Christmas in Juba - 9th Jan

Over the course of the last week if you have asked a Sudanese his plans for Christmas, he will tell you and then add that Christmas won't really come until 9th January.  This is the day he's been waiting for, the day of the referendum to determine the country's future when he can tell the North where to stick it.

There are huge question marks over whether the Government of South Sudan will be capable of running a country the size of France with little money or infrastructure in place, but it is a question of ideology and not pragmatism in the mind of the voter.

Christmas for us expats has involved the usual over-eating and over-drinking in an unusually hot background.  Turkey was forbidden at our work xmas dinner due to the proliferation of Ethiopians, who traditionally won't touch it.  Luckily my friends from another organisation tracked down a monstrous bird that could supply our emergency nutrition programmes for the next month on its own, so all was well.

Also good news is that the lady who works at my compound has taken to bringing me fresh coffee, cinnamon tea and spicy goat stew whenever she sees me, much to the teeth-gnashing chagrin of my undernourished colleagues.  Merry Christmas indeed!

History

Sudan's decades-long civil war ended officially in 2005.  The peace agreement stipulated that the people of the South could vote in 2011 on whether they wanted to become a separate nation, making any future Civil War a mere War.

The vote is scheduled to begin on 9 January and last for a week.  Unbelievably, my sources at the Ministry tell me that it is likely to go ahead as planned, which would be an unexpected triumph for administration in these parts.

The referendum will almost certainly make South Sudan the newest country on earth, and this two-horse town a capital city.

For more info, I would urge you to avoid Douglas Johnson's The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars. A copy of this 234 page textbook exists in most guesthouses in Juba with the last 220 pages in mint condition.

Recent politics is complicated, with a variety of movements with incredibly similar names popping up here and there to take pot shots at each other, much like the People's Front of Judaea and its rivals in the Life of Brian.  I'm not sure if you get murdered for discussing these matters on the internet so I'll let someone else conduct that practical experiment and will leave it there for now.

Houses

There are not many children in Juba.  I understand that this is because it is a boom town, nourished mainly by the attention of the world's development agencies, so most of the workforce disappears to its wives and children in the village in the evening.

Consequently, there are not many houses here, and Save the Children (SC) struggles to find places to put its international staff up.  We have 5 guesthouses but they are all full so for the next couple of weeks I am in a room in an Ethiopean-run Islamic-style courtyard house.  I have air conditioning and my own shower.  This is slightly embarrassing as it is rather better than the quarters my colleagues enjoy.  While they toss and turn in cockroach-infested bedsits or sweat in hammocks suspended over malarial swamps, I write at my walnut desk, sustained by cold drinks from my fridge.  My bed is made for me and my towel laundered while the bloke at the next desk risks death by drowning or alligator to get his towel clean in the Nile.

The flip side of living here is that SC are shipping in emergency response staff to South Sudan by the busload and will have to turn some of this house into office space, as our compound resembles a refugee camp.  So I might soon be woken up in the morning by a man sitting on the end of my bed making an order over the phone for 20,000 mosquito nets and a dozen white land cruisers.

Cows

I now have a South Sudan work permit, which has allowed me at last to get into South Sudan.  These documents tend to be works of fiction; that of a blonde female colleague from Philadelphia confirms the following distinguishing data: hair - black, eyes - black, sex - male.  Mine seems ok though, so here I am.

Juba is the capital of South Sudan.  Population around 500,000, number of paved roads about 3, number of times today my car had to wait for cows to get out of road 2.  In between bouts of cow-watching I attended a security briefing in the Save the Children office, where we discussed guns, land mines and armed robberies.  If there is gunfire, stay where you are!  If there is an actual fire, get the hell out of there!  Most interesting was the warning to stay away from local girls.  If I marry one then I will have to pay her clan around 150 to 200 cows, depending on how fit she is.  Therefore she may well have trigger-happy clansmen keeping an eye on her.  I think I'll steer clear.

Traffic

Still no South Sudan - awaiting work permit in Nairobi.

Nairobi is probably quite a nice place, but it is impossible to see more than a tiny portion of it due to its ridiculous traffic.  This gets ten times worse when it rains; not because people take to their cars, but because the traffic policemen scurry for cover and suddenly whoever can honk his horn loudest has right of way.

You honk your horn to indicate that you are going, to let someone go, to thank them, to abuse them, to say that you are turning and to announce that you have a car.  Sometimes a horn is honked as part of the mechanics of the driver's art: I travelled in a cab on my last visit here with a driver who added a toot to each gear change, like a percussionist following a drum roll with a cymbal clash.

The Big Sky

First promise - no mention of Africa's Big Sky.  In tedious travel books, adolescent letters home and inferior blogs, Africa always has a big sky.  Not here it won't.

I hope to write a bit about my experiences in relief work in South Sudan, with a bit of chat about the place I'll be living, but I promise I won't be marvelling at the majesty of the plains or any of that nonsense.

Off on Monday.