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.