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.