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.
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