and I went to pick it up in the heat of the day today. I intended to go for a long ride along the water, but after I rode the train to the library to pick up a book that was not yet available and then walked to work and then rode my bike home along the waterfront that was packed with annoying hordes of people, I was already dehydrated. So I gave up.

When I switched my wallet and phone to a different purse this afternoon, in order to go out for the evening, I found, in the pocket, a folded blue card. I opened it up to see my photo, a few pounds heavier from the stress eating of law school, staring out at me. It was my SPLM/SPLA* travel permit from Southern Sudan.

This was the purse I used in my final semester of law school, and through Nairobi and Southern Sudan. I finally learned my lesson and brought a cute purse with me instead of the annoying supposedly-hard-to-steal travel bags so many tourists carry. So I was that person with a cute purse next to the dugout canoes on the Nile. It held my camera and money just as well, oh you skeptics who believe travel gadgets and gizmos are necessary, as that silly money pouch that everyone knows you are wearing under your shirt. (P.S. We also laugh at you when you wear your backpack backwards. Why don't you just wear a t-shirt that says, "I AM A TOURIST, AND THERE IS SOMETHING VALUABLE IN THIS BAG"? I once saw people doing this in the airport in Nairobi. I cannot come up with a reason to wear your backpack on the front of your body in the Nairobi airport. I just can't.)

I was just having a discussion again today with a friend about how US Americans dress overseas in ripped khakis, stained t-shirts, and flipflops because they think POOR PEOPLE WON'T NOTICE BECAUSE THEY ARE POOR and I got annoyed all over again at the thoughtlessness and disrespect my countrypeople so often show the rest of the world.

I am currently contemplating how I need to buy some cute sandals for my next trip out of the country. I don't need them here - my crappy Tevas will do, because no one cares what I wear here. But for travel, I have two new dresses already, and I'm hunting for shoes. (Okay, fine, there is a wedding involved in this trip. And no, not my wedding.)

My next trip is a little less than two months away, fortunately.

Fortunately because my passport is empty right now, and that bothers me. It itches and irks. I need to get started filling it. (Funny. The first stamp in this passport, as in the last, will be from Latin America, even though most of my travel in life is to Africa.)

Fortunately also because I feel stuck. Something needs to give, and perhaps a trip will help it along.

* Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Sudan People's Liberation Army, the people generally in charge in Southern Sudan.

lightning

(Southern Sudan - 2007)

A storm is whipping about the branches of the trees outside my window. There is nothing quite like a good storm, as long as you are safely, warmly under a sturdy roof. Like everyone, I went through a stage when I was little when I was afraid of thunder and lightning. In my teens, we lived in a house with a huge tree right next to my bedroom, which had no attic. The first thing that tree would fall on, if it went down, was me. So I wasn't scared, exactly, but sometimes in very severe thunderstorms I would go sleep on the opposite side of the house.

It was when I moved to Rwanda that I first really encountered a thunderstorm alone. I loved them, even though I lived in a house nestled under a large steep hill that screamed "landslide." Sometimes I would hear the clatter of rocks as a little part of the hill slide down where it had been scooped out to make room for the house. I found the storms more comforting than scary, though.

The only time I have been afraid of a storm, as an adult, was in Sudan. The one-room tukuls we lived in had wide screen windows to let the breeze in, and I got stuck in my tukul instead of the more sheltered mess hall when the storm hit. There was literally no way to leave my tukul without being instantly soaked to the bone. I couldn't see the mess hall let alone walk the 50 meters to it. The yard turned to mud and the water collected in four-inch pools. The rain was blowing sideways into my windows. I thought the lightning was going to get me, seriously.

Oooh. I just saw a triple-forked lightning.

skirt

Today I wore a skirt that I have owned for over two years, but rarely wear. I rarely wear it because it has a weird waistband, and it looks weird. When I put it on today, I realized that it is actually intended to be a fold-over waistband, like on some yoga pants, and I put it on that way and it looked great. So I've just been an idiot for two years.

It's also, once the waistband is folded over as it was CLEARLY INTENDED TO BE, shorter than my normal skirt-length. Two-and-a-half years in Africa since 2002 has messed up my perception of acceptable skirt lengths. Folded over, the skirt falls just at the top of my knees, and, as we know, this is practically scandalous in much of Africa, especially on a white girl showing white legs. (In Elsewhere, in Southern Sudan, I once wore a skirt I have that falls just below my knees - a skirt that would have been fine in many places I have lived, but I would not have considered wearing it in Tiny Little Town. On a break, one of my (more distant) colleagues sidled up to me and said, lecherously, "I really like that short skirt you are wearing." So much for that skirt.)

But just below the knee is practically overly modest here in the US. I saw a girl today wearing a skirt so short I could almost see her butt cheeks. And no, she was not 15. She was a normal adult age going out to a nice restaurant for dinner. It says something about how I've acclimated to the US that I can almost feel comfortable wearing this skirt. (I think it also might say something about how old I am getting that I consider 25-35 a "normal adult age.")

I am so all-American now. Until, you know, I leave again, and it takes another 1.5 years upon return to get back to wearing knee-length skirts.

out and about

I rode my bike for a long time along the water this afternoon, and as I rode between the deep green trees, between the river and the highway, I wondered to myself, "What part of this could I not do in Africa?" Because I think like that sometimes. Sometimes I wonder what it is that keeps me here, when I could be there, and what draws me there, when I could be here.

I could have bought a bike, I thought, and I could have ridden it. I could have ridden it down the road to Rusenyi along Lake Kivu in Rwanda. I could have ridden it on the airfield and into town in Sudan.

I couldn't have done it quietly, though. Today, the only things I heard were the distant rush of traffic and the voices saying, "On the left" as they passed me. In Rwanda, I would have heard, "muzungu!" from the hillsides, and, down in Rusenyi, "biscuit! muzungu, donnez-moi un biscuit!" (To which the appropriate response, in your head at least, is to curse the French peacekeepers who, according to the lore, threw cookies out the windows of their vehicles to children TEN YEARS EARLIER. The memory of a free cookie never dies among kids, even when the current promoters of the memory are too young to have received said free cookie.) In Sudan, the football game on the airstrip would have been interrupted with calls of "ferengi! ferengi!" and any remotely bicycle-riding appropriate gear would, I'm sure, have been in violation of the county no-trousers rule that I utterly ignored.

One of the things that keeps me here is the ability, when I choose, to be anonymous, to walk around without saying over and over to small children holding my hand, "Si ni twa muzungu. Ni twa M___," to ride a bike without attracting a small crowd of onlookers. Attention is the price you pay for being white - read: weird - in a remote place. I have never particularly minded it. I grew up, after all, shrugging off the hands of all the people who wanted to touch my blond hair just to see what it was really like. But sometimes, when I think of it, it's nice to be able to go about my life without stares and pointing and the occasional child screaming in fear and running away from the color of my skin. (Don't you know? Only ghosts are this pale.)

...

Something I read today led to the googling of the phrase "yekepa liberia pool photos" because it was either that or try to describe this pool:




What I wanted to try to describe was that middle section, the part that you see the little blond kid walking over between the two rectangular parts of the pool, and how it was more of a bridge than an actual divider - you could swim under that part, and there was just enough air under there to breath if you stuck your nose straight up.

For some reason, I remember being able to see Guinea from near the pool, from the end where the camera is. I have a picture in my head of a hill descending to flat grass-land and a lonely triangular road-block in the middle of it. But when the camera pans over to the left, where I think I should be able to see Guinea, there is only more landscaped grass. Maybe if you walk further? Or have I mixed up two parts of Yekepa in my head?

My other thought about this video: would someone please, PLEASE, tell the Scandinavians that those tiny tight shorts are just... ugh, I can't even deal with them, even 25 years outdated.

end weekend

I have to say, I almost don't like weekends. I am always relieved to have them, and I wish they would go on, but I find myself being so sloth-like in them that I'm glad to have work again on Monday morning. Although I'm not so glad about the fact that I've stayed up/slept in too much for the last two nights and can never go to sleep on Sunday night. That part is not so great.

If I ever came into a great deal of money, I would not be able to quit my job, unless it was because I had started an organization that required me to work every day. My life needs the structure.

On weekends, I watch videos about Somalia, and I watch videos about Darfur, and I think too much. I think about the bullet-pocked walls in Liberia and a coworker in Sudan who, when he saw a picture of Monrovia flash by on my computer, said, "Wow, where is that? I could actually live there. I can live anywhere there are paved roads." In that video about Darfur, where they show the "terrible conditions" that the peacekeepers are living in - the dirty latrines? Not so different from the latrine that was Wallace's last home. (Oh, Wallace. I do miss you.) There is no experience quite like 110 degree heat on a latrine made of corrugated iron. As I was watching the video, I thought, "That's pretty much how everyone lives outside of big cities in Southern Sudan." (Probably in Northern Sudan, too, although I hear that Khartoum is very modern.) My pity for the peacekeepers was distinctly lacking, regarding their toilet accommodations.

I realized the other day that Tiny Little Town in Southern Sudan is the one place in the world where I have been but will probably never be able to return to. It's a weird feeling. Every other place I've been has been accessible. I may never go back, but I could. I could buy a plane ticket and rent a car and take a bus and get back. But Tilt is just too remote. Even if I could fly to Nairobi and fly to Juba and fly to Rumbek, I would need to get on the UN flight to the airstrip in the middle of nowhere, where there are no houses or businesses, not even a child walking by with a tray of gum and biscuits, and therefore no taxis. I suppose I could stand out on the road in the sun with no shade, with big Chinese trucks rumbling past on their way to the oil derricks, waiting for the chance minibus coming from Bigger Town or from Khartoum, two or three days drive away. I suppose I could, but it would be very difficult. Nigh unto impossible. The very impossibility makes me want to go back.

...

A few days ago, I found a tiny blue jewel on a desk at work. For complicated reasons, I'm not the only person who uses this desk, or, at least, someone else very possibly had to use it over the weekend. It's not my normal desk. It was a very pretty and sparkly little blue jewel, and I kept it on the desk, because I thought someone might come back and want it.

Several hours later, I realized that it came from my earring.

single photo

(Elsewhere, Southern Sudan, September 2007)

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.)

heat

I am, frankly, disappointed in the weather service. They had me all geared up for ferocious weather and snow days and now the sprinkles of rain are very anti-climactic. We need to step things up here.

The good news is that the return of the drear of winter has started me thinking about Where To Go Next. Yes, it is true that the plan was to stay here indefinitely, but um, has anyone noticed how early it gets dark here in early December? Less than nine hours of daylight is just not realistic for me. Yes, the summers are brilliant, and it's fantastic that it stays light for 15 hours a day in June, but I don't think it's a fair trade. I would like to keep up a more steady dose of sunshine all year long. I am beginning to plot my escape, although the escape that I am planning may take a few years.

Not only that, but I'm all nostalgic now. You know things are bad when you spend your time longing for a place where you thought every evening, "Tomorrow I am going to have them get me a flight out of here." Yep, I'm missing Southern Sudan, palm-sized spiders and spitting cobras and smelly pit latrines and all. I rationalize this by telling myself that I actually enjoyed Tiny Little Town by the end. The last two weeks or so. Before that, I would lie in the darkness in my mosquito net every night, shrinking into the center of the bed to avoid things getting me through the mesh, and think, "Tomorrow, I am asking them to book me a flight out of here. I can't do this anymore." And then in the morning the sun would rise and I would take an outdoor shower and everything seemed great. 

And that evening, I would lie in the darkness in my mosquito net, shrinking into the center of the bed to avoid things getting me through the mesh, and think, "Tomorrow, for sure, I am asking them to book me a flight out of here. I can't do this anymore." 

There were things going on in my head other than worries about bugs and snakes - it was not Tiny Little Town's fault that I was so miserable. I would have been miserable in a great many places right then.

And to offset the fretting that my head was doing, there was strong, constant sunshine, so strong that I put sunscreen on the part of my hair even when I wasn't going anywhere. Just the 50 meter walk from the tukuls to the office was enough to burn my wimpy pale skin. I found myself missing that sun today. When I stand waiting for the bus in the 24-degree Fahrenheit cold with the wind somehow finding its way through my layers of coat and scarf and multiple sweatshirts, I miss the weight of hot sun. 

I would take hot sun over cold wind anytime. I would blame this on a childhood in Liberia, but my dad is the same way. We are creatures of the tropics misplaced in the temperate zones of the earth.

[30] finale

The Town Bar, Southern Sudan, 2007

This posting every day thing has been really hard this year. It was much easier last year, in Southern Sudan, when all I had to do was open my eyes and write about what I saw, because everything I saw was new. It wasn't always interesting, being in Tiny Little Town; it was just easy to write about. I spent long days doing nothing but hiding from the sun under my porch and working on writing a training guide. It was far too hot to work in the actual office, which had, according to rumor, been designed by someone from the colder regions of Ethiopia. The office, therefore, had one window in each of two rooms. The windows faced in the opposite direction from the direction of the wind. And there was no ceiling under the metal roof. So it was essentially a box of concentrated heat under the 105+ degree sun. 

The only relief from the monotony was a walk on the airstrip at sundown, with a snake or two thrown in on particularly exciting days, or a trip to the hospital with a stool sample, or a ride into town to sit outside the tiny grocery store, drinking whatever cold beverage they happened to have that day. The grocery store was a container. You know, one of those containers they use on ships, to carry goods across the seas? The ones that fit on a flatcar of a train, or on a tractor-trailer base? It was the short length, the half-size. No one builds permanent structures in Southern Sudan. Everything is a mud tukul or a container or a prefabricated metal box that must be air-conditioned in order for human beings to survive inside it. It's the first question anyone asks when they hear about a new hotel or business or project: "Did they build a permanent structure?" The answer is almost universally no outside of Juba, and it's usually no even in Juba. 

The biggest excitement of a week in Southern Sudan, if you could get it, was a drive to Bigger Town (the state capital, three hours away) or to the Nile. Of course, that depended on the road being okay (i.e. not flooded) and no one flagging you down on the way and saying, "Maybe you don't want to go there." If there is one thing I have learned in Liberia and in Southern Sudan, it is that when someone says, "Maybe you don't want to go there," down that road, along that beach, you really, really do not want to go there. No, really. You do not want to go there. There are guns, most likely. 

People in the USA sometimes ask me if I'm scared when I'm in Africa, and the truth is that I have very rarely been afraid. I was far more afraid of bugs and snakes in Southern Sudan than I was of any human beings. (Although we did joke that my headlamp was a perfect target should someone want to get me.) I was scared momentarily in Liberia when it seemed that expatriates were being targeted, but just for a moment. One night I stood on the balcony at work, looking out at the ocean, listening to the night sounds, and I tried to be afraid, but I just couldn't manage it. It was so beautiful. And I was never afraid in Rwanda. In fact, I used to forget to lock my doors at night. 

[28] this post is about underwear

My mind is a very unfortunate blank this evening. This is the apparent result of too much play and too little work. A four day weekend is turning my brain to utter mush. 

I have resorted to blindly glancing through photos on my computer, hoping to find something, anything, of interest. 

There wasn't anything, really. I did find this:

Okay, that is perhaps interesting only to me. That is my tukul in Southern Sudan. I lived in that miniature house for three months. I would show you a picture of the inside, but 1. there is a logo that would give away who I worked for, ruining my pleasing fantasy of anonymity, and 2. there is nothing to see. This tukul contained the following things, while I lived in it: bed (with mosquito net), two plastic chairs, one teetering camping table, one fan that kept breaking, and two suitcases, in which most of my stuff stayed. It felt like a major life-enhancing change the day I got around to hanging a clothesline so I could dry my underwear somewhere other than on the arms of the chairs.

Here's a thing about Africa: you wash your own undergarments. Everyone does. Underwear is dirty, so you cannot ask someone else to touch it. It would be terribly rude. In Southern Sudan, we had women washing our clothes by hand, and they washed everything but the undergarments (they were not pleased with the shorts I wore to bed, either, thinking they were underwear despite some ineffective cross-language attempted communication). I washed mine in the shower, and then hung them about my room, a strategy that only took me, oh, two years in various countries to figure out. Always before I had a big underwear-washing party periodically. Except in Rwanda, where somehow I managed complete oblivion to the whole concept. The lady who helped me keep my house and myself in some semblance of cleanliness (more than full-time work and hand-washing clothes are incompatible occupations) was kind enough to wash my underwear as well. I'm not sure if she did it because she figured I was clearly completely inept, or if she was just incredibly nice. (I was completely inept, by the way. I still have not figured out how that weird mop-substitute floor cleaning mechanism they use in Rwanda works. It's like a big rubber squeegee that you use on your windshield. Only for the floor.)