Making Friends

I would like to introduce you all, formally, to Nya Gwa. She is a very good friend, and has been in South Sudan for around two years now, working in a couple of different roles. Right now she is working in a refugee camp in the north of the country, close to border with Sudan. I am going to let you in on a conversation we have been having about friendships. Imagine us both relaxing on a couple of garden chairs, in the garden of a bar, facing the Nile. Nya Gwa has come to Juba for some R and R and has meet me in a place with some cool beats, a slight breeze, and twinkling fairy lights. We have a couple of beers on the table, and are quietly talking about the people we have met…

This is total rubbish of course. I am, indeed, sitting in the garden of that bar, but Nya Gwa has been working in a small office with no furniture for the last few months, sweating heavily and cursing the lack of wine… But still, just picture it anyway, it adds to the ambiance of the piece…

Me:

“…Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining about the usual social life here. Meeting new people here is pretty easy. The Kawadja hangouts are full of people in a casual conversation kind of mood. Talking to new people in the bars here is much easier than in the UK. It is ok to start conversations with people you have not met. The conversation usually starts with you saying “Hi. My name is Bob. I work for [insert NGO]. How long have you been here for?” The reply is just a repetition, you get the same information back. It is like people are giving out their C.V. in verbal form. However, if you see an overlap or area of common interest, it is possible to start up a conversation which can go on all night, developing into an acquaintanceship and then into friendship. If not, then you can just go and talk to the next person. “

Nya Gwa:

“Oh, that ubiquitous conversation, it drives me insane. It’s like the first week of university when the conversation is always “my name is ….. I come from…… I am studying ……”. But yes, it is easier to strike up a conversation here, the main difficulty is in trying to strike up a conversation that isn’t about work, which can be a struggle.”

“Yeah, that is a problem. I still have trouble cracking that one. But what about the non-kawadja population? It is possible, depending on where you work and play, to go most of the day without seeing one of these rare people. How do we start friendships with them? This one is much more of a conundrum to me. You see, most initial conversations with people we meet in the street and talk to go along these lines-

Me: “Good morning, how are you?”

Response: “Give me money.” Or “Have you got a job for me?”

“As a woman, there’s the whole other aspect of it, which is ‘hello, how are you?’ leading to declarations of love/saying they want to be ‘your good friend’/in one case, a man literally saying ‘Hello. Will you have sex with me?’ on the streets of Juba. In fact, because of this, I don’t start up conversations with men in South Sudan unless it’s necessary. Which is sad, but it’s true. I mean, within in a lot of the cultures here just a woman striking up a conversation with a man is pretty slutty – for example in Nuer and Dinka cultures, women don’t eat in front of men, they don’t drink in front of men. One of my national staff proudly says that when he returns home from a day of work his wife does not speak to him but just brings him some tea and then goes away. Also, I have to realize that even men who I do not perceive as in my category of potential dates, ie married men in their 50s, are perceiving me as in their range. So, there’s a whole other level going on.

The problem is, few South Sudanese women speak good English, or indeed, any English at all, especially once you leave Juba. I often provoke lots of laughter with women when I play with their children here, but it’s not really an opportunity to make a ‘proper’ friendship.”

“Alright, you trump me there. I don’t get marriage proposals. That must be a bit of a bugger. But you mention one of your staff. What about those people we meet during the course of our work? I can tell you. Most ask for more wages, which is a fair question as I am usually employing temporary teams of people to collect survey data. But let me give you an example of what happens outside of that employer-employee relationship. One of my data collectors, who I had employed on a couple of occasions now and got on well with, called me during one project and asked to meet me. She said there was a particular problem that I could help them with. When I met her, she explained that she was trying to go back to school and needed some help as it was expensive and the jobs in South Sudan do not pay very much. I suggested that I could help with finding details of scholarships in other countries, like Uganda or Kenya. But that answer was not completely satisfying to her. She did not complain further, but I could see that she was looking for financial help.

She was an employee, but how about colleagues from other organisations? Not being an employer means I should be treated with a little more equality, right? Nope. On a project with a partner organization, one of my partner colleagues asked if I would like to go for a walk through the town we had just arrived in. I figured this for a friendly gesture, so I willingly accepted. Over coffee in a little tea shop, my ‘friend’ starts talking about education being a challenge in South Sudan. In particular, the lack of good universities for him to finish his schooling, and the cost of going to elsewhere.

Do you see where this conversation was heading? I did, before the words 'I need a little help, but only within your capacity to help' were even uttered.“

“That story is very familiar. Asking for money for school, or for a plane ticket to the UK, has happened a lot of times. Also for clothes, for a watch, for a computer, whenever you go back to the UK. There doesn’t seem to be the conception that things are expensive in the UK, actually more expensive than if they bought these things from Kenya.

But yes, I’ve lived here for two years. Do I have any South Sudanese friends? I would say I only made friends with one South Sudanese person who wasn’t part of the diaspora. I am friendly with my current staff, for sure, and they don’t ask me for money anymore. But, the reality is, whenever I leave this job I won’t have any way of keeping contact with them. And, I am their boss, so, there has to be some level of distance socially.

It makes me sad that there is this gap. Sometimes I feel guilty about it, and feel I should make more of an effort. But, at the end of the day, I spend most of my time at work interacting with people of a massively different culture from me, in a very stressful environment. When I’m finished I am tired and just want something familiar to hold on to. Someone who I can talk freely with rather than worrying about what words I use or whether they will understand what I say.”

“I just met a new colleague today. Comes from my hometown. Nothing beats talking to someone from home. I’m English, I miss sarcasm. But I do wonder about that effort. I feel like I failed a little bit. My efforts to even try and find non-kawadjas is failing. I wonder if the anthropologists have it right? Perhaps we should immerse ourselves?

Of course, the trouble with that is we have no bloody time to do that. We have too much work to do, and cannot sit around just talking to and studying people all day. I think you hit on something when you said your staff no longer ask you for money. Perhaps it just takes time and patience on our part. Perhaps we just need to keep explaining that we cannot give money, and eventually we might break through that barrier that all people have here. The barrier that says all kawadjas are rich, and can save us by giving us things.”

Explaining the principles of unionisation to the South Sudanese...

... is very much like trying to teach a shark how to swim. Or bite.

I regularly employ small teams of south sudanese staff, as do all of my colleagues. Wherever we work we need to hire daily staff that can go out into the communities we are targeting,  to carry out the surveys we have been set. There are dozens of tribes here, all of which have their own unique history and language. If we need to work in a particular area, then we need to employ people who come from the tribes that occupy the land we are working in. We have to do this for two reasons.

The first is that, obviously, we need someone who speaks the local language to do the translations for us. We have surveys that need to be filled in. We need someone who can ask the questions in Dinka, or Nuer, or Bari, or Shilluk. They will then translate the answers back into English for us. If the translation does not go well, you get rubbish data. You had better check out how well they can speak and read English before you hire them.

The second reason is less directly practical, but has much more serious consequences if something does go wrong. The biggest threats to security here is not necessarily the tension between South Sudan and Sudan, who they fought a war of independence with. The biggest threat to your everyday security is inter-tribal conflict. In a country where owning cattle symbolizes your material wealth, cattle raids are deadly. Attacks on other tribes lands, in revenge for previous killings, also happen with depressing regularity. Struggles are sparked over the use of water and grazing land. These conflicts occur at local levels, but they are represented at a national level as  the tribes vie for influence and look after their own in Parliament. Practically speaking, I am not saying that I am likely to get some Nuer guys shot dead if I take them with me on a field trip into another tribe's land. However, I might be setting them up for more than collecting bad data. They may also collect a few bruises.

What this means is that they are used to sticking together. Individuals within a tribe do conflict with each other, but when they are threatened by someone from outside the tribe each and every tribemember will line up alongside their relations. Disagree with someone from the other tribe? None of his tribemates will take your side. Enter a dispute with one of your employees? You will be hard pushed to find a court or judge that take your side if he is connected to the local community. They know that banding together and helping each other out gives them strength. This is how they managed to survive decades of war. People here are used to working as a group. Now let me give you an example of how this can play itself out in my work:

I was recently commissioned to supervise a large survey in Upper Nile state. The data collectors that were to be part of the survey were salaried staff that worked for the NGO that had contracted me. The staff were being taken away from their usual work in order to carry out this survey. Because they were taken away from their usual places of work, they are granted an extra daily bonus. A "Per Diem". Now, it should be remembered that this survey plays an important part of the NGOs funding application. The survey shows how much work there is to do in the area and that they deserve the funding which pays for their projects, and incidentally pays the data collectors regular wages.

I trained this team of 20 or so people for 4 days in the various skills that the survey required. At the end of the 4th day we gave them all their certificates, everyone was happy, and we tell them to prepare to leave in the morning for the area in which we will start work. The next morning, we let them all know that we are leaving at 9am so they could start packing their things in the cars. No-one moved. An hour later, while having a briefing, a spokesman stands up and begins to deliver a list of demands for their continued participation in the survey. They wanted: raincoats; rainboots; daily allocations of tea, cake, and soda; and a 33% increase in their per diem.

In short, they are going on strike, and they waited until the last moment to tell us because they thought that was when we would be most likely to give in. Arthur Scargill would be proud.

This has happened to me and my colleagues in other places too. Much of the time it is over an additional 10 or 20 south sudanese pounds per day. On some short projects where we just wanted the work done, their strike action succeeded. We paid them. In this case, it did not. The strikers held their ground, but so did their employer. The employer went to the local authorities to look for help, and to other organisations to try to find an alternative source of data collectors. However, as they were in conflict with people from the local area, the authorities supported their own. After 3 days of negotiations, the survey was cancelled. The organization failed in its attempt to produce a yearly survey that is uses to apply for and justify its funding stream.

It is also worth noting that the group of employees also lost out on what would have been almost a months salary on top of their normal pay, but they were not willing to give in on their demands. This points to another interesting part of the national psyche of the South Sudanese that I have only just begun to realize. They will stand firm on a demand, even if it may mean hurting themselves as they do it. South Sudan's largest export, by far, is oil. The problem is that the only oil pipeline running from here to the coast is through Sudan, its old enemy. Sudan was levying a high price for South Sudan to pump its oil through that pipeline, and was also making a lot of money out of the oil as it resold it. South Sudan tried to negotiate a better deal for their oil, but Sudan though it had them in a strangle hold.

South Sudan decided the only way to break the deadlock was to stop producing oil. This hurt Sudan a lot, but it hurt South Sudan even more. The South Sudanese lost 98% of their national income.

The thing is, not one single South Sudanese person complained. They supported the government's action. They were happy to hurt themselves severely, so long as the north did not get the advantage on them.

You may be fooled into thinking that because the South Sudanese are poor, they will have to take the weaker position in any negotiation. This is FAR from the truth.