Christmas in South Sudan

Another Christmas been and gone and I can't remember what it's like anywhere else.  Concessions to the holiday season in Juba have been few - a few decorations here and there and a creepy-looking Father Christmas by a roundabout being guarded by a camoflage-clad soldier.

I'm surprised the government has a soldier spare to look after old Santa, as the youth of the Nuer tribe have spent the last week launching attacks on the neighbouring Murle in Jonglei state and someone really needs to go and tell them to show a bit of festive spirit and stop it.

It hasn't been a very jolly week for security staff in Juba.  Five days ago someone shot two of our guards in the leg and stole one of our land-cruisers right outside the office in front of several onlookers.  One of the guards was told by his employer to report to work at my guest house later that evening and never mind the hole in his leg, until someone interceded on his behalf for clemency.  And on Christmas Eve three women were shot dead just around the corner, with the result that the streets were so awash with AK-47 waggling policemen that many of us couldn't get to our Christmas parties.

For me Christmas Day involved a BBQ on the banks of the Nile, shisha, party games and a Chinese-made inflatable reindeer with the price written on its face in indelible marker.

Also occupying my time these days is a 4-week old kitten who is halfway through a fortnight in my custody, and who is making exciting strides in the areas of eating solid food, chasing mouse-like objects, leaping into yawning chasms and going to the lavatory.

Diani

They say that lightning doesn't strike twice; this doesn't apply to very tall metal objects, so our radio mast got done again a while back, knocking out the internet connection just after it had been fixed after the last lightning strike.

I've just returned from holiday at Diani Beach, on the part of the Kenyan coast that isn't constantly being raided by men with eye patches and parrots on their shoulders.  We stayed at an amazing hotel where more or less the only residents were various Save the Children staff, a tame bush baby who liked to sit on people's heads in the belief that he was atop a small, leafless tree and a wicked monkey who leapt on the table at breakfast and filled his pockets with bananas and half-eaten pieces of toast.

After the stress of being in Juba or in the midst of the disaster response in the Horn of Africa we were pretty set on recharging batteries, so our days didn't involve much more than lying in hammocks perfecting our impressions of those sloths that move so slowly that moss grows in their fur.

We had a couple of entertaining nights out at Forty Thieves beach bar, but I'm afraid how the two male members of the party woke up in bed together wearing pretty floral dresses will have to remain a mystery to you all.

Bush baby on branch of small, leafless tree

Lightning

Over the last few weeks our excuses for failing to carry out head office demands have ranged from food poisoning to scorpion stings.  We came up with a doozie a few Fridays ago though – our radio mast was struck by lightning, frying our internet machine and plunging us all into e-silence.

The lightning strike came out of nowhere – no thunder storm, no wind, no rain.  Our friends at Oxfam and Solidarites, 200 yards north and south of us, all reported an explosion of terrifying loudness, with the most seasoned field operatives jumping out of their skins.  Most of us in the office assumed the war was getting going again – imagine tossing a hand grenade out of the window and you have some idea.  Embarrassingly, my reaction was to throw myself on to my desk, as if to protect my laptop; our education advisor was reported to be crawling under her desk when news came that there was no bomb.

Everybody in the office who was touching their computer received an electric shock, and some were reporting headaches and backache hours later.  I am slightly embarrassed to report that none of my team were affected, which suggests that while other departments were all hunched over their computers mine had other pursuits to occupy their time.

So no one has email at the moment, prompting thoughts of what the hell did anyone do before email was invented.  Presumably they got on with their programmes without constant monitoring from head office, which was probably quite a good way of operating.  Field operatives desperate to update their fantasy football teams before the weekend had a different view.

Kapoeta

I write from Kapoeta North, way out East of Juba near Ethiopia and so remote that you can't even get to the airstrip when it's been raining as a river appears and blocks the road.  I think the local tribe might have been put here by National Geographic; every day our water arrives on the heads of five ladies wearing goat skins, beads and bits of metal, none of which covers their breasts.  After they put the water down they sit down and smoke a pipe - you weren't expecting that were you.

Nakedness is popular around here, and plenty of men wander around wearing nothing but a jacket and an AK47.  A friend of mine ran a health workshop here a while back.  Halfway through one of the participants, clearly feeling the heat, removed his shirt and pants with the noncholance of taking off a sweater.  My friend said that she was very sorry but it actually made her feel a little uncomfortable, and the gentleman nobly covered his nakedness by putting his shirt back on.

We run health and nutrition programmes here, which are fantastic and actually seem to make children healthy and nourished.  I visited a stabilisation centre today, where babies who are deemed too size zero to be much of a prospect in life are incarcerated until they show a bit of gumption and gain some flab.  No doubt the picture of tasty vegetables on the wall is inspiring, but I'm not sure of the purpose of the giant rabbit.  I can't help thinking that the idea of a domestic pet overfed to the point of morbid obesity is a bit insulting to a two-year-old trying to make a dent in the scales.

Stabilisers

Tasty veg, an espresso and a piece of coal

Unhelpful

There are something like six billion gazillion insects on Earth, and around half of them live in our compound here.  They like to hang out in the office after dark, and divide their time between orbiting the lights, bumping their heads on my computer screen and trying to explore interesting looking parts of my body.  I'd hoped to get plenty done this evening, but you try developing a 2012 master budget when there's a flying centipede hurrying its way up your nostril.

Return

Apologies for the long silence; bad internet connections follow me like avenging furies.

I'm back in Juba after three weeks in the UK, where I attended four weddings and gave the impression to the happy couple at each one that I made a special trip back for theirs.

As noted before in this blog, a rapid nosedive in the security environment means we all go into hibernation, where we are locked in our guest houses for the necessary days and survive on Rice Krispies and jelly (or whatever) from the hibernation kit, a locked trunk in the guest house kitchen.  Some experienced aid workers are reputedly able to sleep for weeks straight in these situations, like rodents.  When I got back I realized that I went away with the key to the hibernation kit for my guest house, so it was lucky there were no security incidents in my absence or our next house meeting would have been a frosty affair.

Speaking of hibernation, if we have an overnight guest, they now have to sign a waiver confirming that they will not be entitled to any of our emergency food, although on the plus side the waiver doesn’t yet go as far as saying that they will become the emergency food in the event of hibernation.

The rules of the guest house also now say that we all have to be inside five minutes before curfew – on the basis that curfew means the time by which you have to be inside, the rule is therefore that curfew is now five minutes before itself.

For a dreadful few weeks around independence time, curfew was 11pm, so now that it has been put back to 1am the nights seem to stretch ahead of one infinitely.  One of my colleagues recently returned home from his deployment and was found on his first night back standing on a bench on Blackfriars Bridge at 3am, arms aloft and bawling “no f---- curfew!” at the sleeping city.

Life in an independent nation

Things are much as they were before we got all independent.  For some reason there are a lot more road blocks, which usually aren't too much of a problem if you don't look like a gun-runner.  It's worth not copying the example of someone I know who was sick out of one car door while the driver was questioned in another.  Some other friends also got stopped by a policeman, who asked them why they were laughing as they drove, apparently an unpardonable offence.

Huge progress was made on the international airport in the weeks before independence day, but this appeared to stop on independence morning and presumably the airport will now be half finished for the next 20 years.  There are solar powered street lights which oddly enough do actually get light after dark and not just while they are being powered by the sun.

We have a new stock of bank notes emblazoned with the face of emancipation hero John Garang and traditional South Sudanese scenes.  If you're wondering where in South Sudan you can see a lion lying before a magnificent waterfall, just take a look at the new 100 pound note.  There is also a 25 pound note, which I am predicting will lead to all manner of confusion.  Estranged sibling (North) Sudan is also issuing new banknotes, leading to all and sundry scrambling to rid themselves of old Sudanese pounds which will soon be about as useful as an electric blanket in a Juba guesthouse.  This is called the Currency War and so far has been a lot more civilised than the Civil War.

Independence day

Last night at midnight South Sudan did what is has been fighting to do for half a century and stuck it to the Man by becoming its own nation.

Today the government has organised a hilariously-timed programme of celebrations, including speeches from ten major world figures in an hour and thirty five minutes.  The speakers will include the Secretary General of the United Nations, the President of South Sudan and everyone's favourite pantomime villain, the President of (North) Sudan.  I expect the speeches to be over some time around Monday lunchtime.

Last night the people held their own celebration by driving overflowing cars, troop-carriers and motorbikes in a ragged procession around the streets of Juba.  Hazard lights flashed permanently, horns honked pretty much permanently, hands were slapped and fists punched in every passing vehicle.  The shouts were "new nation!", "SPLA oyay" in recognition of the Sudan People's Liberation Army, and a general all-purpose howling.  We joined in the procession in an NGO land-cruiser, and had six people on the roof and two hanging off the side within a few minutes.

We saw one man manage to drive despite having most of his body out the window and on the roof of his car, one daredevil lying on his motorbike like Superman and swooping between cars and pedestrians, and one fellow pushing his broken-down car to the side of the road but still blowing lustily on a vuvuzela trumpet.  There were plenty of home-made flame throwers fashioned from lighters and bug spray, and people seemed to be chucking fireworks about.  By the side of the road lay some who had evidently began their celebrations in the morning, but there seemed little time for drinking.

Road safety is never high on the agenda around here, and you feared for some of the car roof gymnasts.  As we approached the countdown clock tower on the stroke of midnight we saw a limp body being dragged from the road and tossed in the back of a pickup.

The clock tower was the focus of the midnight celebrations, and traffic approaching the roundabout found itself entering a melee of dancers with shields and spears, embracing families, jerry-can drummers and BBC news crews.

I have no idea what freedom feels like as I have never known anything else.  From what I saw last night, it's not so much a state of mind as a physical feeling.  It was possibly the coolest thing I've ever seen.

Independence minus 10 days

 On 9th July South Sudan becomes the world's newest baby nation, and Juba is preparing.  The airport is currently a one-storey hut with one room for leaving and one for arriving; luggage is tossed through a hole in the wall.  The skeleton of a huge new terminal building has been slowly growing over the last three years but work is now going on round the clock to transform it into a shimmering temple to aviation that will no doubt collapse on top of the thirty heads of state due to arrive for the party.

The shabby countdown to referendum clock tower has been replaced by a swish countdown to independence clock tower donated by the Chinese, who I'm sure don't want anything in return for the $9bn they've donated to the baby shower.  I believe this money has been earmarked for several enormous guns which will be taken to the border and pointed at North Sudan.  Anything left over may go on ministerial stretch Hummers, or perhaps a monorail.

You'll have noticed that North Sudan, upset to be losing a good chunk of itself, isn't playing ball with the independence celebrations and has been bombing the hell out of selected Southern towns.  At the moment it is refusing to hand over the region of Abyei, like a jilted lover who won't face facts and refuses to return a favourite borrowed sweater.

A consequence of Khartoum's moodiness is that there are dire shortages of fuel, food and premium-strength European lager.  The fuel problem is hitting Juba hardest, and hoarders are filling up spare bins, washing up bowls and wellington boots in the belief that it will get worse.  Some petrol stations are refusing to allow you to fill jerry cans, but this isn't a problem as no one will notice if you get your driver to make several trips and spend half his day lying under the car syphoning petrol into empty baked bean tins.

5 things I've learned so far from 7 months in South Sudan

Putting your hand in a ceiling fan will lead to a broken finger.  It will also lead to embarrassment when done during a meeting at which the entire management team is present.

Tiny bugs can get into unopened packets of nuts and breed within.  The chances of you noticing before eating any of the nuts is around 50%.

You can't really play football in the rain in Sudan.  It poured with about 10 minutes to go in one of our games and within seconds the clay in the pitch had turned into glue, the hail was in everyone's eyes and we were staggering around like blind men wearing deep sea diving boots.

If you accidentally swig from a bottle of kerosene in the belief that it is water, lighting a cigarette immediately afterwards to calm you after your ordeal will not make you explode.

You can swim in the Nile if you watch out for crocodiles and don't swallow too much water, but you don't want to stray too far from the bank or the current will take you to Khartoum.  Seeing as virtually no expat in Juba has a Sudanese visa, a watery arrival in Khartoum is unlikely to go down well with the authorities there, who assume that most movements that Westerners make are an attempt on the President's life.

Planes

There is something like 50 km of paved roads in South Sudan, so getting round is a headache.  The solution is the United Nations Humanitarian Air Service.  Here it has a fleet of 10 or so aircraft, administered by the World Food Programme, that ferry aid workers from tiny place to tiny place and back to Juba.

Airstrip at Akobo East with Caravan

Tickets are considered far too simple a method of deciding who gets on the plane.  Far better is to publish a manifest the day before the flight, twenty minutes before the flight, or not at all, listing who the chosen ones are.  If your name's not down you're not coming in, although methods have been designed to get around this.  They include crying, shouting, arguing, pleading, threatening or being extremely attractive.

You get from Juba to regional hubs Rumbek, Malakal and Wau on a 40 seater De Havilland Dash, and from a hub to the pointless village of your choice on a 10 seater Cessna Caravan.  A trip on a Caravan is a lot of fun; you get a great view of take-off and landing through the windscreen, and pockets of hot air make for a bouncy ride.  It's all quite informal - a friend claims he once got on a plane with a full manifest by being put in the co-pilot's seat, although sadly the controls on his side were disabled.

There are some commercial airlines, but they are not to be trusted.  They all have peculiar names, like Feeder Air, and questionable safety records.  There used to be a carrier called Icarus Air, presumably named by someone who read only the first half of the myth of Icarus.

I am told that South Sudan has no Civil Aviation Authority, a body that your average country has to tell people flying north to fly at one altitude and people flying south to fly at a different one, so quite some trust has to be put in your pilot's eyesight.

The UNHAS schedule is a mystery, and long waits in boring airfields are part of the game, where you can spot huge cargo planes from the old Soviet Union with curious hieroglyphics on the side.  The best airfield is the one at the northern town of Wau, where the twisted carcasses of two planes that crashed just off the runway have been left where they fell, presumably pour encourager les autres.  My favourite wreckage, though, is in the town of Rumbek, where a pilot once mistook the main road of the town for the airstrip.

Airstrip at Kapoeta with Dash

Safari South Sudan

Over Easter weekend, a few of us went on safari in Nimule, on the Ugandan border.  Like everything else in Sudan, this was a strange experience.

It takes about four hours to get to Nimule.  There is an average of three deaths on the road every day, probably because it is a good road and therefore an unusual driving experience for most of its users.  We rescued a family who had rolled their car and drove them to the next town; the father was so keen to distribute business cards to his rescuers that I'm pretty sure this is a stunt he pulls every day.

A night out in Nimule involved drinks in a bar called Operation Jungle Storm, food in a restaurant with dodo on its menu (no idea) and a visit to a hip hop concert.  We were lucky enough to meet members from one of Nimule's gangs, the Holy Guns (see photo).  One of our number introduced us as the Juba Jews, possibly the least cool sounding crew of all time.

Arby from the Holy Guns, and a Member of the Juba Jews

Holy Guns and Juba Jews at peace

We brought a driver from Juba with us, and in the morning there was no sign of him.  We broke into his room and it was unslept in.  He appeared at ten to nine, mumbling incoherently.  When he turned to battle with the handle to his room, a patch of mud was visible on the back of his head, the classic sign of a night in a ditch.  After two minutes in his room he emerged in exactly the same state, but with a fresh T shirt on back to front, and off we went.

Safari in South Sudan involves wandering on foot with a guide wearing camouflage and carrying an AK47 (our guide promised that if we saw any animals he would shoot them).  We spent some hours in the heat and saw a few warthogs, antelopes and half a buffalo, although later examination of photos revealed that we also may have seen Bigfoot.  We also got stuck in a swamp and swam in a side project of the Nile, where we hurled giant weeds at each other.  An elephant had killed a hippo there earlier that day, and people were gleefully carrying its skin off to dry out and sell as a tasty snack.

At dusk we returned to the river and were rewarded with sightings of hippos in the water a few feet away, and we also had a standoff with a herd of elephants, who were on the far side of the river and wouldn't cross it until we'd gone.










There was a group of Germans staying at our hotel, who were allocated the rooms we thought we'd booked, ate the dinner we pre-ordered and made it to the park an hour before us; if they'd seen any animals before we got there they presumably would have shot them.

The health and safety people haven't made it as far as Nimule, which makes the whole safari experience a lot more fun.  We were also fortunate to have a talisman in our midst, one of my colleagues who is so sickness and injury prone that he picked up a parasite in Colombia and was invited by doctors to name it as no one else has ever had it.  Safe in the knowledge that if anyone got eaten it would be him, we were free to roam close to rabid buffalo and make crude gestures at rogue elephants.  It was a miracle he made it home without mishap, although when he was getting out of the car in Juba the driver drove off and made a good fist at running him over, which would have been a fitting end to the weekend.

Orphanage

My football team practices two evenings a week on a little field at the Living Waters orphanage in Juba.  This is pretty good, although there are a few hazards.  There is a low wall at one end behind which lives the park keeper from comics from the sixties, so balls only go over in one direction and are presumably punctured with the spike used for picking up leaves.  There is a very old and sick alsatian dog that staggers about the compound and often falls into a coma on the edge of the six yard box.  And we have found all sorts of strange things in the long grass; transistor radios, bits of glass and a kitten have all been held aloft with a cry.

The presence of the orphanage is useful as there is a never-ending supply of orphans who can be called upon to make up the numbers on either team or tossed over the wall on a fruitless ball hunt.

The Danish Refugee Council funds a workshop at the orphanage where the boys stitch leather footballs and volleyballs, and these are sold to local traders.  The graduation of 20 boys was a couple of days ago, and two of us from the team were honoured guests at the ceremony.  This was an amusing occasion; the team captain's mobile phone rang with the ring tone of the Jam's Town Called Malice while the local pastor was opening in prayer, and somebody rode a motorbike very close to the marquee and revved it while he watched (and drowned out) proceedings.  All of the boys were given certificates and we clapped them up to the stage.  One boy was wearing a huge golden medallion, which is not in keeping with the required orphan's uniform (think Oliver!).

Prizegiving

Graduates and honoured guests.  Note man with eyepatch.  He had a huge scar on his face, and spends his life traveling around and education children on road safety, presumably based on experience

Another project at Living Waters is the bakery, which turns out delicious bread and cakes.  The guests were given cakes and they were indeed delicious; mine had a maggot in it but it was only a small one and it was dead.

We are told that the leather workshop has ambitious plans - next on the production line will be belts, wallets and the menu holders for local restaurant the Queen of Sheba.  We were invited to inspect a selection of prototypes, which included a belt with 'God is Grateful' emblazoned on it.  My suspicions were aroused that the wallets were not made by the orphans of Living Waters, Juba, as they had 'Made in Ethiopia' printed inside, but I guess they were examples of what is to come.

Swimming

Life in Juba is tiring, hot and dirty, so there's nothing like a visit to a swimming pool to take the edge off.

Your choice is limited to two.  The Acacia Hotel offers a 15 metre long pool filled with a liquid the colour of lemon squash, a mostly Western clientele and a tame Dik-Dik that sniffs around your bag and eats the apple you were saving for after your swim.  The pool is busy but can usually be emptied by some vigorous bombing and ducking.  If you have a ball you can throw at people then so much the better.

The Jebel Lodge pool is more of an African hangout and is usually filled half with lemon squash and half with people.  None of the tactics that served us well at Acacia worked here and it was a hazardous place as most of the swimmers were doing the backstroke, swimming underwater or with their eyes shut.  We did witness some of the worst diving imaginable; in this photo I demonstrate how it's done.

Textbook

The greatest pleasure from the pool is derived not from the exercise but from the temperature of the water.  In fact, a paddling pool is a serviceable alternative, and people with those in their back gardens are popular people.  I would imagine that the key demographics for their manufacturers are five year olds and aid workers.

The other good thing about going to the pool is that it can make you forget you are in Juba, a necessary state every now and then (swallow enough water and you can forget more or less everything).  Having said that, one of my colleagues returned to London from his deployment and showed his photos to his friends, who remarked that it looked more like he'd been on a boozy holiday than on a life-saving mission to a fragile state.

Malualkon

I'm writing in the village of Malualkon, not far from the border with the North and in the heart of Dinkaland.  Yesterday some tiny clouds appeared in the sky and were greeted like long-lost friends by the team here, desperate for some rain to cool the nights and wash the cars, buildings and children.

When the rains come they will long for the dry season, as most of the compound will turn into a lake, the tukuls will flood and the snakes will increase in number and curiosity.  At the moment the most notable thing about the compound is the group of huge predatory birds (kites maybe) that sit patiently on the trees, waiting to swoop at us at mealtimes and go for bits of meat on forks.  I'm pleased to report that the bald head of the area programme manager is an even more tempting target, so when he's around it acts as something of a lightning conductor, keeping the rest of us attack-free.

Today we are confined to barracks as the Joint Integrated Unit of the North and South armies is demobilising in this area so no one is allowed out as huts are searched for weapons.  This was where the second civil war ignited in the early eighties, as Arab raiding parties took half of what was in the villages and burnt the rest.  Yesterday I met a guy who was abducted from here as a small child and brought up in Khartoum; he returned two months ago and was reunited with his mother.  They couldn't chat though as he didn't speak a word of Dinka.

We have some excellent education and livelihoods programmes here.  We are running teacher training at the moment, and yesterday I handed out per diem payments to the 150 trainees.  They stand in line for an hour, sign their name and take their money, although a lot of them seemed happy to stand in line, sign their name and then try and walk off without taking their payment.  One lady didn't show up, and after 6 weeks of perfect attendance she has missed the whole of this week.  Her excuse?  Turns out she had a baby at the weekend.  Maybe there is hope for South Sudan after all.

Queueing for per diems

Fruit

Juba is an expensive place to live.  This is mostly because it runs on a sort of emergency economy; industry has never been able to develop, and if it did it got shelled in the war, so if you buy something it came from Khartoum or Uganda.

Even fruit gets imported, which is a ridiculous situation in a country that is incredibly hot and wet - lovely weather if you're a pineapple you'd imagine.  Agriculture here stopped to allow the war to go on, and people have never got out of the subsistence mentality.

I discussed this with Anuol, our lawyer and coincidentally a friend of a friend in London.  (He went to law school in Newcastle and his accent has to be heard to be believed; he is the only Sudanese I know who says 'aye' instead of 'yes').

Anyway, we discussed the lack of entrepreneurship in South Sudan, and the fact that planning ahead, even in the fairly short term, is mostly absent from the national psyche.  I wondered if it was due to the war, living each day as it comes as it may be your last. He said no man, it's a lack of education.  People who have been to university plan ahead better due to the experience of spending their whole loan in fresher's week and surviving on super noodles for the next 10 weeks.

That's a valuable lesson, even if it's the only one you get.

I recently met a Dutch guy in Addis who was on his way to Juba.  Being Dutch, his two passions were irrigation and volleyball (I'm not making this up).  He was being contracted to teach modern commercial farming methods to a group of Juba farmers.  If they understood his accent then they are set to make a killing because as far as I can see the most sophisticated farming method employed in these parts is kicking a mango tree until something falls out of it.

The view from my bedroom in Juba: worth kicking

Cows

The two main tribes of South Sudan are the Dinka and the Nuer.  They both love their cows.  Complimenting a Dinka's cow is like complimenting an Englishman's new car; it is expected.

These Dinka and the Nuer don't really get on (cf. the English and the Scots, Americans and Canadians etc) and a Dinka likes nothing better than nicking cattle off his Nuer neighbour, which as you can imagine winds him up up something rotten.

They don't tend to eat their prize cows, although they might sacrifice one on a special occasion like a wedding, a funeral or Superbowl Sunday.  They don't even drink their milk much; they just like making them look pretty in a kind of giant version of My Little Pony.  I'm told that some even purse their lips and blow up the cow's bottom in the believe that this will improve the calibre of its milk, although if I've tasted the result I can't say I've been impressed.  You'd be amazed at how hard it is to get fresh milk in this land of cattle.

Anyway, cows are important as a measure of a man's wealth.  If I had a lot of cows, my neighbours would respect me and chicks would dig me.  I wouldn't be able to get married until I could provide a decent number towards the total heads of cattle that my male relatives put together as a bride price.

This bride price of course means that girl babies are useful as money spinners a few years down the line, all the more so if they turn out to be easy on the eye.  This makes a novel and pleasing change from the more popular idea in the developing world that it's better to have boys than girls as they are more effective water carriers and more likely to be able to give mum and dad the odd handout in their dotage.

Cows in the road.  Rule one: don't run the damn things over.

Ethiopia

Sorry for the long silence; I've been on R&R in Ethiopia, land of stunning canyons, beautiful churches and terrible internet connections.

Colleagues from Juba put me in touch with a Man who Can in Addis, and he furnished me with a landcruiser, piloted by a charming Tigrain who claimed to speak English.  It took travelling buddy Chris and me half a day to discover that he responded to all questions with the word 'yes', and a further minute to learn the extent of his English.  Getting him to stop the car for a photo op was like halting a naughty pony, with frantic whistles and clucks from the back seat eventually doing the trick a mile down the road.

We have seen the monasteries of Lake Tana, the castles of Gondar, the churches of Lalibela and the nightclubs of Addis, and been hounded by tenacious hawkers and sticky children in all four.

High quality paintings on the walls of monasteries

Devil not enjoying himself

Ultimately a disappointing experience

In Bahir Dar we met the monk on the front cover of the Bradt Ethiopia guide (5th ed); I suspect his life has been made a misery by tourists pointing this out to him, and he must be looking forward to the publication of the 6th edition.  We also met some Israelis and Americans (good job we didn't run into any Muslims) and went to a bar that on close inspection turned out also to be a brothel.

A highlight was watching Arsenal's European Cup tie with Barcelona with 200 other people in Lalibela in a room the size of my bedroom.  When Arsenal scored the tin roof came off.  People waved their shirts around their heads and sang a song in Amharic, translated roughly as 'silence to the jealous man', a pleasing alternative to 'you only sing when you're winning.'

Sports Bar

A week in Waat

I've been in Waat for a week now, and am supposedly leaving for Juba tomorrow, a journey that will take over 24 hours somehow.

I've hung around at a few feeding programmes.  If your kid is officially as thin as England striker Peter Crouch you can bring it in for such tasty treats as corn soy mix and plumpy nut, a kind of magic peanut butter that I'll write more about another day.  This diet is in fact more varied than that in the staff canteen, where goat stew is where the menu begins and ends.

It's got hot here.  Too hot to work in our corregated iron offices between 1 and 3, so we sit under trees slapping at flies on our faces if feeling energetic.  Keeping cool is a problem; I washed at around seven in the evening with water kept in the shade in a black drum, and it was almost scalding.  Our fridge is only on when the generator is on, so at other times taking on water is more like having a cup of tea than anything else.  People are moving their beds outside in hope of the odd breeze.

The other day I was talking to someone about the weather here.  He explained that it won't rain at all until May, at which point the entire county will be under water for five months.  In Juba it rains at night every so often in the dry season, but here - nothing until May.  Anyway, that night it bucketed it down for an hour or so, and in the morning I asked him what was going on.  "Climate change", he shrugged.

So the weather is a bit confusing, but in brief: now it is hot, soon it will be wet.

There's been a fair bit of cattle rustling around here in the last few days.  This has increased since the government disarmed the Nuer tribesmen but for some reason left the rival Murle with their AK47s.  If a Murle fancies a few head of cattle he can ride into town, let off a few rounds into the air, laugh at the spears and large rocks brandished by the Nuer and make off with the most attractive cows he can lay his hands on.

What is the Waat

I'm in the town of Waat in the oil-rich state of Jonglei.  It's remote - five hours by road to the nearest bank and one plane a week which I will probably miss next Tuesday.  In the rains the airstrip turns into a ploughed field and the roads turn into canals, so if you're here in April you'll be here in October.

The land here is as flat as can be imagined - nothing in any direction apart from small trees, big grass and tukuls, those little round National Geographic mud huts.

This is cattle land.  You won't see a green vegetable here as these people are pastoralists who live off meat and milk.  There was a tomato in Waat for about an hour yesterday as I brought it from Juba, but the ants got it so we are back to a zero veg situation.  Cattle rustling is popular in these parts, and yesterday we heard gunshots as the Nuer defended their herd somewhere near the compound.

Our compound is a nature lover's dream.  In my first 10 hours here I hung out with goats, chickens, a monitor lizard, hedgehogs, a praying mantis, crickets, geckos and those big flying bugs with leathery wings, and I had an altercation with a scorpion in my tukul which was won by the sole of my shoe.  There are two hawks that live on the kitchen roof, eying up the chickens greedily.  We also have 10 cats, which are on the payroll to keep the snakes at bay.

All this fauna congregates in the roof of my tukul at night and entertains itself by creeping about and making curious rustly noises, like someone surrepticiously eating a packet of crisps.

By the way the title of this post is a reference to What is the What by Dave Eggers, about the Lost Boys of Sudan who walked for months to get to Ethiopia to escape the war.  A few of them are my colleagues here; how they found themselves in Waat is anyone's guess.

Hibernation and evacuation

Security continues to be the watchword.  I'm very proud to report that I have now ticked off the bit on every boy's wish list that says that at some point his job should require him to have a UHF radio, into which he must mutter oaths involving Charlie and Tango.  I can say with absolute certainty that if disaster strikes I will forget every word in the phonetic alphabet.

If it all kicks off, we will hibernate.  This is exactly as it sounds - shut your doors and don't come out until you get a phone call from the security officer, no doubt sounding disappointed that the shooting has stopped.  Guesthouses are equipped with hibernation kits, which contain essentials: water purifying tabs, rice, tinned fish and vegetables, high energy biscuits and condoms.  These are useful for holding water and are not intended for recreational purposes.  You can be assured that stories are legion of hibernating colleagues believing themselves to be at death's door but later sheepishly emerging from the wreckage wishing they'd just used the condom for its secondary purpose.

Hibernation kits are a good idea, but these have the habit of being raided by residents for emergency snacks during peacetime.  The kit in one of our guesthouses currently contains a tube of Pringles and a bottle of olive oil.

If things get tasty enough then we put our enormously complicated evacuation plan into action.  We each have a grab bag, that lives by the door in your room and is full of essentials for fleeing to the airstrip.  Mine has two tennis balls in it for some reason.  One of my colleagues claims to have a bottle of Bombay Sapphire in hers.  I'm not sure which planes we will be fleeing on, as there never seem to be any at the airport when I go past and presumably we are not the only NGO who have hit on the idea of getting out if Juba turns into toast.

Counting votes

The voting's over, and we wait for the results.  African vote-counting tends to result in a majority for the incumbent despot of several times the population of the country, but here there is only one outcome that anyone will accept.  South Sudan has been through the wringer for this one, and to prevent secession it's going to take more than a few sensible fools who trust the present government of the north more than the guerilla-run pretender to its crown.

The turnout was way higher than the 60% required to ratify the result, although the queues tailed off disappointingly towards the end of the week.  Nobody was allowed the day off work to vote, a ploy by the government to boost the queues on the opening sunday for the world's media and its wide angle lenses.

In Juba the tripod-wielders have been denied the riots they craved, although intrepid reporters around the border in the north have been rewarded by some bloodshed, mostly caused by the classic too-many-weapons-too-little-sense combo.  The region of Abyei just north of the border (on most maps) is the big problem, where the nomadic Arab Misseriya tend to be a bit too nomadic and a bit too Arab for the liking of the neighbouring Dinka.  If South Sudan appears at the wrong end of the news in coming weeks, this will be why.

Votes

Sudan has fought itself since 1955 (with brief skirmishes of peace) over whether it wants to be one big thing or two smaller things, and in the process it killed 2.5m of its people.  Today the people of the southern bit (the ones that are left anyway) vote to determine the same question.

A paper cut is nasty, but it beats stepping on a land mine.  This is the power of democracy.

For now, the question of whether a separate South Sudan is viable or preferable is irrelevant.  A nation's worth of fathers died so that their sons could cast this vote.  I have no idea what this feels like for the sons.

In the centre of Juba there is a tower with a countdown to the referendum displayed in big red digits.  On Wednesday this read "1 day, 44 hours" which tells you something about local timekeeping and technology.  Zero hour, and time to get in line, is 8am local time.  I'll be taking my camera.

Security

The Referendum begins on Sunday.  No one has any idea whatsoever of what is going to happen; the UN has helpfully predicted that it will be something between someone getting a party popper in the eye and 4.3m people displaced by conflict.

The UN curfew is still at 1am, and walking after dark is forbidden, so when the pubs shut the town seethes with white landcruisers delivering humanitarians to their homes.  Our security officer is in his element, issuing terrible warnings about everything under the sun.  There is a security officer at a different programme who is notorious for having been mugged more than anybody under his care, but ours is the business, Zimbabwean, never happier than when shepherding fearful Westerners in fragile states.  On new year's eve he gleefully instructed us to be indoors at midnight to avoid falling bullets.  An anarchist militia isn't the real deal if its members don't usher in the new year by firing their AK47s as one into the sky, preferably in front of a BBC news crew.

Security in fragile states is a major headache for an NGO, and questions never have easy answers.  SC sent a security consultant to Somalia in October to assess whether it would be safe to open an office there.  He was kidnapped, which was unfortunate but on the bright side it did at least provide an easy answer to a question for once.  NGOs never pay ransoms, but he was released unharmed because one of his colleagues knew the right tribal elders.  Colleagues like this are worth their weight in high protein corn/soy mix.