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leighabroad
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Country: United States
State: Texas
Birthday: 12/31/1980
Gender: Female
Expertise: breaking diets, procrastination, funding my wandering
Occupation: Student
Industry: Nonprofit
Message: message me
Member Since:
4/3/2004
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| Arrival in Juba
After four days in Nairobi of checking emails and reading Emma’s War in anticipation of getting my travel permit, I boarded a JetLink Express commercial flight yesterday to Juba. A Sudanese visa is not required to travel to South Sudan. Instead, one can enter on a travel permit issued by the interior ministry of the Government of South Sudan, now that the south has become an autonomous entity. I remember that a friend of mine while studying in Uganda back in 2003 had told me that she really wanted to go to South Sudan, and, at the time—a bit more than a year before the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA)—I thought she was crazy. Another friend of mine visited Juba in January 2005, the month the CPA was signed. Honestly, I thought she was a little crazy, too (but just a little bit…I mostly thought she was ballsy.) Since then, I’ve met a bunch of people who have worked and interned in Juba over the last couple of years and have spoken about what an interesting place that it’s become. I was excited to have the opportunity to spend the summer here but was a bit nervous about what it would be like. Although I had lived in East and North Africa and had traveled throughout Southern Africa, I didn’t know what to expect from Juba. Would it feel familiar? Would it be a different world? What would life here be like?
My travel permit came through on Wednesday and I was set to fly out on Friday morning. Flying from northern Kenya into South Sudan, the landscape transitioned from red-orange desert-like plains and hills spotted with dirty brown lakes to increasingly verdant fields, reaching an almost radioactive green. As we started to descend toward the town, I could see the round, straw roofs of huts and the rectangular tented camps where UN and various expats are housed. A large hill stood in the distance, and I smiled when I saw that the earth was made up of the same deep orange dirt that stained my feet in Uganda. Getting off the plane, it was clear that we had left the temperate climate of Nairobi. While it’s the rainy or “cold” season, I spent much of the afternoon sweating away under tented shade. Quite a change from Boston, which was still in the forties a couple of days before I left. Thank god it cooled down in the evening so that I could sleep!
I was picked up by the IRC at the airport. Its vehicle—as well as many others belonging to NGOs—was marked with a large sticker of an automatic weapon with a large cross over it and a red background. I asked and learned that the sign indicates that the car is unarmed and that it will not carry soldiers. On the drive to the IRC office, I saw a number of signs and posters with pictures of John Garang and calls for peace.
Catherine, a new IRC staff member who arrived on the same flight, and I were taken to the AFEX camp run by UN-OCHA, where I’ll be staying for the next week until a place opens up in the IRC guesthouse. It’s made up of dozens of semi-permanent tents, a few portable shower and toilet facilities, and a large tented mess hall where buffet meals are available at $15 a pop. There’s daily laundry, and there’s purportedly wireless access as well. A number of its residents—employees of the World Bank, the UN, NGOs—have lived there for months or years. It feels kinda like being at summer camp. A summer camp with really expensive food. And populated by adults.
Catherine and I had lunch and a nice afternoon of conversation. She’s a Kenyan who has been working in Sudan in the field of health for over a decade. She told me that Kibaki owns the hotel where I stayed in Nairobi. She also told me a joke about the Kenyan president: Kibaki, Bush, and two other dignitaries were all on a boat, which began to sink. Since there was only one life jacket, those on board decided to vote for who would get it. Who won? Kibaki. With how many votes? Nine.
Catherine shared some amazing stories about working in Sudan over the last ten years. She talked about having to sleep entirely dressed during the war while working in Bor so that the staff could evacuate in the event of an emergency. She told me about having to hide in a bomb shelter for over two hours, occasionally coming out to see where the bombs had fallen but then silenced and scared when the last of those dropped fell close to their compound. The locals had learned when the planes would drop the bombs and where they would fall, and even the dogs and roosters had learned to run and hide at the right time. Catherine spoke of sticky mud that would suck off your shoes in the rainy season and of killing more than 60 snakes in compound she was living one month. She mentioned how rebels would sometimes “borrow” NGO vehicles when its staff evacuated for safety reasons and then return them before they were back. She told me about Kenyans and a Sudanese NGO worker getting arrested in Khartoum for possession of alcohol and of how the Kenyans were quickly released but of how it took convincing from the Sudanese woman’s employer to get here out. She talked about how sad it was to see little girls in Darfur ostracized after they were raped. Over dessert, Catherine also spoke about how good the fruit tastes in Darfur.
In the afternoon, it rained heavily for about an hour, after which the sky cleared up and the sun came out again. I’m hoping that this is what constitutes the rainy season and that we won’t be plagued by days and days on end of rain. It made it cooler, and helped dissipate the dust.
In the evening, some of our new colleagues came to pick us up and take us to out to dinner. We ate at what is known as an SPLA hangout, and I apparently received my first marriage proposal (although I can’t be sure, since our Dinka translator didn’t tell us exactly what was said.) Today, when he left the office, the owner of the new security company being hired by IRC left his card and asked one of my bosses to pass it along to me, telling him that he could show me around Juba if I was interested. He’s a Brit here training the SPLA and has spent three years in Iraq. So, two days in Juba and two times hit on. This brings me to the conclusion that it’s the guys and in Cambridge—and not me—that are responsible for my lame love life. Of course, I will take full responsibility for my lame love life here, as both of the offers so far have not been that appealing.
This morning, I overheard a conversation that I found dorkily interesting as a law student. One of the women in the bathroom was talking about an accident in which a man on a motorcycle drunkenly hit someone’s car while it was stopped. Things apparently calmed down and were taken care of fairly quickly without much incident. Another woman commented that she knew of a similar accident where the driver was foreign. The court determined that the foreign driver had to pay for the damage to the motorcycle even though the driver’s car was stopped because, had he not been working in Sudan, the accident would never have happened. Seems like an odd notion of determining fault and proximate cause.
Well, I’ve probably bored whoever has made it to this point enough. It’s been incredibly interesting here so far, but I know that I am not able to translate much of it into words. I haven’t even seen that much of Juba yet, but from what I can tell from the bit I’ve spent driving around in the backseat of a 4x4, it seems to thoroughly fit the mode of the odd division between UN/NGO and real world that you find in many developing and post-conflict countries, just more pronounced. There are walled compounds, white Land Cruisers all over the place, extremely basic facilities for most, and relative extravagance (i.e., $10 salami with cheese sandwiches at a restaurant/wine bar behind a walled compound) for others. This morning, we passed a UNICEF food warehouse pilled up with bags, and UNAMIS has a huge camp outside of town.
I’ll try to write every now and then, more for myself than anything else, but also in case some of you might want to know what I’m up to.
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| to any friends who might still read this. i know i am lame. it's not my fault (well, it is, but...).
i promise to return to the normal world as of january 10th at roughly 5:30 eastern. there will be lots of alcohol and celebrating, and you're welcome to come by if you're in the neighborhood. | | |
| This guy scares me. I was trying to wind down from a day of studying civ pro and, in flipping the channels, was severely disturbed by his take on Middle East history (which contains consists of a 30-second post-WWI review of Israeli history offensive to anyone who is not anti-Arab). He was extremely patronizing in his critique of president Carter's "naive" assessment of the Middle East, which his great creditials give him the legitimacy to do: "After high school graduation, Beck pursued a career as a Top 40 disc jockey, landing a job in Corpus Christi, Texas, as the youngest morning host in the United States at 18-years-old. His career took him to Top 40 morning shows in Baltimore, Houston, Phoenix, Washington, D.C., and New Haven, Conn.....After a bout with alcoholism and drug addiction, Beck became a Mormon and embarked on a new career in talk radio. He joined WFLA-AM in Tampa, Fla., where he took over a program ranked 18th in the market and took it to No. 1 within his first year." romyolivia, you would LOVE this guy!! (p.s., i know that i owe you an email!) | | |
| this is my brain: 
this is my brain on law school: 
Any questions? (p.s., this anti-drug add campaign scared the shit out of me when it broadcast. i was about four and thought that i could accidentally get on drugs and my brain would actually be fried.) | | |
| i decided on kiev and then switched to paris. as much as i'd love to see kiev, the flights i originally were going to take got fully booked, and it became apparent that the alternatives would have made the trip enough of a hassle to make me regret the decision during the nth hour of travel or nth transfer to/from an airport. i've seen paris so it will provide a good, leisurely stopover between flights of 11+ hours each way.
as usual, i am taking the most ridiculous travel route possible on my trip this summer. i'm flying to st. petersburg, russia, to start the trans-siberian/mongolian express, during which i will pass though moscow, irkursk, mongolia, and beijing, before flying back to paris to return to the states. why spend 15 hours traveling back to europe when it's closer to get home the other way? frequent flyer miles. i'm really excited about the trip.
otherwise, things are pretty crazy. i'm still trying to find a home and loans for next year, which i can hopefully work on some this week since i'm traveling to boston for work. however, i'm not confident that being in trial will lend itself to having free time to apartment hunt. i don't know what i'll actually be doing for the trial, since i've been working at my firm for only 3 weeks, but aparently they think i'm useful in some capacity. picking up coffee, reading through documents to verify that there's nothing of interest inside them, adding to the critical mass of the defense team?...we shall see. | | |
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