Malualkon

I'm writing in the village of Malualkon, not far from the border with the North and in the heart of Dinkaland.  Yesterday some tiny clouds appeared in the sky and were greeted like long-lost friends by the team here, desperate for some rain to cool the nights and wash the cars, buildings and children.

When the rains come they will long for the dry season, as most of the compound will turn into a lake, the tukuls will flood and the snakes will increase in number and curiosity.  At the moment the most notable thing about the compound is the group of huge predatory birds (kites maybe) that sit patiently on the trees, waiting to swoop at us at mealtimes and go for bits of meat on forks.  I'm pleased to report that the bald head of the area programme manager is an even more tempting target, so when he's around it acts as something of a lightning conductor, keeping the rest of us attack-free.

Today we are confined to barracks as the Joint Integrated Unit of the North and South armies is demobilising in this area so no one is allowed out as huts are searched for weapons.  This was where the second civil war ignited in the early eighties, as Arab raiding parties took half of what was in the villages and burnt the rest.  Yesterday I met a guy who was abducted from here as a small child and brought up in Khartoum; he returned two months ago and was reunited with his mother.  They couldn't chat though as he didn't speak a word of Dinka.

We have some excellent education and livelihoods programmes here.  We are running teacher training at the moment, and yesterday I handed out per diem payments to the 150 trainees.  They stand in line for an hour, sign their name and take their money, although a lot of them seemed happy to stand in line, sign their name and then try and walk off without taking their payment.  One lady didn't show up, and after 6 weeks of perfect attendance she has missed the whole of this week.  Her excuse?  Turns out she had a baby at the weekend.  Maybe there is hope for South Sudan after all.

Queueing for per diems

Fruit

Juba is an expensive place to live.  This is mostly because it runs on a sort of emergency economy; industry has never been able to develop, and if it did it got shelled in the war, so if you buy something it came from Khartoum or Uganda.

Even fruit gets imported, which is a ridiculous situation in a country that is incredibly hot and wet - lovely weather if you're a pineapple you'd imagine.  Agriculture here stopped to allow the war to go on, and people have never got out of the subsistence mentality.

I discussed this with Anuol, our lawyer and coincidentally a friend of a friend in London.  (He went to law school in Newcastle and his accent has to be heard to be believed; he is the only Sudanese I know who says 'aye' instead of 'yes').

Anyway, we discussed the lack of entrepreneurship in South Sudan, and the fact that planning ahead, even in the fairly short term, is mostly absent from the national psyche.  I wondered if it was due to the war, living each day as it comes as it may be your last. He said no man, it's a lack of education.  People who have been to university plan ahead better due to the experience of spending their whole loan in fresher's week and surviving on super noodles for the next 10 weeks.

That's a valuable lesson, even if it's the only one you get.

I recently met a Dutch guy in Addis who was on his way to Juba.  Being Dutch, his two passions were irrigation and volleyball (I'm not making this up).  He was being contracted to teach modern commercial farming methods to a group of Juba farmers.  If they understood his accent then they are set to make a killing because as far as I can see the most sophisticated farming method employed in these parts is kicking a mango tree until something falls out of it.

The view from my bedroom in Juba: worth kicking

Cows

The two main tribes of South Sudan are the Dinka and the Nuer.  They both love their cows.  Complimenting a Dinka's cow is like complimenting an Englishman's new car; it is expected.

These Dinka and the Nuer don't really get on (cf. the English and the Scots, Americans and Canadians etc) and a Dinka likes nothing better than nicking cattle off his Nuer neighbour, which as you can imagine winds him up up something rotten.

They don't tend to eat their prize cows, although they might sacrifice one on a special occasion like a wedding, a funeral or Superbowl Sunday.  They don't even drink their milk much; they just like making them look pretty in a kind of giant version of My Little Pony.  I'm told that some even purse their lips and blow up the cow's bottom in the believe that this will improve the calibre of its milk, although if I've tasted the result I can't say I've been impressed.  You'd be amazed at how hard it is to get fresh milk in this land of cattle.

Anyway, cows are important as a measure of a man's wealth.  If I had a lot of cows, my neighbours would respect me and chicks would dig me.  I wouldn't be able to get married until I could provide a decent number towards the total heads of cattle that my male relatives put together as a bride price.

This bride price of course means that girl babies are useful as money spinners a few years down the line, all the more so if they turn out to be easy on the eye.  This makes a novel and pleasing change from the more popular idea in the developing world that it's better to have boys than girls as they are more effective water carriers and more likely to be able to give mum and dad the odd handout in their dotage.

Cows in the road.  Rule one: don't run the damn things over.

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.