A day with Kurdish military intelligence

Not sated by the 24/7 party lifestyle here, I've signed up for a bit more in January.  I've been here for two and a half months without the Kurdish government being very bothered, but my desire to come back for another month has led to a flurry of official paperwork, cross-examination and blood-letting (HIV test).  The Kurdish intelligence service demanded an interview, where peculiar questions were posed.  I gave details of the full names of my mother, father and sister, so I apologise if you get arrested by a dark-skinned man with a bushy black moustache in the coming weeks.  They were also interested to learn which floor of my apartment building I lived on, which is clearly of great importance to national security.



One half-day in the bowels of the intelligence building wasn't enough, and my colleague and I were summoned the next day.  Turns out that another NGO operates here with a very similar name (in fact the same name with "in Kurdistan" tagged on the end), and the employees were found to be smuggling gold after a routine fact-finding government raid.  Cue lots of questions of the nature "why were you smuggling gold?"  Eventually the fact that we weren't dressed in fur coats and carrying ivory canes convinced them to let us go.



Elsewhere, life has carried on.  We're busy ordering winter clothes to send to the chilly youngsters in the refugee camps, so job-lots of Ugg boots and Hely Hanson ski jackets or similar should be on their way there soon.  On a conference call last week somebody in Baghdad gave a long account in arabic of something, so I passed the time by practising my arabic writing in my notebook.  One of my colleagues noticed and said "wow, you're taking notes in arabic" so I showed him what I'd written.  "Yesterday I went into town and saw a big dog and the king of Jordan" wasn't what the guy on the call was saying, but I think my linguistic skills earned me a little respect nonetheless.



Photography is not welcomed in military buildings so I don't have any shots of the intelligence officers. Instead here is a photo of a bottle of handwash that just turned up in our bathroom.  Good to get some romance in the bathroom.

About town

Today we threw caution and security regulations to the wind and gorged ourselves on what Sulaimaniyah has to offer the thrill-seeker and pleasure-lover.  It took about 20 minutes.

Actual contents may differ

We began with a visit to Nawroz Tourism Park, whose ferris wheel can be seen across town like a beacon to hedonism.  The pictures of log-flumes full of people howling with delight on the sign were clearly more figurative than actual, and seem to have been taken at Disneyland or similar.  It was hard to tell if the park was open or not, but we didn't go in as unfortunately each of us was carrying a cylinder of gas, forbidden under park rules.

We didn't miss much, as the dodgems were all grounded, the zombies in the House of Horrors had all gone to work for the Iraqi government and the ferris wheel hadn't revolved since before the french revolution.

On our way back we found a good place to join Santa for a drink but apparently it isn't love time until well after dark.  No matter, for soon we found a cafe serving turkish coffee (the kind that you have to eat with a spoon) and delicious cakes.  Best of all, it was outside the four walls of this compound.

The smiles are in honour of being outside Pak City

It's actually been an excellent weekend, as last night we had a fabulous thanksgiving dinner with the cooking directed by the mother of the Child Protection manager by live TV link-up from Plymouth, Massachusetts.  We also drank home-made mead (a kind of honey wine), which had absolutely no effect on us, as the pictures below will prove.

Shake 'n Bake Apartments

We live in Pak City, a clump of nine high-rise apartment blocks that were built in about three days as a convenient method of laundering some of the grubby cash floating around these parts.  The flats are spacious, airy and well designed, and much nicer than most of the places I've lived.  Occasionally, though, you get a reminder of the fact that it took two Turkish families their lunch break for a couple of weeks to knock these buildings together.  Shutting the bin in the kitchen had the side effect of causing part of the doorframe to fall off.  The buttons for the lift on our floor were put on upside down, with the result that for three weeks I pressed down and couldn't understand why the lift would insist that I picked up an Armenian family on the tenth floor before heading downstairs.

Going up

I tend to take the stairs these days, partly for fitness reasons and partly because I harbour a secret fear that the lift will get stuck and the 'call operator' button will turn out to have been drawn on with a crayon.

Finally, and this is no fault of the builders, the blood from some long-forgotten meat has leaked and frozen in our freezer, so my peas rest on what you would get if Fergus Henderson started producing ice lollies.

The latest pudding at St John, London

I'm still here because Iraq has changed its mind on how it issues visas, so to go anywhere other than Kurdistan requires a phenomenal amount of effort on the part of one's admin department.  I'm told that the trick is to fly to Basra and from there to Baghdad, because for some reason Baghdad no longer recognises the Iraqi embassy in Jordan.  If you don't believe that there can possibly be such ruinous lack of communication within different parts of an organisation then you've obviously never tried to order a credit card over the phone with Santander.

Cabin Fever

I've been in this compound for three weeks now, with brief excursions to the shops, a Saturday afternoon walk and a trip to a Turkish restaurant where we shared no common language with any of the waiting staff.  Meanwhile on my doorstep is Sulaimaniyah, whose throbbing nightlife Lonely Planet urges travellers to visit before the hordes arrive.

Soon I will be living in a windowless house in Baghdad so I should probably save a post called Cabin Fever for then, but at least then I won't have a sixth floor balcony looking out over town.  Just over the compound fence is Sarchinar football club.  When I watch their Friday afternoon game from my balcony I am reminded of the Far Side cartoon where a cat presses itself against a window through which two trucks have collided and spilled their contents.  The trucks are labelled Bob's Assorted Rodents and Al's Small Flightless Birds.

Venue for Friday's game: Rodents v Birds

Someone else who was desperate to get out was one of my colleagues, who has a hilarious story about his passage to England to seek asylum about a decade ago.  He made the channel crossing sitting on the  roof of the driver's cabin of a lorry, absolutely motionless for 13 hours to avoid detection.  Before his asylum hearing he'd been advised to pretend to speak no English, on the absurd basis that he must have been undeclared in Britain for months in order to learn it.  He duly starred at the judge and shrugged when asked any questions, but his cover was blown when the judge spotted him reading what she was writing down and she threw his case out.  He spent two more years in London, having further adventures, mostly in the pizza restaurant business.  Maybe I'll write more about him later.

I did get out last week to register as a resident of Kurdistan.  You are supposed to have a blood test to see if you are HIV positive and intend to share it with the locals, but for some reason they took one look at me and waived this requirement.  If I thought hard enough I could probably think of a reason to be offended.  I have an ID card that makes me look rather fat and incredibly smug.

Fat and smug

The language barrier

The only Kurdish I know is 'thank you' and 'how are you?'.  If someone asks me how I am, I ignore their question and ask them how they are instead; sometimes I thank them for their answer.

Every day a Kurdish lady comes to clean our apartment.  We have cheerful but brief and slightly confusing conversations in her native tongue.  Her remit is to mop floors and dust stuff; she is not supposed to do our laundry.  Nonetheless she insists on washing and ironing all the clothes she can lay her hands on.  I feel slightly guilty at this extra work she is doing, but I don't have the linguistic tools to put a stop to it, and oddly enough I haven't yet rushed to my English / Kurdish dictionary.

The other day I advised one of my team to transfer money by hawala, a clever Middle Eastern cash transfer device a bit like Western Union.  The agents have no guarantee that they will receive the reimbursement from each other, but trust in honour, familial pride and presumably the threat of broken legs.  My finance officer seemed a bit bewildered at my suggestion and with good reason, as I was insisting that his cash transfer was done by halawa, a tasty confectionary made with pistachios.

My Arabic is improving at a glacial pace, but I am getting good at annoying my Egyptian housemate by reading out the words on cereal packets very slowly and incorrectly.  My progress is hampered by the fact that I have the book but not the accompanying cassette, so I may develop my own unique accent, which might be interesting.  Mastering Arabic is by Jane Wightwick and Mahmoud Gaafar; a look at the fly-leaf reveals that Jane wrote it and Mahmoud drew the pictures, which I find quite amusing in a racial stereotype sort of way.

My spare time

The Arabic bit says "corn flakes" - beautiful language

Sulaimaniyah

This is the view from my balcony in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah.

It's a good base for Save the Children's operations in northern Iraq as it's pretty safe - we drove to the supermarket a couple of days ago and not a single molotov cocktail was lobbed through the window, although I did see some pretty alarming graffiti that read "WE HATE MEN".  Before you get in your car you have to check for IEDs (improvised explosive devices) underneath in such a way that no one notices you are doing it, so shoelaces get a lot of retying.

People have been being mean to the poor old Kurds for centuries, though the ones I've met have been lovely.  Saddam treated Kurdistan like a wasp nest in the corner of his garden; now that the president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, is Kurdish, they've come back into fashion, prosperity has returned and spaceship-like buildings are mushrooming in all directions in Suli.

SC imposes a 9pm curfew here, though to leave the compound at any time you need a note from the Pope, a specially-formed militia of navy seals forming a human pyramid around you and an Apache helicopter hovering above.

I'm battling with the lingo - Kurdish is tricky.  I had a crash course with a chap I met on the plane who fled to England 12 years ago and just got his UK passport.  As a Liverpool fan he headed straight up there when he got off the boat.  Tired of theft, violent crime, civil strife and the hopelessness of the local people, he left Merseyside and ended up in Norwich.  Anyway, he taught me the rudiments but progress is slow, particularly as I'm also trying to learn Arabic, which is also hard and is written backwards.

Below is the view from my desk.  The apartment block on the right is full of staff at the American University, who are here to explain why the US occupation of Iraq was a great success.  I hold the Bush administration responsible for the volatile security environment in Iraq and the fact that on a Friday night I am sat in front of my computer rather than in front of a belly-dancing snake charmer or whatever it is they do on Friday nights here.

Mysteries

In 20 months in South Sudan I discovered a great deal about the world's newest nation, but I'm sorry to say that some mysteries remain.

A luggage trolley with 'Heathrow Airport' emblazoned on it found its way to active service at Juba airport.  How the hell did that get there?

South Sudan has lots of oil but no pipeline, north Sudan has a nice pipeline but no oil, neither country has any money, and yet they still can't work out how they can each have some.

My football team (Juba Unathletic) was awarded a free kick by a referee who was promptly surrounded by angry members of the opposition.  His method of calming them was to pull out a pistol from his shorts and level it at them.  None of this is mysterious, or surprising; the real mystery here is the reaction of the players, which was to lift up their shirts and jab at their chests as if to say "go on, shoot me."  In South Sudan if you pull a gun and don't shoot anyone then you are a coward.  In what way is it a good idea to test whether the ref wanted to be a coward?  Anyway, when a 15 man brawl ensued, with two AK47s being waved around, we called it a draw and left.

Soldiers in South Sudan are unable to shoot straight when fighting a war (I think that's why the civil war went on for 50 years, with a pause for half time), but if a middle aged Kenyan lady accidentally drives through a roadblock a soldier manages to shoot her in the head from 50 yards.

Our security manager used to sit at a desk with a huge detailed map of South Sudan in front of him.  Habitually he would skype me when bored, with an amusing place name he had just spotted ("Boing" etc).  The only mystery is something he spotted, and it is how the town of Longochuk (sic) is the capital of Longuchok (sic) County.

When you donate clothes to Africa, most of them end up in Konyo Konyo market in Juba.  A lot of Western references are lost on Jubans, which explains why my friends have seen a burly shopkeeper wearing a Chippendales T-shirt, and a coal delivery man wearing a Santa hat in September.  But even if he wasn't familiar with the reference, surely the 6'7" armed soldier in Rumbek must have been aware that a Hello Kitty T-shirt didn't suit his image?

When I came to South Sudan in December 2010 it was part of an enormous country on the brink of collapse.  In July 2012 I left an independent nation on the brink of collapse.  Other than separation, there has been tangible progress, in the form of Guor Marial's 47th place in the 2012 Olympic marathon, although he had to pretend to be a country on his own as South Sudan has no Olympic Committee.  I can also report that Juba has more tarmac roads than it did in 2010, and a good Indian restaurant opened halfway through 2011.  However, for as long as South Sudan loves Celine Dion, shiny silver suits and slimy okra stew, the road to recovery looks a rocky one.

Thanks for reading.

Slightly below par road conditions in Kapoeta

Football field in Juba - we won one and lost one here.  I scored one own goal, in the win.

Progress

Two tribes not going to war

The rains have come to South Sudan.  This is rubbish in many ways; planes can't land on dirt airstrips so people get stuck in remote locations for weeks, cars get stuck in the glutinous mud so we can't visit our projects, ex-pat garden parties get rained off.  An upside to the rains is that the tribes admit defeat to the elements and put down their spears and rocket-propelled grenades until they can go out on the rampage without getting their Reeboks dirty.  It has been weeks since any clinics were burnt to the ground because they were treating members of an unpopular tribe.

I think Africa breeds warrior societies.  I don't know if these cause wars, or the other way around.  When an African boy reaches the threshold of manhood at around age 14, he will likely undergo a ceremony of unspeakable pain in front of a hooting throng of his tribesmen.  This may be circumcision, or having deep furrows cut in his forehead, or four of his bottom teeth pulled out.  If he weeps, or cries out, or throws himself on the ground and adopts the foetal position (I would favour a combination of all three), he is a little sissy girl and will never be a fighter or even a man.

It is a matter of honour that when two Sudanese tribes go to war, biting is frowned upon (presumably along with fishhooking and anything below the belt).  The fact that warriors have their bottom teeth extracted to enforce this rule tells its own story.  Although it may also be to prevent biting the tongue when driven mad from malaria, dengue fever or one of those Celine Dion hours they have on African radio, and if I got tetanus I'd be pleased to have a convenient hole to feed through when lockjaw set in.

Another interesting side affect of the teeth removal is the unwitting pronunciation of 'p' as 'f' - in South Sudan you mustn't be surprised when a security guard announces to you "you can f&ck your car over there".

The Refugee Experience

I’m just back from Maban County, Upper Nile state.  Things in Blue Nile state of Sudan are even worse than they are in Greece, with rather more bombing of civilians, so people are crossing the border.

Our compound is just outside Doro camp, which has 35,000 refugees.  20,000 are children and all of them managed to get themselves in a photo I took at the airstrip this morning.  Just up the road is Yusuf Batil camp, which has about 15,000 refugees and space for 20,000 more before the hot tubs get too crowded.  Every day 3,000 fresh refugees get brought down from the border by the UN in trucks that look disturbingly like they transported cattle in a previous life.

The Refugee Bus

7,000 of the new arrivals at Yusuf Batil are without shelter, but don’t worry – I spent most of yesterday building a tent warehouse (Rubhall) where we will store 1,000 tents for these folk.  We flew over the camp this morning and I was amazed to see the Rubhall still standing.

Yusuf Batil camp from the air - our Rubhall is the white building furthest right

In fact the most overcrowded, barbaric living conditions for anyone in Maban is in the compound we share with the Danish Refugee Council, who are doing marvellous work in refugee health and in lending us their vehicles.  Every inch of the compound is covered by a tent, each housing at least two people.  I slept on a mattress on the floor of the office, and was awoken every four minutes by assorted flying rodents alighting on my face.

My quarters

We are hiring vehicles and drivers from a Kenyan company, and last week they sent our next driver up from Nairobi.  This poor fellow was put on a plane in this vague direction, and found himself with 20,000 refugees in Jammam camp, a long way from Doro.  He spent three days there for some reason, and eventually managed to cadge a ride to our place on the back of a motorbike, which took four hours.  It appeared that his only worldly possessions were a box of spare parts and a shovel; needless to say he wasn’t impressed by his commute to work.

Yesterday was World Refugee Day, which seems a strange sort of thing to celebrate.  They had dancing and football and goat-murder and the usual festive things.  The parties continued well into the night, although I may have confused the end of the celebrations with a wedding.  At any rate the cacophony outside our compound was ludicrous – singing, howling, ululating, drums.  The pack of wild dogs needed no excuse to join in, along with a single psychotic donkey.  Someone even seemed to be playing the didgeridoo; heaven only knows what possessed him to grab this as he fled his house with only the bare essentials, but I wish he hadn’t.



Thailand and Kenya

In my last blog before going on holiday to Thailand I promised you jokes about Thai prostitutes, but I can’t make any jokes because I didn’t see any prostitutes.  On the plus side I found myself to be very popular with the ladies in Bangkok, especially the ones with Adam’s apples.

We spent a few days in Bangkok swimming in people’s rooftop pools and generally being fabulous.  We devoted a day to the visual arts, and I can report that the new ‘Avengers Assemble’ film is excellent.   Also interesting is a visit to the Khao San Road to look at the backpackers, although you have to make sure you wash your hands if you touch any.

The Grand Palace is amazing, with its Temple of the Emerald Buddha, where a little green Buddha the size of a hamster sits on an enormous pile of golden and bejewelled paraphernalia.  There is also a sign saying ‘Beware of your Valuables’, which is good advice if you are worried your camera is going to bite you.  The lavatories are divided into Men, Women and Monk.

We went to the paradise beach locations of Koh Phi Phi and Railay, where we adopted the traditional Thai beach diet of prawn curry and Sangsom buckets.  When you arrive in Phi Phi you are herded by cattle prod into a boat to visit Maya Bay, which is every bit as underwhelming as the location for disappointing Hollywood blockbuster The Beach sounds, although they have cool urinals cut into the cliffs.  Phi Phi used to be a trashy resort with nothing but cheap hostels and sleazy bars, but the 2004 tsunami devastated it, enabling it to be rebuilt as a trashy resort with nothing but cheap hostels and sleazy bars.

I had a weekend in Kenya before returning to Juba, and a trip to Hell’s Gate national park was just the thing.  You can hire bikes and ride past antelopes, zebras and giraffes; if they all run in the same direction then it’s best to follow them.  Quite a good joke is to ride past another tourist at top speed, screaming “LION!!!!!!!!”, to see if they take the bait.

Another good thing to do in Nairobi on a Sunday is to visit the Karen Blixen house.  The traffic was light so we covered the 5 mile journey in under a day, and it turns out that an NGO ID from South Sudan is enough to prove one’s Kenyan residence and qualify for reduced admission.  In the gift shop they have a series of books about living with clinical depression and terminal disease, for some reason.

The trouble with war

One of the troublesome side effects of war is that you very quickly run out of stuff.  South Sudan is running out of lots of things, most notably money.  The exchange rate is going north by the day - your $100 bill would get you 350 South Sudanese Pounds a month ago and now you're looking at close to 500.

Juba is also experiencing a severe shortage of fuel, which logistically speaking is the bread and butter of almost all organisations, and a severe shortage of actual bread and butter.  I passed a bakery this evening and it was like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 1985.  A lack of butter is turning people to Blue Band Margarine, a disgusting Ugandan margarine substitute made of petroleum jelly and ear wax.

I was in the town of Bentiu, close to the border, a couple of weeks ago, but we had to leave because the North kept bombing the town.  They chose some strange targets, including the market and various fields, but since they drop the bombs by having soldiers push them out the back of Antonov cargo aircraft I guess they aren't very accurate.

No one seems to know what is going on at the border now.  It's hard to imagine either side winning a war,  considering the state of the two economies.  Sudan at least has a few planes, but they are so old and Russian that they can't fly from Khartoum to Juba without a stop for fuel and repairs along the way.  South Sudan doesn't have two planes to rub together, although I heard a rumour that they have one.

Another unfortunate consequence of war is that the UN have filled our football field with tanks, in an awesome show of power that will have no effect since everyone knows that UN peacekeepers are far too busy playing volleyball and being bad at DJing to leave their compound.

I'm off to Thailand tomorrow on R&R for two weeks, so prepare yourself for tedious jokes about prostitutes when I return.

Bentiu - for real

There are 20,000 Nuban refugees hanging around at a camp in Yida just south of the border, and the UN is trying to move them fifty miles south where they will be less in the middle of a battlefield.  The trouble with refugees is that you can’t just load them into the back of a pickup and move them – they have to move of their own accord.  The particular trouble with these refugees is that they are mountain folk who want to stay close to their mountains for fear of disorientation, so they are not at all keen to come south.  The UN is trying to lure them south with the promise of schools in Nyiel and a university in Pariang, and our job is to make those facilities irresistible.




A bit of Nyiel Refugee Camp, waiting for refugees



We are based in Bentiu and going by road through the oilfields to those sites when the road is safe and no one is dropping bombs on it.  It’s a 6 hour round trip to Pariang, which is almost as bad a commute as people who use British Rail in the winter experience, and a 3 hour one to Nyiel, which feels round the corner in comparison.

I sat in on a P5 health and hygiene lesson in Nyiel, where we learnt about washing our hands and sang some songs.  Half the school is housed in temporary longhouses, divided into four classrooms by plastic sheets.  My class concentrated well and weren’t too distracted by my presence, but close to me was a hole in the sheet and children from the nursery class were taking it in turns to peer through it in wonder and disgust.  Every so often they were yanked away by some unseen and no doubt exasperated teacher, but more kids would take their place at the peephole.  Eventually an enormous bottom appeared and filled the hole, as the teacher sensibly used herself as a plug, and her class were once again able to concentrate.




Nyiel refugee camp urchins



The camp in Nyiel is nice, but there’s only about 1,000 people there.  Rows of empty tents sit waiting.  The UN have installed a very nifty solar powered pump that fills a raised bladder; when taps in the camp are opened, gravity causes the water to flow out and the pump refills the bladder provided that it’s sunny, which is a reasonable assumption.



Nifty pump in Nyiel

 The Easter weekend in Bentiu was not full of incident, although we did eat caviar brought from Moscow by a UN pilot and threw a rugby ball about in front of bemused locals.





Bentiu Grand Hotel - two out of three ain't bad



Bentiu - nearly

I'm writing this from Bentiu, capital of Unity state, or I would be if someone didn't keep dropping bombs on it.  The UN and the NGOs are evacuating most of their staff today so my trip will have to wait till Tuesday next week, when we'll try again.

Observers of events in these parts over the last 50 years will know that these guys don't need an excuse to fight, but this time they have one.  The black South and the arab North are going at it again for control of the Heglig oil field, and its all-crucial Central Processing Facility.  All oil from South Sudan goes through the north as that's where the only pipeline goes, and two months ago the South took its ball home and turned off the pumps as it was convinced the north was siphoning it off along the way.  Holding the CPF would be a good way to do a similar siphoning trick as all the oil from north and south goes through it.

Seeing as 98% of South Sudan's revenue is from oil, its sulking raises two major questions.  How will it now feed its people, and where the hell did the other 2% come from?  The first question is moot as South Sudan has never bothered to feed its people, preferring to splash out on heavy artillery.  As for the second question, my visa must have contributed a hefty portion, as it's $100 just to set foot in the country.  I imagine that import duty on ministerial Hummers has been significant too.  Of course, technically they can't charge you for importing things because they haven't got around to writing any laws yet but that's another story.

Weapons

There are rather a lot of weapons in South Sudan; this is what you get when you host a war for the best part of fifty years.  If anyone wants an AK47, I can get you one for the going rate of $13.  The government has been carrying out disarmaments recently.  This is an invitation for everyone to bury all but one of their guns in the bush, and hand over the one that's left, on the basis that no one could possibly have more than one.  This assumption has led to unfortunate incidents where people have been beaten up by soldiers for not handing over a gun, when they didn't have one in the first place.  Last week in the town of Bor the army even disarmed the police, who are supposed to be armed, and had to re-arm them after a hasty phone call.

There are lots of land mines and UXOs (unexploded ordnance) on the Jebel, the rather pretty hill on the outskirts of Juba that people climb when they can't think of anything better to do with their sunday.  This is not because mines were planted there during the war.  In fact, a couple of years ago the government gathered all the mines and UXO they could find around Juba and put it in a pile on the Jebel.  They then tossed on a lot of sticks of dynamite, hoping that a controlled explosion would be the result.  What actually happened was that several tons of explosives were blown into the air, and rained down all over the mountain.  A de-miner actually lost a leg, not because he trod on a mine but because a mine fell from the sky onto his leg.  It didn't even explode.  Anyway, hikers on the Jebel would be well advised to take a companion and follow in their footsteps a few paces behind, ready to turn back in case the companion suddenly travels a long way in a vertical direction.

Health - a rebuttal

I've had complaints that this blog makes South Sudan sound like a bit of a lark and that it's all swimming in the river and playing with kittens.  A while ago a well-respected commentator wrote that 'there are so many twenty-something Americans working at places like Save the Children that Juba feels like a giant frat party.'  I will not confirm or deny this - I will however write a bit about disease in the hope of garnering some sympathy for my situation.

It is not easy staying healthy here.  The bugs and the bacteria bask in the hot, wet climate, and all of the sane doctors left years ago to work somewhere they would get paid, leaving the other kind of doctors.  If we get ill we head to one of the small private clinics which are expensive but preferable to the state-run Juba Teaching Hospital.  I passed an unpleasant hour there on an errand and saw the biggest rat I have ever seen in one of the wards (it may have been a squirrel).  I heard of a boy who was hit by a car, taken to JTH and given an official report of his condition that said 'he has a fever, and a headache in the buttocks'.

We are pretty used to our colleagues turning strange colours and missing days of work.  Malaria is endemic - at any one time at least one of my colleagues is usually struggling with it.  Generally you can zap it with drugs in a couple of days, but it's a good excuse to be miserable in the office.  Typhoid is another favourite; so many people come back with it from one of our field bases that they must hand it out at the door.

Another health hazard is the Nairobi Fly.  This is a small red and black thing that behaves like a fly in all respects, but if you swat it then it explodes in a shower of acid that leaves horrific blisters on your skin for days.  This is what would have happened if someone had swatted the Alien in that film, and I can confirm that the terror that greets a swarm of Nairobi flies is comparable to that experienced by the crew of that space ship.

About two years ago we had a visit from the internal audit department in London.  One of the auditors had a miserable week in middle-of-nowhere Waat, struck down by various ailments.  While waiting for the plane to take him back to health and civilisation he had to dash to the loo, and the plane landed and took off while he was there so he had to wait a week for the next one.  South Sudan has become a bogey land to people at HQ, something like a cross between Timbuktu and the Bermuda Triangle, and stories abound of giant fire-breathing snakes, flesh-eating diseases contracted from public transport and murderous bacteria that creep into kitchens and lie quietly among the breakfast things.  When I was last visiting the office in London I did nothing to dispel these rumours.