We have left the Sudan and are in Kenya. A sleep-denying 3.50am flight, 90 minutes in a taxi and we were at the hotel by 8.00am, in time to be utterly exhausted and completely wide awake.
But Kenya is colorful.
In many ways.
After the austerity of Darfur, Nairobi seems some kind of decadent UN paradise.
I think I prefer the non-paradise option.
Here we are, on a brief walk in K. Brief, because we are pretty well forbidden by the National Security Service (NSS) from any actual interactions with real people here, and from doing anything public, such as walking in the street. Instead we are driven everywhere – the project site, where we hop out and talk to some project staff and perhaps a few community leaders – but not actual people, poor people – and then back in the car. Work release, as my colleague M calls it.
We are also forbidden from taking photos. So I have to keep using my phone to ‘make calls’, as we term it. Strangely, I never get through. Photos taken hastily with a phone though are very unsatisfying, rarely any good and mostly are blurred by my finger or my hat.
Some latrines. I will spare you the inside image. But imagine 100 children, all…
you get the picture. Communal latrines in IDP camps are always hard to maintain, and invariably poo is all over the place. 10000 people in a camp, 200ml per day – that’s 2000L of poo to deal with. It is a big problem, and unpopular. Much more fun to manage a water supply:
But even here, you can count – of 12 taps, only 5 are working. Who is responsible? the community? TEAR Fund? the Government department to whom it has been handed over? No one can agree.
Classroom. Be thankful for your data projectors and libraries and laptops, kids.
This man runs a public latrine in the market place. Originally built by TEAR Fund, and then handed over to a community management committee. Half a Sudanese Pound gets you the right to use the toilet, a jug of water to clean yourself with and bar of soap at the end to use. A cleaner is paid to clean them all daily, and with the profit they make, they are planning to make more latrines at the other end of the market. Private enterprise. I wondered aloud with the staff if the management committee could use this captive audience to do some public education – stick notices about civic rights, health, etc on the back of the toilet doors. I had forgotten that because Arabic is the holy language of God, they can’t have anything written in Arabic so close to a toilet – it would offend God. Interesting, the cultural problems we don’t see.
(I am cross about the above photo; it is out of focus because I had to rush, because the NSS flunkey was coming back).
For the last year or so, it has been relatively safe in K. Nonetheless, there is still a 6pm-7am curfew, and we do not go outside the office/ guesthouse compound anyway, except to visit the project sites. At nights, to reduce risk of robbery and kidnap, the compound are double locked, and we sleep behind barred doors. Too bad if there is a fire inside.
The links between the monastic life and the aidworker life in places like this are many: mainly male environment, simple food, rotten beds, basic amenities, austere conditions. And we share a kind of faith too, in the value of what we are doing, that it is somehow worthwhile, signficant. Then again, there are similarities with prison life too: locked in, basic amenities, mostly male, lots of razor wire, cycnism, .
Today is Friday. The holy day, and a day of rest. We seem to all be hunched over laptops, working.
I share my room with this little fella.
We flew to K today, in a very noisy helicopter, and landed beside the helipad. We wore ear muffs all the way, but even so I could hear funny clicking noises that made me nervous. The crew were Russian. Rushing here, rushing there.
Sorry. Old joke. We got here fine and God and the Russians willing, we will fly out on Tuesday. Till then, we have some work to do. Some 100,000 displaced people from the various, ongoing genocides are living here in K, for several years now. While conditions are not appalling, it is a hard, sad way to live. Mostly, they probably just want to go home. That is not going to happen any time soon.
At about 5pm last night, the wind picks up, and the city disappears in a cloud. Undeterred, the boys in the square beneath our apartment continue to play soccer. I head out into the storm to try to get my phone fixed.
At the repair shop, I fall into conversation with Azis, a Sudanese man who has lived for 10 years in NZ, and now works in Qatar. I ask him how he finds it being back here, and he bursts into panegyrics – ‘We have the best resources, the friendliest people, the most beautiful country. We are rich! My heart aches when I leave here!’
It is nice to meet someone so excited by this country. I hesitate to ask him about the obvious problems – there are watchers from the security office all over the place, but he brings them up himself: ‘A group of men who cannot believe their good luck to still be in power!’ I murmur nothings, surprise, interest, uncertainty. It is best not to have too strong opinions.
He tells me this wind is called ‘The Ten Days of the Shepherd’. A shepherd, concluding that winter was over (it is, despite 40˚ temperatures, winter here), sold his blanket and put out his fire. Then, a wind came – this wind – and the temperatures dropped, and for the next 10 days, he was cold.
Sure enough, today is mild – only about 30˚, and it looks like staying that way.
I am here for some TEAR work.
Flying to Dubai feels like a real flight. People are calm, absorbed in movies or sleeping. Flying to Sudan is more like being in a bus with wings. Seating is more or less optional, business and economy class demarcations arbitrary. People wandered around the plane as though at a picnic, swapping stories, haranguing the stewards, snapping their fingers for coffee and tea. I would not have been surprised to see chickens and goats fall out of the lockers. The passenger next to me had uncontrollable flatulence, and the one behind me had restless leg syndrome. Or perhaps he was simply perverse, for he kept kicking my seat the entire flight.
We now need to wait till we get our travel permits to fly to K and N. Probably by Tuesday. In the meantime, we have mushy weekbix, English style for breakfast and instant coffee. There are lots of cockroaches, and speedy, vicious ants.
We are at Manning farmers markets. It is a beautiful Saturday morning, and we have stocked up on fresh vegetables, apples, cucumbers, and orange peppers. While Julie buys a coffee, the kids and I sit under a tree with our bags, enjoying the air and the movement. Because the markets are outside, many people have brought their little dogs, and in front of us two pretty mutts do the usual sniff routine. The lady who owns one of these dogs then moves on, and as she does, her small, furry dog cocks it’s leg and urinates on our eco-friendly canvas shopping bag.
‘Hey!’ I call out. ‘Your dog just peed on my bag!’
‘Ahhh. Sorry’, the lady mutters and continues on her way.
Incensed, I jump up and grab some serviettes from the coffee shop, and mop at the damp sprinkle left by this careless dog and its less-than civic-minded owner. My thoughts coalesce a bit more and I stride after the lady, and interrupt her.
‘Excuse me. But I think if I peed on your bag, you would be upset. When your dog pees on my bag, the least I think you should do is offer to get a tissue and help mop it up.’
The lady looks at me incredulously. ‘Get real! Get over it!’ She is almost, but not quite shouting.
‘That’s not a very mature response’, I return. Snappy, I know.
‘You’re the immature one!’ She does shout this time, and she is now walking away. I give it up and return to Julie, our shopping, the kids and the pee-stained bag. Julie has the coffee. She shares my outrage, as do a few stall holders who witnessed it all. We take our stuff and go and sit elsewhere.
This whole thing rankles. Apart from the illegality of exposing myself in public, how would she feel if I peed on her shopping?
The coffee is soapy and lukewarm. But the apples are delicious.
