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.