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.