An Afghan Refugee

Back in February when I first arrived in Juba, I was contacted on skype by an Afghan woman I used to work with -- we will call her Shakila -- who told me she had recently fled Kabul with her husband as she feared for her life in Afghanistan. She was in Germany, she said, and asked my help. I reached out to everyone I knew and several  friends, and friends of friends and friends of people I didn’t even know, made efforts to help her, providing names and numbers of lawyers, refugee agencies in Germany, and eventually in Sweden where she fled to next. I did the only thing I knew how to do; I wrote letters and I tried to get a story published, in fact the story below. But I was told by one news agency that it wasn’t “a cracking enough read”. Last week Shakila contacted me to say that she had been granted asylum in Sweden. 

Thank you to all who helped. Below is the story that was never printed. 

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Shakila (not her real name) was just a girl, living in Kabul with her family, when the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 1996, but her memories of that time when women were not allowed to work, go to school or leave the house without a male escort are not easily forgotten.   

“I was home all the time, I couldn’t go out because women weren’t allowed to go out. I do not want that again.”

Sixteen years later, at the age of 26, Shakila exemplifies more than a decade of battles between conservative forces within Afghan society and Afghan women’s advocates and their Western allies. She is educated, liberated, married to a man she loves, and was working as a senior finance manager at an NGO in Kabul. But, with the United States and its allies winding down their support in Afghanistan and the Taliban on the verge of a comeback, Shakila’s refusal to relinquish those hard-won freedoms is now putting her life in danger.

“Right from the start, my father wanted me to marry my cousin – his brother’s son – but I refused. I married a doctor,” Shakila says by skype from Sweden, where she is seeking asylum after a months-long harrowing escape that took her through Iran, Turkey and Germany. 

“But my cousin, he threatened me and my husband, and said he will kill us if I don’t marry him.”

Marriage between first cousins is not uncommon in Afghanistan, because in a country beset by decades of inter-communal conflict, marriage is seen as a way to strengthen bonds. Refusals are not taken lightly. Last December, a teenage girl was beheaded in northern Kunduz province, apparently for refusing to marry a first cousin.

Shakila and her husband ignored the threats and then, just over a year ago, Shakila became pregnant. Her father, and her cousin who lives in Logar province, began to press her to give up work, sending text messages warning her to leave her job or be punished. “My parents never liked the fact that I work and provide for myself and the family. But when my parents also began receiving threatening messages (from conservatives), they turned against me.”

Her husband’s family also tried to get her to stay at home. She says she was beaten by her in-laws, conservative Pashtuns who live in Kandahar, the spiritual home of the fundamentalist Taliban. “They would tell me that I was putting their lives in danger because I wouldn’t give up work,” she says.

The abuse was not just over her job. Shakila says her mother-in-law used to beat her to force her to do the housework when she visited Kandahar. “It is a common practice,” she says, when asked if other Afghan woman suffer the same violence from their mother-in-law. According to one recent study, more than 90 percent of Afghan women are beaten on a regular basis, by either their in-laws or their husbands. Most, like Shakila, think it’s a normal practice. “They hurt me a lot,” she says.

At first her husband tried to protect her. “My husband, he fought with his parents when he found out that they hurt me … but later, when we both realized how serious these threats were, even he got scared, and said that we don’t have any other choice but to leave.”

It took them a week to reach Iran, to the west of Afghanistan, where millions of Afghans have fled since the Soviet occupation of the country in 1979. The Iranian government estimates there are about 2.5 million Afghans legally in the country, and another million or so who are there illegally.

Life for Afghan migrants, legal or not, is not easy in Iran. Shakila and her husband stayed seven months, long enough for Shakila to give birth to their son, but they never felt they could relax. Shakila stayed at home while her husband worked as a painter’s assistant. “We thought we could build a life there. But we were afraid, what if they (their families) found us; what if they came and got us? It was too dangerous for us there, so we found a smuggler.”

They paid $25,000 for new passports and visas. The smuggler agreed to take them as far as Turkey and put them on a plane for Germany, where they had friends who would help them. But when it was time to leave, the smuggler insisted it would be safer if Shakila and her husband travelled in separate vehicles. Shakila took her baby boy, climbed into a minivan with another woman and her daughter and waved goodbye to her husband. It was the last time she saw him.

The van crossed from Iran into Turkey, where Shakila waited for her husband to show up. He never did. “The stupid smuggler said he was caught by the police, but I don’t know.  If he can, he will try to find us, because he loves me and his little baby a lot … but I hope he is somewhere safe in Iran and not in Kandahar, because I am afraid they will kill him.”

Shakila and her son remained with the smuggler in Turkey for three months before it was considered safe to fly to Germany, to Munich, where she spent some weeks with friends.  But they warned her that it was too difficult to get asylum in Germany, and that she would have better luck in Sweden.

“I am afraid they (immigration) will say this is a family problem and send me home. I can’t go home, they will kill me.”

Shakila’s story reflects a growing fear among women in Afghanistan that the rights they have struggled so hard for are now being traded away by their government and Western allies as a way to negotiate peace with the Taliban. In a 2011 survey, the NGO AactionAid found that 86 percent of the 1,000 Afghan women polled were worried that a Taliban-style government could return. 

After more than a decade of state and peace building by the international community, Afghanistan still has the world’s highest number of asylum seekers. In 2011, 35,700 Afghans claimed asylum in 44 industrialised nations, an increase of 34 percent on 2010, according to the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency. Sweden saw a 74 percent increase in Afghan asylum seekers in 2011, from 2,400 to 4,100. No hard statistics are available about what percentage of them are women, or specifically unaccompanied women.

The IOM, the UN’s migration arm, uses statistics from the UN’s Population Fund that show women make up 43.6 per cent of Afghan migrants, but that figure hasn’t changed since the 1990s. The UNHCR says it has no data on the sex of Afghan migrants, though it recognises that Afghan women are at risk if they are divorced or widowed.

Last year, the UNHCR flew 15 Afghan women – three widows and 12 female heads of household – and their children from Iran to a resettlement centre in Slovakia. The UNHCR said their situation as widows or divorcees meant they would be at further risk of abuse or exploitation if they were to return to Afghanistan.

While there may be no statistics about the number of women fleeing Afghanistan, there are many stories and anecdotes. Najia Haneefi, whose flight to Canada was the subject of a documentary some years ago, says she has several friends, parliamentarians and activists, who have left Afghanistan in the past three years because their lives were in danger. They now live in “troubled conditions” in India, waiting for their applications to be processed, she says.

Lauryn Oates, project director at Canadian Women for Afghan Women, a Toronto-based NGO, says embassies in Kabul are seeing a “spike” in the number of women applying for asylum compared with five years ago.

She says many Afghan women are preparing for an exit based on a “perception of what is to come. Some try to get invited on scholarships or to training opportunities overseas, and seek out family members who can sponsor them if it comes to that.”

Paradoxically, it is the same women who have pushed women’s rights onto the agenda who are now trying to leave the country, she says.  “Educated women have more to lose with a regime change,” -- but these are just the women who are needed in Afghanistan to ensure that women have a voice in future discussions with the Taliban.

Women have indeed made huge strides since the fall of the Taliban: women’s rights to work and education are now enshrined in the constitution, some three million girls are in school, and women have key roles in government; 27 percent of parliamentarians are women.

But many of these gains have been the result of pressure by the West and of aid tied to women’s inclusion, and are still not accepted practice by much of the country. While three million girls are indeed in school, another three million are not, and female parliamentarians report continued harassment and death threats.

Three weeks after her first message, Shakila confessed her sense of desperation. She said she was worried she could not provide the type of "strong documentation" her immigration lawyer said was needed to prove her life really was in danger in Afghanistan. “I am really afraid and scared about what will happen," she wrote. "I can't stay here illegally, it is a big risk."  

But a few days later, her son fell very ill and she was forced to come out of hiding and approach immigration so that she could get him to a hospital. In a final message, written hastily on a computer after she had registered her case formally, she said had no idea what would happen next. However, she did not regret taking the risk. “I just couldn’t jeopardise my baby’s future.”

R&R

Today I discovered the hammock.  After a couple of failed attempts to climb into it without my kindle, bottle of water, room key and ipod spilling back out, I managed to wrap everything up in my sarong and get the balance just right.

Suspended, I lay in the hammock, a sluice of sun cutting through the green canopy. 

Lost in thought, a branch fell with a thud next to me and I looked up to see a monkey trotting across the branches overhead. I don’t think it was the same one which broke into my room a few days ago, but perhaps one of the three who recently stole some bags of crisps from another room. It ran quickly and lightly down and sat in the saddle of the trunk, put its head on its hands and stared at me, as I watched it. More gathered and soon there were five, some just a couple of arms length away sitting on the grass pulling at branches and gnawing at what looked like large pea pods. The cat, Mary, wandered past, they paying no more attention to her as she to them. 

It’s strange being here, in this place. The room and the hotel are beautiful, stone floors, wooden furniture and everything covered in sunset orange fabric. The beach is palm fringed, white sand and at night when the tide comes in and the waves crash noisily against the shore, the moon rises, scorched red like a sun and there are the most amazing amount of stars. Beautiful, right? Shame about the boys on the beach, and their incessant attempts to sell you something, including their bodies. Even this morning, when I went for a run, I was followed, by a running beach boy: “Jambo Jambo,” he said as he slid into pace with me. I pointed to my headphones and shook my head. Of course, we all know, he knows, I can still hear him. “Hi, you want to go on a tour. I take you to see the dolphins. Want to see Masai Mara; I take you to see village. You want buy sarong...”. 

The only good thing, I guess, is he made me run a lot faster .. just to try to get away!  

What I wonder though is he must have had some success with this method, otherwise why continue? So who buys tours this way; who would stop to have their photo taken with a man dressed as a masai mara warrior, on a beach? Don’t they find it somewhat incongruous? Makes for good pics though I suppose!

I rented a bike, and rode down the southern coast for a few hours, until the road turned into rutted mud and it hurt too much to ride. Then I had a massage, by Maggie, who told me my leg muscles were flat, and that I was lucky because a lizard pooped on me during the massage. 

I leave tomorrow, just as I am beginning to find my routine .. and my people. But I guess that’s the way it is. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone on a beach holiday on my own and done nothing. The last time, I think, was 20 years ago, when I was travelling. I had my journal back then. Now, I’m finding it hard to think of my laptop as my journal. I keep thinking I should be working, should be answering emails, thinking about my project ... those 200,000 South Sudanese girls I have to save.   

Nairobi, where I spent my first two days, was different. It’s a city. It’s a big and bustling capital in a still developing country. There are highways, and there is rush hour traffic, but there are also few rules of the road beyond “don’t give way”. Buses swing into lanes, as if cars will magically disappear, but they don’t, and I was even advised by one taxi driver as a bus loomed upon us, on my side, “not to look scared”. 

It’s urban and high rise, and people are poor but working hard, making money so they can set up a business. Doing what? I ask “buying; selling” is the reply. Still a market mentality. Everyone has heard of South Sudan, if only because of the stories of Kenyans killed there. 

Don’t worry, I say it’s not just the Kenyans the South Sudanese dislike, but the Ugandans, Ethiopians, Eritreans and mostly the Lebanese. 

I met a friend at a bar the first night in Nairobi, and was at first surprised when the taxi pulled into a strip mall, shops centred around a parking lot. I had expected a garden. But it’s like that there, these small American strip malls, just off the highway with boutiques, coffee shops and supermarkets (selling ryvita and quinoa!). People mostly drive or take taxis - crossing wide highways which seemed so at odds with our small Juba streets -  but on my last day we walked around one of the more residential areas, climbing hills with colonial looking apartment buildings and banyan trees rising up out of the earth. At times, it felt a bit like Hong Kong, back in the 80s.

The giraffes were really all I had on my to do list (other than hunt down ryvita). There’s a centre that supports the endangered Rothschild Giraffe. The giraffes have acres of ground to move around in, but are enticed to the viewing platform by food. When I got there, about 11am, “Daisy” was hogging the platform. “Be careful, she headbutts,” one of the guides there told me, just in time for me to flinch away from Daisy’s massive head swing. I offered her a handful of pellets and her ridiculously long grey tongue whipped them from my hand, without so much as a thank you. I moved on to chat to Edgar, who loved having his furry horns stroked. “Edgar is the best kisser,” I was told, and was then enticed to put a pellet in my mouth and see. So now, I’ve been tongued by a giraffe.  

Not everyone can say that.

Jambo, Jambo

So I’m writing this from my beachside bar, in Diani, on the coast of Kenya where I’m supposedly on R&R, but mostly catching up on work reading and thinking through the project. Oh, and drinking wine and listening to the bar's limited play list of Carole King and Marlene Martisson (who I first heard at a jazz festival in Hua Hin), wandering along the white sand beach, stepping over the acres of washed up seaweed and avoiding the many beach boys and their “jambo jambo”,  the Kenyan equivalent of Asia’s “Hello Mister”.   

The two weeks before I came here were occupied by the recruitment workshops for selecting our 10 state producers. There were two candidates came from each of South Sudan’s 10 states: Western, Central and Eastern Equatoria; Northern and Western Bahr el Ghazal; Unity, Upper Nile, Lakes, Warrap and Jonglei. 

While we bought the plane tickets and reimbursed people for their transport, I am amazed at the distances people travelled just to get on those planes, often journeying for hours overland, staying overnight in a mid-way town and then travelling further to the state capital to pick up the flight. One woman came just hours after attending her father’s funeral. One person missed their flight because they forgot to take their ID with them; two missed their flights back as they forgot to print out their permission letters from us; one came down with Malaria and passed out during the workshop, and another decided he’d had enough and left half way through! 

But for the most part, it was success, I think. Mostly, my role involved observing: seeing how people interacted with each other and how they dealt with criticism. And also trouble shooting. For example, when the schools I had made arrangements with for reporters to work out of grew bored with the same questions: “what challenges are there for girls in education here?” I headed back to the schools to sit with headmasters and headmistresses to convince them of the value of their involvement. 

The candidates were a great combination. Some were journalists, some not. Some had never even used Adobe Audition - the editing software used by radio journalists. Some didn’t really know the challenges for girls in school. All progressed during the week.  

BBC Media Action programmes are not journalism per se, but what is called “communication for development”, which means using media/communication to help people attain their rights and live an equitable life. The areas we work in are: health, governance and rights and disaster risk reduction and resilience, and now, girls education. We tackle some of the entrenched attitudes and behaviours that are either unhealthy or exclusionary. 

To get people to change though, you can’t just tell them their attitudes and behaviours are wrong! Who wants to be told their entire belief system is wrong, and that they must change because some well-meaning western organisation thinks it's so?! So, you have to get people to talk about things. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the extent to which people discuss a behaviour is closely correlated to the adoption of that behaviour. People also learn by observing others, observing the consequence of certain behaviours and envisaging the consequences of adopting those actions on their own lives. 

So our programmes are (or will be) a mix of positive role models and voices: girls who stay in school and contribute to their families and communities; fathers who take an interest in ensuring their daughters are well protected at school and teachers who encourage girls to do well in school, rather than harass, ignore or impregnate them.  But it will also include other voices too. For example, what happens to the girl who drops out of school to get married, thinking she will suddenly be an independent woman? And discussion programmes, where people can phone or text in with questions about their own schools.

One of the exercises during the workshop was for each candidate to tell a story about how they changed a behaviour. The point was that a) it’s usually a long process from first recognising that you either want or have to change to actually making the change, and b) we often look to others to either guide us verbally, or by following their actions to help in the change. Few people change in isolation. Funnily enough, it was a class I took during my Masters that introduced me to these ideas of how people learn and change.  

The stories our candidates told were pretty incredible. We heard quite a few about overcoming alcoholism, one about the change from idol worship to Christianity (some might say that that really wasn’t much a behaviour change). Another guy spoke of how in his early 20s he used to “love other men’s ladies” (I am begrudgingly learning to accept the use of the word ‘lady’), and only stopped when he was caught and jailed for three months and his father had to pay 7 cows to the aggrieved husband. One of the women talked about how she had started socialising with men, going against the cultural norm and custom of her state. She explained how this grew out of a desire to advance in her career, and took us through the steps of first watching other women eat lunch with men, and then joining a safe group and now becoming a role model for other women who come from conservative society.

Several talked less about behaviour change than lifestyle change; working in cattle camps as young boys and envying those who went to school and finally, years later (in one case that included a stage in the army) getting to school. Another refused his father's demands to give up school and get married. One woman explained how her father had abandoned her family and that to earn enough money to send her and her brothers to school, her mother used to make alcohol. She learned to accept her father. 

From the 20 we brought down, we will employ 8, but from the emails and texts I have already received from those 20 candidates, I think everyone gained something from it, even if it was just a bit more understanding about the difficulties for girls in school or about their own country. 

One more day in Juba

May 31, the morning after the storm

So it’s the end of my fourth week, and it feels like four months, but in a good way. There is just so much to do to make this project look like the one that was proposed to the donor, and the one they signed off on, and there’s just me doing it. 

I wrote most of this blog a week ago, while I was sitting in a restaurant, waiting for the friend of a friend with whom I was having a working brunch. That’s how we roll here! A short pause, as ever, as there are still a hundred things I need to do to get my project ready. The last few weeks I have spoken to dozens of people to try to understand the context in which we are trying to make this project happen a bit better. I am to broadcast in a local language that is reflective of that state, but there are nearly 60 languages in a country of 10 states and the animosity between tribes means that each decision will be political. I have spent many a happy hour with the head of the Department of National Languages, a government department, listening to the history of how the languages came about. I have spoken to educationalists, to ICT specialists, to the stability and conflict advisors, to gender and child rights experts and to our other partners. 

As ever, finances are always on my mind. Juba is ridiculously expensive. To rent a venue to hold a workshop will cost me £150/day, and that’s before we add on rental of laptops and lunch. The last week, I’ve been organising what we call a recruitment workshop. The response to the advertisement for the 10 state producers was phenomenal, over 130 applications. I whittled the list down, made a final decision on 2 from each state (in consultation with my boss) and then phoned each one to ask them if they would be able to come to Juba for the final stage of the recruitment process. 

The workshop enables us to see what skills the applicants have. Most have already participated in dozens of three-day workshops and training, everything from reporting in conflict situations to first aid to gender-based development and child rights. It’s what development organisations do in the name of capacity building, hold workshops and provide certificates. So almost every applicant sent a multitude of attachments, certificates from every workshop they had ever attended. Some of the mails had to be sent several times, with explanatory notes that the internet in their part of the country was intermittent, or non existent, so they had to rely on dongles, and moving into better mobile coverage. Some sent photographs. One sent a photo of his stomach.

In any case, CVs can tell you only so much about a person, and for this job, we need to know they have the skills, or at least the potential. And that’s where the recruitment workshop really comes into its own, as you can see whether people really can do what they said on their CV they can, how they act under pressure and whether they work well as part of a team.  

So I am bringing 18 people down to Juba, over two weeks. Which means organising their flights, accommodation, and pick ups. Like all good development organisations, ours has strict procurement policies; anything over £1,000 and you need three quotes. So I’d already got one from the venue we usually use, and Henry, the logistics guy and I went off one morning to look at a couple of others. We walk in to the “reception” of the Government Accounting and Training Centre and enquire about renting the venue. I still think that we need to pretend we are thinking about using their venue. We’re directed to the director’s office; but when we look inside, through a glass pane, the man sitting at an empty desk in an empty room seems fast asleep. Henry who is South Sudanese, doesn’t see anything wrong with this picture and walks into the room. “Hello Sir”, he says, and stretches out his arm, as the director shakes himself awake. He grunts at Henry, shakes his hand, and I follow suit, making sure to look him in the eye as we shake hands, and smile. He grins back. Henry, soft spoken Henry, says more direct that I would have the courage to do that we want a written quote. The director grunts, opens a drawer and pulls out a note book and flips it open to a blank page. He doesn’t appear to have a pen, so I  am wondering what he’s going to do with the notebook. “600 pounds (south sudanese that is) a day,” he says. “Do you have a projector?” Henry asks. The director grunts, rubs his nose and opens the drawer again. He shuts it and motions to a sheeted pile in the corner, “You can use that one”. Another man enters the room, the director waves at him. “Get them a written quote. 600 pounds a day.” the director says, then looks at me, smiles, and says, please sit down. Henry and I dutifully sit down on one of the many empty leather chairs around the room. Henry pulls out his mobile phone and starts texting. The director gets up and walks out. Henry and I sit there, for 10 minutes or so. Henry on his phone, me, just soaking up the aircon. Just when we thought they had forgotten about us, the man with the quote returns, hands us the stamped piece of paper and off we go. Hotels next. 

The first hotel is run by Eritreans. The rooms are clean, with fans and a small bathroom. I battle the owner down to 230 pounds with breakfast and dinner, and he gives us a written quote. The next hotel is just a drive down the road, rutted so bad we can’t go more than a couple miles an hour, past small stalls selling tea and food and cigarettes. It’s a  Chinese hotel, the Huaren, and Henry knows the South Sudanese man who is the manager, a short round and smiling guy. They show us one of the self-contained rooms. It’s sweltering inside, and the bathroom is a squat toilet. It feels shabby, although there is a large breezy compound where we sit to haggle with the manager. A South Sudanese woman sits to negotiate with us, her eyes never meeting any one else’s. They are very accommodating, offering us a super deal for 200 pounds for the room, breakfast and dinner. But I’m not convinced. As we sit there, a group of young men, tall, strong, commanding walk in .. they are dressed in tatty t-shirts and long shorts or jeans, and they walk in as if they own the place. They approach our table and say to the manager, “Give me your phone”. He tries to ignore him, there are a few hushed words exchanged, but in the end, the phone is handed over. The group hang around, the Chinese woman in the kitchen is watching them as I am.  The woman talking to us about prices ignores them, continuing to talk about the dinner options in a sort of daze. I have no idea what goes on here, but I tell Henry that I feel more comfortable putting our applicants in the first hotel.  He agrees. 

We head back to the office and I ask Henry to start booking the flights. I have given him a list of the names, their national IDs (although some people are still applying for theirs) and local airports for all the recruits. Because we are using UNHAS, the UN airline, we are bound by their schedules, which means no flights on a weekend. Not only that, but some of the applicants are coming from areas where there are just two flights a week, Tuesday and Thursday. So my neat plan for a Monday to Friday workshop needs some reorganisation. I opt for Tuesday to Saturday; my first thought, Sunday to Thursday, was vetoed due to Sunday being the day everyone goes to church. So Tuesday to Thursday it is, it means I now have to call the trainer and ask if he would be willing to spend one more day in Juba. 

Sounds like the name of a blog; one more day in Juba. 

National Archives

I spent a couple of days last week in the National Archives, a two-storey building on the outskirts of Juba, down a jarring, rutted road and flanked by tea stalls and mechanic workshops. In each of its dozen or so rooms, boxes reach the ceiling, each labeled by state and district and filled with an array of fragile, torn, and tea-stained documents stretching from the 1920s, through independence, to the 1970s. Most of the early files are correspondence between about 20 British administrators who effectively ran the southern half of the Sudan, as it was at known when part of the British empire.

Some of the documentation is dull, letters back and forth about chiefs who have died, and meetings that need to take place. One box was a tattered police log, detailing several interviews with witnesses who saw a car roll backwards into a river, and even included a diagram of the incident. Or correspondence among administrators concerned about the rise of "poisoning" cases. 

But most is gold dust when trying to understand South Sudan today. About four or five of the administrators were keen anthropologists and sociologists and spent a great deal of time trying to understand the culture of the tribes who lived in the country they were administering.

Several wrote lengthy theses detailing the “traditions” of the Nuer and Dinka (the two main tribes in S Sudan), many of which are still in practice today. Bride wealth, where a potential husband must pay a number of cattle for a wife, and ghost marriages, where a woman is married to a dead man and all her subsequent children take the dead man’s name.

However, I put traditions in quotations because there’s a debate over whether it was the very act of documenting these practices that turned them into tradition. Not to mention a push by British colonialist to have tribes standardize their practices to make it easier for a court system to adjudicate.

For example, most “crimes”, or sleights to a family’s honour, were compensated with cattle.  According to BA Lewis, a young, and super enthusiastic administrator in Jonglei State in the 1940s, the Nuer demanded 16 cattle as compensation for a murder; for the fracture of a bone; thigh, arm or leg: 6 cattle; loss of an eye: 4 cattle; getting a girl pregnant: 3 cattle; getting a married woman pregnant: 6 cattle.  But not all tribes valued the same crime with the same number of cattle, and even among the different tribes of the Nuer, the number of cattle varied. And so administrators held several meetings with chiefs and tribal elders (no women present of course) to standardise these practices, and such was their efforts that in 1943, even the Dinka, the dominant tribe in South Sudan, decided to adopt all Nuer tradition. This included handing over all children in a marriage to a husband in a divorce. Up until that time, Dinka women were able to keep their children. This is a hugely charged issued in South Sudan today, as women fear divorce because they do not want to lose their children.  Cattle must also be returned.

One large box was dedicated to the Akobo Girls School, run by the formidable Wilma Kats, who in 1948, at the age of 28, was sent by the Reformed Church in America to Sudan. The documents are dated between 1961 and 1963 and detail her correspondence with the state ministry of education, including a reprimand from the ministry for “forgetting” that female teachers get paid less than male teachers, and several letters arguing for the construction of new dorms for the girls. In one correspondence, she responds to a letter sent to her by a teacher, so incensed by an argument he had had with another teacher, that he threatens to resign his post as religious teacher. Ms Kats responds with diplomacy and tact. “We have heard quite enough on this subject. You will not be resigning. I expect to see you in class on Monday.” In another letter to the state ministry, she asks for a truck to take the children on a picnic.

But the best find: two letters. One from Ms Kats to a Col Deng, commander of the Darfur brigade, scolding him for writing a love letter to a student, and the other, the letter itself, with its childish handwriting exhorting the student to tell him how she feels, and its sign off “my heart looking for  you”.

I can’t find that much about Ms Kats online, except that after Sudan’s independence, she was sent to Ethiopia but returned to the States after a few years, and died in 1980.

What a fascinating story she would have had to tell though.  

Starting with the BBC

This week, I had my first informal, but official meeting about my new job. I haven’t yet signed a contract yet, but decisions need to be made about the project, and so I was called in. It was really the first time someone had sat down and explained, in detail rather than abstract, the design of the project. And I’m excited!

Up until now, the most I’ve known is that it’s about getting girls into school, using radio. I’ve had all sorts of ideas about the ways in which that could happen, mostly based on other Media Action programmes which use a combination of radio dramas, call-in shows and public service announcements to deliver behaviour change messages.  But this, my project, is so much cooler than that!

We will train 10 reporters, 1 from each of South Sudan’s 10 states, and embed them in a school for a couple days a week. Each reporter will follow a couple of students and their families; teachers, members of the PTA (yep, parent-teacher associations are a big thing here) and also families who do not send their girls to school, or girls who have dropped out for what ever reason, and do a weekly documentary. Think The Archers set in a South Sudanese school, or for podcast listeners, This South Sudanese School Life. I will be in charge of recruiting our trainees, working with them to develop story and programme ideas and chasing them to make sure it all gets done on time. I imagine I will be spending a lot of time travelling to visit our schools and to make sure our reporters aren’t using their mates as fake students (not unheard of here).

I have been doing a lot of reading about girls education and schools. From the outside, it appears that the basic challenge is convincing families that it’s worth investing in their daughters’ education, that an educated woman has more value than an uneducated one. In terms of dowry, one girl can be worth between 500 SSP and 5,000 (4SSP =$1), depending on the family, the state, and the education etc.. Usually this payment is made in cattle. 

But it’s not that simple. The average South Sudanese family lives a subsistence life. Daughters and cattle are their only assets.  And school costs money; for uniforms, for shoes, for books and school fees. Many families cannot afford to invest for the long term, and prefer to cash in their investment when it stars to mature (ok, I’ve obviously been thinking about my investments too much).  But the point is, they can get a substantial amount of cattle for a young, uneducated girl, some of which can help to pay for their sons’ marriages.  

There is another aspect that I did not know too much about. School is not a particularly safe place for girls. The journey to school, often sometimes two hours each way, can be dangerous. It’s common for girls to be “carried off”, by men looking to either find a wife, or just have sex. This risk of “early pregnancy”, results in a community-imposed fine on the man who raped the girl, or maybe he will marry her. Once a girl is pregnant, it’s likely she’ll drop out of school.  In discussions with girls in some of the schools, researchers found that while most girls did want to attend school, they also wanted to get married, move out of the family home, and have their own independence and have a family. No difference really from the West then.

Some girls admitted to trading sex for homework help, and some girls started affairs with older men or became prostitutes to earn extra money so they could buy mobile phones and “nice” things.

So, I guess you have to look at it from a family’s perspective.  If we use my investment analogy, we’re often encouraging families to put their most valued asset in a high risk fund with a poor manager (teachers are paid so little, many don’t show up for work, let alone pay attention to learning outcomes or behaviour of school girls).

So as my country manager said to me today. We know education of girls is a good thing, but why is it good for these families? How do we show them that it’s worth sending a girl to school?

Good questions. I think the government should just make it mandatory and fine parents who pull their daughters out of school before the age of 18. But then I’d be out of a job!

Jonglei: From basket weaving to conflict

This is a photo taken by a friend who is in Jonglei, South Sudan’s largest and most remote state, on the border with Ethiopia. I was supposed to be there with her, we had planned to spend a week over Easter together, but UNESCO, in a brilliant display of UN inefficiency, failed to get me on a UN humanitarian flight. Yes UNESCO, a UN agency, was unable to get me on a UN flight!

To be fair they did try, and it is a bureaucratic procedure. To get on the flight you have to be a humanitarian worker, or, you have to have a letter of introduction from an NGO. I am still a consultant, not staff, so I need a letter, but UNESCO’s country director said he was more than happy to write one as I had pitched them the idea of testing our manual (the one I’m writing ) on a women’s group in Akobo, one of the more remote and conflict ridden parts of the state. I had even offered to pay my own airfare. UNHAS, the UN Humanitarian Air Service, may carry NGOs and charities to remote areas, but it is certainly NOT a charity. For a 90- minute flight on an eight-seater plane, you pay US $200 each way. In fact, the airline had threaten to suspend operations in South Sudan if it did not get the funding it needed: US $3.5m a month.  

Other than UNHAS, there are no other airlines, commercial, non-profit or governmental, that fly to Akobo. In the dry season, most locals walk wherever they need to go. In the wet season, they stay home.  With that in mind, I gave UNESCO more than a week’s notice about my trip to Jonglei.  


The first day after the country director directed someone to handle my booking, I heard nothing. Day 2, they were busy filling in the form. Day 3, they had realised it was an outdated form and were trying to get the updated one. I emailed my friend and asked her to send me the form she used, which I forward on to UNESCO. But the project officer is not convinced, and wants to wait for the email from UNHAS. Day 4, they have the right form (and yes, it’s the same one I sent them), but now they can’t find the country director to sign the form. It’s Friday. The flight leaves next Thursday, and the deadline for submission is Tuesday. They promise to get it signed and sent in on Monday. I find myself saying “Well, we can only do what we can do, and if I get on, great, but if not, then we have done our best.” I have no idea where this calm resignation has come from.

Monday arrives, and they still can’t find the director, but at least now they know he’s on a mission. What about his deputy? I ask. Surely there must be someone standing in for him while he’s away. There is, I am told, but no one knows where she is either.

On Tuesday, the day of deadline, they get the form signed, but the person handling my flight booking has a training day. I get a phone call that evening to say they had missed the deadline. “Oh well," I say, "thanks for trying.”  

And that’s why my friend is in Akobo, taking this cool photo and meeting with women and youth groups, and I am sitting here in Juba, moaning on my blog about UN inefficiency.

So the photo: My first thought when she sent it through was I love that woman's hat. The next, was to ask what they were making. The answer: rubbish bins.  The women are creating those baskets to put the town’s waste in, although they seem more for aesthetic reasons than environmental because once they are full, they just dump the contents in a landfill or burn it. What else did miss besides the cool basket weaving? Well, a family of scorpions, two snakes, endless games of gin rummy, and sweltering hot days with no aircon. 

But there's more to Jonglei and Akobo than scorpions and basket weaving. It is the most conflict prone state, with inter-communal fighting between tribes over cattle raiding and a renegade soldier, with backing from Sudan, trying to start a rebellion against the government. But it's more complicated than that. David Yau Yau, the rebel soldier  is a Murle, one of three tribes in Jonglei. He has been stirring up trouble in the state since 2010, when he lost parliamentary elections. The other two tribes are the Luo Nuer and the Dinka. The Dinka are the most populous tribe, and the most powerful. John Garang, who led the rebellion against Khartoum was a Dinka; the current president, Salva Kiir, is a Dinka. But the Nuer are equally strong. During the rebellion against Khartoum, the Nuer initially aligned with Garang, but then split because they objected to Garang's vision of  a united secular Sudan, rather than an independent South Sudan. They eventually reconciled, and the current vice president of South Sudan Riek Machar (who incidentally married a British aid worker in the late 1980s), is a Nuer. 

So there is animosity between all three tribes, and within each tribe, but real hatred towards the Murle. 

In 2011, over 1,000 people were killed in clashes between the Nuer and Murle, and tens of thousands were displaced. In early 2012, it's estimated up to 3,000 civilians were killed, again when Nuer youth marched on the Murle to avenge cattle raids. Almost all of those killed were women and children, as the men were able to run much faster into the bush, according to the UN.  

This year, there have again been clashes after Yau Yau's men attacked a group of South Sudanese soldiers accompanying Nuer cattle herders. All 11/14 soldiers were killed along with 100 civilians. As a result, the government sent more soldiers into Jonglei to wipe out the Murle, with Machar even exhorting his Nuer tribes to dig up their decommissioned weapons. Every few days, we see reports, mostly in the Sudan Tribune or from the UN, of civilians being killed and people being forced to flee their homes because of the fighting.  

Another impact of the conflict is that people cannot look after their crops if they are continuously fleeing the fighting, and with the dry season almost over, and World Food Programme flights unable to land during the rainy season, deaths in conflict may be outnumbered by deaths due to starvation.  

People We Meet

The other night I went out to meet a friend of a friend. The meeting took place at Logali, which, as you may remember, is the hang out for most expats. In his email, the friend of a friend said he would be at Logali at 6:30, but would be skyping “in poor French” with some one in Chad. I could “hover” if I wanted to until he was done.  I chose to stand at the bar with a G&T. They were out of Gordons, did I mind Bombay Sapphire, asked the barman. I said I did not. 

The first part of our conversation was all work-related, mostly his work and my appalling contract with UNESCO. As someone who works within the UN system, he was horrified at the contract I was given. I shrugged it off with a G and T and then a couple of his female friends showed up, so we joined them. We sat outside on a patio, our backs sticking to plastic chairs,  the few ceiling fans failing to cut a breeze through the still air. 

The conversation turned to the other people at Logali. Who was the woman with the long blond dreadlocks? Oh, a VSO volunteer. How did that Lebanese guy with weight-lifter biceps stay in such shape? And oh, here come the refugee camp workers on R&R. Specifically a couple of women who were making a beeline for the Lebanese biceps. There is a big Lebanese crowd here, most of whom are engaged in property: management, construction, sale/rental, and are loosely referred to as the “mafia”.  Not surprisingly, they have the best parties, the best houses with pools and excellent kitchen staff, nabbed from the few decent restaurants here.

I ask one of the women if she knows my landlord, Abbas, also Lebanese. She says yes, but adds that she doesn’t like him. Not surprisingly, really, as Abbas has no love of aesthetics. His sole ambition, he proudly tells me, is to make $5 million. I am supposed to be impressed by this, and also by his incorrigible efforts to convince me to date him, ‘You just need to get to know me better’, he says. I know you well enough, I reply.

Back at the bar, I am enlightened to the different types of relationships that emerge in situations of conflict/disaster. There are, I am told, three main types. There is “emergency sex”; brief, fleeting, adrenaline fuelled and the subject of a book by the same name; there is the “disaster couple”, a slightly more enduring relationship, but which tends to be location specific - refugee camps mainly; and the “contract relationship”, which exists only for the duration of one of the partner’s contracts, most likely between three months to one year. 

At the table next to us, a group of Africans are drinking Jamesons and coke. A bottle sits on the table, and they compete to top up each other's glasses. One turns to chat to one of the women at our table and we learn he is Somali. The guy I came out to meet, an American, turns to him and says, “Oh, I’ll be coming to work in your country.”  The Somali grins, and says, “Then I will kidnap you!” We all laugh, but it’s slightly awkward.

Regardless, with Janis Joplin’s Me and Bobby McGee competing with the loud chatter of a couple dozen expats getting steadily drunker, we fall into a conversation about who is worth what to the Somali pirates. Of the woman who works for the World Bank, he says: “We do not like the World Bank. We would kidnap you. But you are Italian, so your country wouldn’t pay, so we would kill you.”

What about journalists someone asks, are they ok? “Yes,” he says, “journalists are ok”. A whoop goes up round the table on my behalf. “But wait,” he says, almost with an un-pleasant taste in his mouth, “but not if they are the BBC or CNN”.  Boo, says our crowd. 

And then I tell his friend, who has joined us, that I don’t mind being kidnapped, as it would be a great story. He looks at me somewhat confused. “Sure, I  could tell your side of the story,” I say.

“We would let you come with us,” he says, oh so seriously, “on one condition: that you let our government see what you wrote before hand, and if there are any lies, we will kill you.”

I decline the kidnapping trip.