South Sudan: Round 2

Like a bad penny, I turn up in South Sudan again. I was fortunate enough to be given a job in an monitoring and evaluation department for an NGO in Juba. As I shall be posted around the country on various missions, I can happily say that the Guerilla Researcher has been resurrected!

Things have changed in my new position, and I wonder how I will match up to this task? I manage more people, do more paperwork, and will have to take a step back from most field operations. I will be doing enough grunt work to deserve the title of this blog still, but will have try damn hard to get to the stories worth writing about.

This resurrection is a welcome one for me. Leaving my last job put me in a position of freedom, but after about a month I got really bored. I am very glad to be back here, but my journey was preceded by three reminders that I believe affect any and all expat aid workers. In this work, I have come into contact with many more people in a short space of time than I feel I would have done if I had a job that kept me stationary, and close to the friends of home. Social circles, although not to close, expand very fast. I have mixed with people that like to, or are forced to live in dangerous places. Higher morality rates abound.

And I have lost three people.

I don’t want to claim sympathy, or play on the heart strings. I know that there are others out there that have a much greater right to grief than I do for these souls. But let me tell you a little about them:

I worked with a translator, that I shall call Dom, on one long project in South Sudan. He was a person who was not just a translator, but also an intermediary, guide and fixer while he worked with me. We had to spend a lot of time together, sleeping in the same tukuls for weeks. He was a clever man. A talented translator, able to speak several languages. A man who contributed greatly to the success of the aid programmes in his homeland. There was trouble though, in his life and habits. The trouble came in the form of regular consumption moonshine.  After spending several days in Camp 15, the closest thing you will ever see to a wildwest town, the local brew got to him. No family or friends were around to take him to the far distant clinic when he started being sick from the home-brewed alcohol. I hear it took a few days.

Rafe, another translator, is a really cool guy. He is the only South Sudanese man I have met here with dreds plaited into his hair. We took a long journey to a remote village, a journey which took us through his home town. When we got to his town we were forced to stay for a few days while the local authorities checked us out. People in this part of the world are suspicious. We stayed with his family, and his father became one of my interviews. An elderly man, cane, dusty had, suit jacket. Knowledgeable guy. The town held a small barracks for troops. A couple of months after I stayed in the Rafe’s home some kind of gunfight erupted in the street, and the thin wood and tin walls offered no protection for his father.

You won’t have had a chance to hear about Dom, or Rafe’s father. They are people that were too far away. However, there is a chance you heard about my next loss. Unusually for this column, I can provide her real name. Camille LePage was a young photojournalist. Born in France, educated in England, a fierce and fearless advocate for action and change. She worked in South Sudan, travelling independently to the furthest and most dangerous areas, looking for under reported stories to tell of struggle and conflict. The youths that raided for cattle. The tribesmen and women who hid from artillery shelling in caves. She traveled a lot in the short time that I had known her, going from hotspot to hotspot in search of stories, then flying to New York and Paris to tell them. I have not been able to find out what killed her, but it happened when she had to go off the radar, searching for people in CAR who had been the target of a militia raid. Her body was found by peacekeeping troops, in a car being driven by rival militia members. She was usually laughing at something. Often worried about the success of her pictures. Always overcoming fear of danger. Somehow, the danger caught her.

Others were much more deeply involved with these remarkable people than I, but I feel I am going to have to watch out for loss over the course of this career I am still only just beginning.

Accomplishments this year...

Ok, so the outbreak of the new year is a time where we all break out in resolution and reflection. Not so sure about the former. Resolutions made at new year seem to be no stronger or effective than resolutions made throughout the year. Have any of you really maintained your gym going habits past the end of January? Ever?

Reflection, now that I can do something with. A year is a nice, functional unit of time to look over, digest, and observe changes and triumphs. Of course it may also reveal failures and catastrophes, but we don't really need to share those in a public forum, do we?

I will but you a deal. I will show you mine, if you show me yours. Please comment with any successes you have, and an explanation, and lets see how far we all got...

My accomplishments:

1) Survived -  Not as facetious a comment as you may think.
I am not really talking about the higher level of danger that South Sudan presents to its occupants in comparison to, say, Iceland. No. I am talking about the fact that lots of international workers burn out, freak out, wig out and generally go nuts. I would refer you to the story of a compound manager, responsible for looking after the living and working areas for several NGOs in his compound, attempting to burn it down after getting drunk and only being in the field for a couple of weeks. I have managed to finish my year with sanity still intact.

2) Three months spent researching farmers and their ways in South Sudan - Three babies named after me.
Now, I don't want you to think that those babies were biological relations in anyway. But it appears to be true, they were named so as a result of my visit. I might go back and check one day. The research itself was the first time I had a chance to spend significant amounts of time in one area, and get a deeper understanding of a people rather than a project I have been sent to assess.

3) WaSH evaluations - Where people were proud to tell me their village was open defecation free.
WaSH stands for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene. It is the name given to an area of specialisation within the development field. These three subjects are linked by the common factor of giving people good quality water they can drink and wash themselves in, and then educating them on the importance of doing just that. Good hygiene practices are not universal. Brilliantly, although changing people's habits take a long time, the effects of these programmes are observable and can be quite dramatic. Especially when villages proclaim to the world that they no longer crap in the open by advertising it on their village signs.

4) Evaluation of three Leper colonies - Seriously, they still exist...
...and they come in different forms. Two of the communities I assessed were large, and those that were affected by leprosy had been treated. Their families were expanding, and there was little issue with treatment and care. However, the last one was more along the lines of the leper colony that you might have in mind. Small. Lots of people disabilities. Neglect. No treatment. You name it, they had it. The only thing missing was the bandages, because there were no doctors to put the bandages on them.

5) Month long travel through conflict areas - asking people whether they listened to the Radio or not.
This needs some qualifying. The areas I traveled through were not in a state of conflict at the time, but they are now. The trip through the state of Jonglei was the most challenging road trip I had taken up to that point. It involved training and working with two different teams of people from the Nuer and Dinka tribes, and travelling to the most out of the way places possible. The answer that we got back from the questionnaire? Simple. Mostly, people do not listen to the radio, in the areas I visited anyway.

6) Got stuck in the car, in the mud, countless times - It ended up becoming fun after a while.
This one is self explanatory.
 
7) Lived through the front wheel falling off said car - Three times
This is never going to happen in the west. Ever. It happens a lot otherwise, particularly in the make of vehicle I was in. Pray that you are driving slowly when it does.
 
8) Got detained by military for three days -  An important tick box in an international worker's life
After posting this on facebook, I now see the point of explaining this event at greater length, as my parents are reading this and their reaction just ain't funny. The military in South Sudan are very suspicious, and like to know everything. As I passed through a town with my team on one research assignment, we were stopped by one observant soldier who decided that the documents we had with us did not prove that we were, in fact, working for an NGO on an agricultural assignment. He and his superiors became certain of the fact that we were, in fact, trying to steal the gold that permeated the hills nearby. 

Seriously. They did. 

Still, being detained for three days was not too bad. They seized the car keys and satellite phone, and made us stay in town while they checked out our story with their superiors. After the state government threatened the soldiers with arrest for delaying us, we were released. But not before we spent a few nights drinking in a bar showing Korean martial arts movies, while the off duty soldiers stared at us balefully.

9) Left South Sudan before it descended into civil war - This is one of points I don't really like. 
Alright, so this is one failure or regret I am going to put in here. Family and friends would happily point out that I was lucky to leave a couple of weeks before the South Sudanese army started fighting itself, sparking a struggle that has killed thousands and divided the country along tribal lines. Intellectually, I agree. However, emotionally I cannot. Friends are still there. Nya Gwa put it better than I can right now. I think my colleague Cleopatra would agree.