WASHing

How many people do you know that wash their hands before dinner? I mean really? I know we get told to do it as kids, but did our parents really do it themselves? All the time? You sure?

I bet YOU don’t . I also bet you don’t know many people that do it at all. I hope you realize that you are breaking international WASH standards. And you should feel guilty about it. 

Want to know what WASH is? Water and Sanitation and Hygiene. It is a general sector within the sphere of humanitarian aid, and there are minimum international standards that most organisations and people working within this sector adhere to. Washing your hands before eating is one of the things that people working in this sector will teach. I just came back from assessing a project where this is an important topic. If fact, it is one of the major parts of a programme that will cost millions over its three year lifespan. One of the largest impediments to any kind of development in a country is the health and wellbeing of its people. Quite simply, if one is too sick to work or go to school, change cannot happen.  Keeping clean is part of this. People’s health is often underserved by their limited access to basic health provision and knowledge. You know why we wash our hands of course. We do it to clean off the most harmful bacteria. Why would you wash your hands if you don’t even know about bacteria?

I have caught a little glimpse of what happens when you don’t look after your own hygiene, and it ain’t pretty. Diarrhea, lots of it. Skin diseases. Eye infections. You will see a lot of photos of kids in poor countries. Look closely at the photos. You might see flies around their eyes. Eye infection, right there.

Now here is what I find interesting. The stuff I have seen underlines a basic habit that we take for granted in the UK, without quite realizing why. We wash in the UK in order to avoid smelling. We often wash because we feel it is socially unacceptable to go out without doing it. Having a shower makes us feel “more human.” But the experience here reminds me of the real reason for good hygiene which we do not often remember or even know. If you don’t wash your face regularly, your eyes will die. If you drink dirty water, you may well waste away from any number of parasites and sicknesses.

Now consider this: If someone does not know about bacteria, how do you convince them that drinking from and using clean water for washing is a good idea? How can you tell them that they need toilets and that they should not, in fact, go and shit in the woods? Want to convince them that human feces in the open can infect drinking water?  You could try and explain to them about small animals they cannot see. You could try and explain how they breed several times an hour. Perhaps you could try and tell them that these small, invisible animals cause diarrhea and eye infections. They won’t believe you though.  They will think you are making it up. Let’s be honest here, it does sound a little fantastic.

There is at least one answer the question of how to convince people though. It comes in the form of shame. Give up on the idea of visiting a village and showing them a few things in a workshop. They won’t buy it. Far better to ask them to drink their own feces. 

This is an approach that a few people I have met recently have been taking. Let me tell you how you how it goes. One should go to a village and meet with the people there. Convince them that you are not there to give anything away, but to assist them with their problems. Keep talking. Eventually you will get around to sickness and then you can say “Wait, I can help you with that. You need to dig latrines, and to make sure you use them rather than going into the bush near your village.” They will say that you are crazy. “No, really. You should because if you don’t then your waste will get into the water and infect you.” They will insist that they know that poo is disgusting, but would not drink it. It does not go into the water, as they would see it. “Oh really?” you say. 

This is the clever bit. While you have been talking, you have all been walking around the village and you are in a place where you can see human waste lying in the bush. You have a bottle of water in your hand and you have been allowing people to drink from it. Now it is half full, so you take a stick and transfer a small bit of feces into the water. Put the lid on. Shake it up so the water is clear again. Offer them a drink…

Clueless....

I am continually being reminded of something in this work. That thing is quite simple, and yet irritating. I constantly get reminded of what it is like to be a clueless student. There are very few worse feelings in this world.

We are all, us researchers, in a constant state of “I don’t know jack.” I came out of undergraduate degree and launched into this job. It felt a little odd at first, as I came to grips the simple idea that preparing for an assignment is like cramming for an exam or an essay deadline. However, it began to sink in that each time I am put on a new project I may have a mere week to get familiar with a subject about which I know nothing. Disaster Risk Reduction project evaluation coming up? You got a week to learn about it and come up with a survey. Water, Sanitation and Hygiene baseline? Go through forty documents in two days to figure out what the hell they thought they are about to do. Peacebuilding exercise to evaluate? Oh boy, good luck with that one. Not much of that is measurable in any easy way. Good luck in that one.

A new colleague of mine, Cleopatra, pointed out a very simple truth. While speed reading a dozen DDR documents, she blurted out “I feel like I am studying again!” She just completed her MA and doubtless thought she may have left those worrisome days of cramming behind.

I had realised before graduating, that life would not be gravy in this regard. Final year undergrads can happily hold court over younger years who constantly ask for advice, seek guidance and reassurance, and who generally hope to be in your position very soon. However, conversations with other graduates had already shown me that upon finishing your degree you immediately find yourself at the bottom of the knowledge pile again. Everyone in the field you want to get into has studied more, worked longer, and experienced more than you. Welcome back to feeling like an idiot once more. Facing the slow scramble back up the face of ‘knowing what you are talking about’ is daunting enough when starting a career.

Now imagine doing this with every project you are given, once or twice a month. 

Welcome to the life of the contracted researcher.

With any luck one will end up getting contracts that require you to do research on an area you have covered before. Perhaps one might get a couple of Shelter projects in a row. Now things may not feel so desperate, as your knowledge from one feeds over to another. The more you do, the more project like this you may be given. I imagine this is how experts get made. By accident. With any luck, however, the stress of learning decreases over time as one finds oneself on a burgeoning (and completely unexpected) career path.

Now, I have to ask you, have you ever encountered someone who says “I enjoy learning”? I bet we all have. I would like to share an observation with you on this common assertion: The fuckers are lying to you. They are probably lying to themselves. Nobody likes learning. Never. What people enjoy is being learnED. They like the feeling you get when you have finally figured something out, or when you realise you know more than the other people in the room. Sounds big-headed, but it is true nonetheless. It is the relief of moving from the feeling of being clueless to the state of being clued up that is the real kick.

The problem is, I suspect that feeling of being constantly clueless is going to be with me for life. I suspect that what YOU don’t realise is that it might be with you for life too. I think that being complacent in learning is going to cripple modern and future workers. The modern worker is going to have to learn how to become an expert on new topics very quickly as jobs become less about being work for life, and more about who knows what. More and more people will be part of the knowledge based economy. Being at the cutting edge of your field is going to be crucial, and maintaining that advantage will require constant study as information and knowledge becomes easier to share. Knowing something about a lot of subjects won’t get you very far. Wikipedia knows a lot about a broader range than you. One will need to become an expert really fast to be competitive.

Welcome to a life of feeling clueless…

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.

Working in "The Field"

Around a month ago, I was dispatched on my first extended trip into the field, and I would like to tell you about some of those experiences. I still have to analyse them myself, so perhaps you can help me.

First of all, what do I mean by working in the “field”? I certainly don’t mean going camping in nice green pastures where the cows eat grass, trees sway in the wind and farmers chase you off their land. These things do happen here, but that is beside the point. There are a couple of definitions of the term “the field”, and they all depend on where you are standing at the time that you define it. Lets say, for example, that you are standing in London. You work for the Red Cross. For you, working in “the field” means moving to any other country where you are running an aid programme. Therefore, if you come to South Sudan you are now working in “the field”. Have a look at my friend's definition of "the field" for another point of view.

When you get to the field, things change. You realise after a few days that working and living in Juba is nothing like it is elsewhere in South Sudan. Juba has roads (sort of). It has shops. It has restaurants. It has lots of things to buy and eat and consume. It has barbers that will give you a shave and a massage. It even has city supplied electricity. Occasionally. You have now come across a new definition of “the field”, and it is one that no longer includes you. Within South Sudan, “the field” means working anywhere that is away from your main office. For those organisations with a base in other major cities, the definition has to change a little to mean working away from those offices too (although one might like to keep that quiet. It sounds better if you can claim to have been working for months in “the field” when what you have actually been doing is living in air-conditioned opulence).

I live in Juba. For me, the definition of “the field” means everywhere else. We were commissioned to conduct a nation-wide survey on radio listening habits. All of the researchers in the company were dispatched to different areas of the country at the same time. Some packed out landrovers as if going on safari (I was one of these), others were sent in planes. One of us at least had to use a boat to get to their final location. We all had several locations to visit, many teams of data collectors to train, and new friends to make. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?

That is because it was. The first part of the trip was comparatively easy for me. I got to stay in a hotel with mostly working generators. I got a room. It had a television. It worked. I told my colleagues this and they instantly hated me. One of my co-workers was in an area where the roads were so bad with mud from recent rains they managed to spin the car 180 degrees while going 15 miles an hour. Another was supposed to conduct a survey in a village that no longer existed since the Lord’s Resistance Army attacked it several years ago. A third has, I am told, spent most of his time walking.

But don’t worry. My troubles started pretty soon. The biggest challenge we face in the field is the team of people we have around us. We employ local people to conduct the surveys we carry out. The team we employ can make or break the project. If you get a good team, things go excellently. If you have one or two trouble makers on board, then you will encounter huge problems. On this trip some of my Data Collectors were brilliant. Most, however, I fired for stealing memory cards from the smart phones. I nearly fired another after I caught him lying about his work. My boss is now threatening to call me “The Terminator”.

I had to move from my first cushy area to a Panyagor, the county capital of Twic East, and there things altered. It is a small town that runs along both sides of the north-south road that runs from Juba in the south, to Upper Nile State in the far north. The phone charging stalls had power, as they rely on small petrol driven generators, but that was about it. The largest (and only) NGO there had a main generator that was broken. So was their other large generator. Their small back-up generator was broken too. They were down to a couple of solar panels that barely worked. This was the beginning of a theme for this trip. Generator repair men are hard to come by, and the spare parts even more so. The roads in this country are hell, so the people and parts don’t get around.

All this meant that I finally got a taste of what it is like, trying to work in a western way in the bush. In short, it does not work. I have phones to charge. A computer that needs power. I have papers that need light to be read. I had a small hut that was so bloody hot I could not work inside it without dripping sweat, even at night. As a result I tried to work outside during the night.

That was a mistake. I found chair to sit on. A table to use. I have a netbook with good battery life so I can carry on working. I was as prepared for work as possible. The problem is that no-one else has power that late at night. This means I was happily sitting there, in the dark, a computer on the table in front of me. Insects like computers. They think a small moon has just landed on earth, and they fly and hop and jump merrily toward it. Try as I might to write up the reports from the day, I found it impossible to work as insects from hell bounced off the back of my head in their scramble to get to my computer screen. When they got there they obscured my work, adding extra meaning to the prose on the screen:

“We left Bor at Bluebottle and arrived in PanyaMosquito pm. Left the data collectors in Stickinsect and drove out the meet our contact the Big Hairy Fucker…”

When the Big Hairy Fucker’s friends came to the party and started investigating my face I decided to do what everyone else in the lodge was doing. Stop working, get some tea, sit in the dark and chat.

The final stop on this journey was Ayod. As before in this trip, I was subject to the kindness of strangers as accommodation and data collectors were found for me before I arrived. Introductions to the county commissioners were made on my behalf. We were looked after. Everything was going so well. We were put in a compound that, you guessed it, had multiple generator failures.

I mentioned earlier that the organisations working in the field rely on the kindness of strangers themselves. Those broken generators? We promised to take one back to Juba for them, so it can be fixed.

As I write this entry, I am in the office of this final set of kind hosts. The solar power is working. We just had lunch of goat meat and rice. The breeze is blowing through the open windows and doors. There is a song bird warbling away on the chair next to me, trying to find his way back out again. A small flock of chickens had wandered in to inspect the floor for dropped food, and has now just left in disgust at finding nothing. I am glad to have ended up here, at the end of my field trip. The songbird and the chickens beat flies in your face any day.

The Kindness of Strangers

Working in South Sudan is hard for an organization of any kind. Operating in a country with no infrastructure to speak of, no power, no flowing water, bad roads, means that you or your colleagues will run into trouble regularly. Your car might lose a wheel on the roads, as mine recently did. You will have to stay in places with no access to water. On my most recent field trip we visited several county capitals, each of which had one well resourced NGO operating out of it. They were well resourced in comparison only to the huts and houses around them. But of these organisations, almost all were suffering from power failure. Their main generators needed fixing. Their back up generators needed spare parts. Their back-up back-up generators did not work. If they were lucky, they had a couple of solar panels which were only good enough to run a few computers while the sun was shining. 

Spare parts and engineers all have to come from Juba. This takes weeks, if not months. Each of the NGOs have difficulty operating in their respective environments. A task which would be made infinitely more difficult if it were not for the kindness and assistance of other NGOs around them.

When I began planning this trip, I was heading into unknown territory. Literally. The company had not been to any of the areas I was being sent to. The more I found out, the more I realized that OTHERs had not been their either. Jonglei state is one of the most underdeveloped states in the country. This should mean that they are getting the most help, but what it means in reality is that the NGOs do not have offices or staff there. Only a few adventurous organisations, mainly those giving food aid or working in emergency response and preparedness, have outposts in this NGO-less wilderness. I was incredibly fortunate that they did.

I contacted as many people as I could find, and chased down contact after contact. Eventually I found those that were living and working in the areas I needed to get to, and I discovered something brilliant. The NGOs help each other out. For free. This came as a revelation to me. Up to this point I had heard of and seen much of the politicking and arguing that happens at a management or coordination level. But the workers in the field face a different reality. If one needs assistance, or a place to stay, or advice, then it will be given happily. The only caveat is this: When someone comes asking you for advice and assistance, you should give it.

I could not have carried out my work without the help I received on this trip. When we arrived in Ayod, one contact had arranged a place to stay for us, facilitated meetings with the local authorities, and found a number of data collectors for me to employ on the project. All of this on top of organizing and managing the work that her own organization has to take care of. Indeed, she was unable to house us in their own compound as there was no shade for us to erect our tents, not water because the pump was broken and, you guessed it, no power as the generator needed a new spare part. She asked another NGO with a compound nearby to house us. They immediately said yes. As one of my new friends put it “We cannot work in the field without each others help”

We offered as much assistance as we could in response. We offered to ferry parts, people and anything else back to Juba on our return journey. Unfortunately the assistance was not needed. I feel guilty about this. I wanted to give a little something in reply for their kindness, but it was not needed.

NGOs work on a different set of ethics than the rest of us. I work for a consulting firm. We are a business. I wonder whether this matters to the NGOs and the people that help us. I know we are doing work for them. We assess their programmes, do the research they hire us to do, give them the knowledge they need to work. This means we are part of their world, so I guess we are deserving of their help and assistance. However, I have a sneaky suspicion that if they realize we are actually profit makers, they would not help so much. So please, keep this story quiet. I don’t want them to know…

Taking Inspiration From the Most Unlikely Source

I found my recent trip to some leper colonies made me feel oddly bouyant. The problem is, I am going to have trouble explaining why. Especially as that statement makes me sound like an insensitive idiot.

Let set the story for you first:

We (the company) were asked to perform a Baseline Assessment for a charity that provides services and help to people that suffer from Leprosy. They are about to extend their services to South Sudan. They have not worked in the area for several years and have no idea what things are like anymore. A Baseline Assessment is NGO project speak for assessing the situation on the ground. We go to the communities and gather information by observing and questioning the inhabitants and the people who live nearby. This gives the charity a snapshot of the conditions they are about to deal with, and allows them to identify possible issues that the charity can assist with.

The fact that you are conducting a Baseline Assessment means that you are likely to be going in blind. We were visiting three communities. We didn't know how large the communities are, how they are organised, or how many individuals with leprosy live there. That is what we were meant to find out. I had no idea what I was going to see. I was expecting to encounter post-apocalyptic conditions.

It is a surprise to many that 'leper communities' still exist. We have all heard of them. In most countries they were set up by missionaries, priests and nuns, to administer to the sufferers. They were set up because those who had the disease became lepers. They were thrown out of their communities and had nowhere else to go. But, in most countries, they do not exist anymore. The disease was eradicated. Not here. The numbers are growing. Slowly, but growing nevertheless. The total population diagnosed with leprosy may only number one or two thousand. The problem is that we cannot be sure. Accurate numbers are hard to find in South Sudan. One of the biggest reasons for this is illustrated by one of our subject communities.

Two of our communities had, over the last 100 years, had access to treatment. When drugs were discovered that could destroy the disease, the nearby hospitals were able to dispense the treatment to the  patients. For some the damage to the body had been done, but the progress of the disease was halted. For many it was halted before it had done much damage at all. The communities grew, built and developed. They are still poor, but the people around them grew less afraid as the leprosy was controlled. The communities intermingled. People remained healthy. No post apocalyptic scenario here.

However, this did not happen in one place. This very small community, of around 20 adults and 30 children, has remained isolated. They occupy an area that saw a great deal of conflict, and they are far away from many of the larger cities The world either forgot them, or was unable to get to them because of war. They had not seen a doctor for almost three decades. The disease continued to ravage those that had it, because it is a slow disease. It does not transfer easily, so many of the children of those with leprosy managed to marry and move away without contracting the disease themselves, leaving their parents behind. This community shrank as people died, and stagnated as the individuals grew more incapable over time. The outlook is not that good. South Sudan has no money, little infrastructure, and scant will to help such a small population of people. This is not surprising. The country has bigger problems to worry about. Still, with any luck, the report that I write might encourage and enable this charity to begin programmes that improve things for these communities.

But why, I hear you say, would such a hopeless situation improve your mood? Is the Guerilla Researcher a heartless idiot who finds this amusing?

No. I am not. Or so my friends say. Let me see if I can dig myself out of this hole.

I met people who cannot pick up their own food. Some lost their sight to leprosy. Others are afraid of cooking or going near fire because the disease makes them insensitive to pain and they can become seriously injured without realising it. Many cannot walk without an aid of some kind. Some have to crawl in the dust, mostly naked and dirt poor. These are the physical impediments that we observed. Our research barely even touched on the social exclusion, fear, revulsion and discrimination that leprosy sufferers have faced for years.

Life is hard, and cruel to these human beings. It is easy, and essential, to compare my life to theirs and observe how simple mine really is. I have it made. All of the expats here make this comparison. I have not yet met someone who does not. I hope I don't because that person probably IS an arsehole. This kind of work should be one of those things that helps you be a little more thankful for what you have, if only because it shows you are able to empathise to some extent with those who have less.

The inspiration I took from this project was more specific: It points out to me that humans can suffer a lot more than I have suffered, and still keep going. That one outcast community is suffering badly, but it is not without hope. Those whom I met have not let their illness beat them down. Children do come back and aid their parents. People do organise and support one another mutually. They have all encountered barriers that cannot be overcome, but they still show spirit. Spirit in the sense of not being broken, and spirit in the sense of the human spirit. They work as hard as they can. They still hope for an improvement in their life. They still plan for the future of their children. They still look ahead. Importantly, some people will be humane enough to help.

I tried to imagine myself in their position, and wondered if I would still have the ability to get up and face the world every morning. I do not want to flatter myself without reason, but I felt that I might be able to do it. I realised there are trials, greater than the ones I am facing now, that I could conquer. I have seen others do it. I just need to have faith. Possibly a little help too.

In summary, I believe I am talking about two sources of solace and inspiration here. You can say 'I see what others do without, and I am more grateful for what I have'. You can also say this: 'I see what others can deal with, and it gives me hope that I could deal with it too'.