Words, not pictures

I have a favourite place for coffee these days: Le Bistro at the New Sudan hotel. It’s a favourite as much for the fact it has real coffee (not Nescafe served in a tin pot) as for the walk there. Because I cannot show you in photos, I’ll have to try to describe it, a good skill for any writer!

From my apartment I turn right, down the familiar dirt path that runs to Logali House, a three-storey colonial house and garden that is the favourite spot of the expat and certainly journalist crowd. It’s a Sunday morning, so there are not that many people on the path. One woman walks past me. She is dressed in a grey skirt and t-shirt and is balancing a large plastic bucket on her head, but still manages to turn her head to nod at me. “Good Morning,” she sings. Yes, sings! And I mumble ‘morning’ back, my head still a bit clouded by the beers and tequila shots at yet another leaving party the night before.   

There is a huge crater in the path that I step into and climb back out of, enjoying the feeling of using my muscles. I try to do a yoga class a couple of times a week, but it can’t compare to the cardio blasts at the gym back in London, and the endless walking. I feel my muscles are starting to atrophy.

The air smells burnt, and the shaded patches of ash and a small fire burning in the bush testify to the, as yet, unchanged practice of burning plastic bottles and other rubbish. I hear a child laugh and through the bamboo slats of a tightly woven fence, I see a girl, pink t-shirt and underpants, chasing a rooster. Her dad, or a man, sits slouched in a white plastic chair, under a tree, close to a hand water pump. Their house is mud and brick, with a thatched roof, and parked on the compacted dirt path in their yard is a white landcruiser.

I carry along the path to Logali. It’s Sunday, so it will be packed with the weekend brunch crowd. Not my type of thing today. I have been social every night since Wednesday, and am craving a bit of solitude to read a book. The path bends to the left, and I pass three guys washing cars beneath a tree on a field of scrubby grass and discarded rubbish. A few hundred feet away sit two earth diggers. I have no idea if they are ever used. The path now moves through what can only be described, in my mind at least, as a shanty town. There are dozens of shacks, constructed of randomly collected bits of corrugated iron, cardboard, blue plastic sheeting (from UN IDP tents), and woven leaves or bamboo. Some are in better shape, and one even has a fence of tightly woven thatch around it and a papaya tree in the yard. The smallest shacks, nothing more than four bits of corrugated iron leaned together askew, with no roof, are the latrines, one for a dozen of so families. The ground around them is hardened sand and stones, and littered with rubbish; empty water and juice bottles, cans, broken CD covers, plastic bags and often, razor blades. There are few people outside, save a few children, in shorts and t-shirts, slouched in the shade of a tree. It is very hot, and getting hotter. By June, the rainy season will have started and the thunderous, torrential rains will wash many of these homes away. 

I often think as I walk past here that I should be afraid. Poverty breeds crime, does it not? But no one pays me any attention, except the children who shout “hello”, and the boda (motorcycle taxi) drivers who really can’t believe I would rather walk, and sometimes trail me the entire path to make sure I don’t get on another bike. It’s a small path, but it’s also a heavily used one as it connects two main roads and is the most direct path to Logali, so NGO-labelled SUVs are constantly cruising up and down it. Towards the end of the path, it opens up. On one side, a couple of cargo trucks sit loaded up, their tarpaulins pulled tight. Around them, a bunch of kids play football, each kick sending stones and dust flying. A couple of people lean lazily on chest freezers in an open fronted general store. On the other side, are a jumbled swarm of small food and tea stalls, made in the same style as the shacks, with corrugated iron and bits of plastic sheeting, and rasta music pumping out from inside. The boda drivers seem to gather here, slouched on their bikes, smoking and drinking with their sunglasses and baseball caps. One woman, tall and gorgeous as they all are, dressed in a t-shirt, skirt and crocheted cap (yes, this is also quite common) is peeling cucumbers from a plastic bowl. Next to her, a large metal kettle sits on a small brazier of coals. One man calls out to me from a shady den, “Hello Juba, come and have some tea.” I smile, wave and walk on. A woman, again, just gorgeous, wrapped in a billowing brown sarong walks alongside me, and says: “Hello sister, how are you?”  Then she disappears into the maze of shacks. A man, in a brown dusty suit, walks past, six women of various ages trailing behind him. The one immediately behind him, towering over him, is dressed in a brilliant turquoise top, cinched at the waist, and a straight A-line skirt in the same colour. She’s also wearing a white crocheted cap, and carrying a baby, swaddled in a white blanket. Behind her, the women are dressed in various prime colours, fuchsia pink is a favourite, while the woman on the very end is dressed in pink batik.

And then I’m there, at the hotel, ready for a coffee. 

More Recycling

My obsession with the plastic bottles has paid off. 

Last night, at a leaving drinks, I got talking with someone from USAID, an education specialist. I can’t remember what led us from education to plastic, perhaps just my sheer bloody-mindedness,  that, and I had just read that in Afghanistan, USAID was funding recycling plants. We talked about the mountain of plastic bottles, how only a couple of years ago there were just one or two bottling plants, and now there are 10; how on some of his field trips, he has used bottled water to wash, not for fear of contamination, but because there wasn't any water. 

I casually mentioned my new found fact about USAID in Afghanistan (I am nothing if not direct!). Really, he says, and an eyebrow shoots so high it becomes hidden under a mop of curly hair. You should talk to Karen, her husband is working on something about that. 

It was a while before I did speak to Karen, and then a while before we got on to the subject of plastic. We first talked about the small house she shares with her husband on the banks of the Nile, and its secret garden of birds and lizards, and our shared love of buying fabrics from places we have been; India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Vietnam, and having them sit folded neatly in boxes at scattered homes of friends and family. I hear your husband is working on a project to recycle plastic bottles, I say, explaining it is a bit of a pet subject of mine right now. And, so she tells me the story. Of how her husband, an environmental scientist, came to visit her in Juba, last year, and saw the situation with the bottles. He knew that if he stayed, it would have to be something he worked on. And so began the arduous task of trying to get those with money interested in a project that did not involve conflict or peace building or democratic governance; five months of proposal writing, applying for grants, endless meetings. Then, just when it seemed like there was no where left to go, an offer came through: $500,000 from the United Nations Environment Programme and the French Embassy. 

The programme started last year and sees plastic bottles gathered up and sent to a factory where they are chopped into pieces and sent by road to Uganda. PET, the type of plastic used to make the bottles, cannot be melted down and remoulded on its own. It needs to be combined with other types of plastic and some chemical  to break it down. So it goes to Uganda, or it goes to China, where it is used to make fleece.

There are several elements to the programme. Awareness raising in the villages and in Juba, about the  environmental impact of burning plastic, the harm to the water the soil, the health of children. There is a payment for those who do collect them and within that a certain amount of protection for children, who in other countries are often pulled out of school to collect plastic bottles and other recyclables, and protective gear for those who live on and near the landfill and who daily sift through dirty syringes and medical waste to find something to sell, often discarded food, but now  plastic bottles.

Is it working I ask? She shrugs. You should talk to my husband. So hopefully, that’s what I will do next.

Recycle, Recycle, Recycle

Everywhere I look there are plastic bottles. All of them (I would say 99.5%) are empty 600ml water bottles, discarded along with most other trash, on the side of the road.

Sometimes children collect them for their mums to put  homemade mango juice or honey in, but mostly they are just left to be trampled under foot or crushed by car wheels, or nibbled on by a goat, until someone heaps them and other trash into a pile and burns it.

Most of the water comes from the Nile, either here or in Uganda, and is filtered and bottled in South Sudan. It's one of the few items that is not imported, and therefore costs 1 or 2 South Sudanese Pounds (20- 40 cents) a bottle, so everyone (foreigners and locals) drinks dozens of them. It's the only way to ensure the water you are drinking, or using to brush your teeth, is clean. It took me a week or so to get into the habit of cleaning my toothbrush with bottled water, how my hand just desperately wanted to reach out and turn on the tap!

Dirty drinking water is a serious problem in South Sudan. Water-borne illnesses result in half of all hospital admittances and many premature deaths. In one county alone, an NGO found that half of the 238 water sources were contaminated with e-coli bacteria.

So I can understand why people drink bottled water, but I can't imagine why people aren't recycling the bottles. It would not only clear the paths, prevent more toxic gases being released into the environment when they are burnt (after all, South Sudan has signed up to the Montreal Convention to prevent the release of ozone-depleting gases into the environment), but also provide extra income to families who have little beyond a chicken and a goat.

But the problem, as you may have anticipated, is that there are no recycling plants here. Thousands of aid workers gulping a gazillion bottles of water a year, and no one thinks about the environmental impact. Come on, someone out there must want to set up a recycling plant!

From there to here

Wow, not a single blog post in 2012! Well, I guess I was busy, I wrote a 10,000-word dissertation, finished my Masters (with a distinction!), moved back to London to do some work on my flat, and started the process of job hunting, a painful, tortuous process that really should be banned. 

In the four months since I completed my Masters, I applied for countless jobs; from Afghanistan to Kenya to Scotland, with little success. My goal, as many of you know, is to work in development in Africa. But even though I got close on a couple of counts, I was passed over because of the universal Catch 22: I couldn’t get a job in Africa because I didn’t have any Africa experience, but how was I supposed to get the experience if no one gave me the opportunity? 

Luckily, I had picked up some research work and was being paid to write on conflict in Sierra Leone and the Niger Delta. But that was to end in January, and so, with no job on the horizon, I decided a drastic step was necessary. I would go to South Sudan and look for work there. This wasn’t just an impulse decision and a blind pin the tail on a country in Africa. South Sudan became the world’s newest country in 2011 after four decades or so of conflict, it was still severely underdeveloped, conflict was simmering in disputed areas with Sudan, and there were a stream of refugees coming in from the border. Every international NGO and donor agency was in Juba, and ramping-up their funding to support a new democratic government. If I was going to get a job by being in the right place at the right time, it was this place, this time. I also had a couple of friends in Juba, who were willing to make some introductions.  It seemed the perfect plan. Then, a week or so before I was to go, the professor who I was working with on Sierra Leone research became ill, and asked me to go in his place to Freetown to hold a workshop on conflict and youth. They wouldn't pay me for the work, but they would pay my flight and hotel, it seemed an easy choice and one that would flesh out my CV with a bit of Africa experience. I loved it. The workshop was great, and with a day to spare I  hired a driver to take me out into some of the mining areas where there had been violent protests, so I could talk to people about what happened. It was a great way to ease into Africa. 

A week after I got back from Freetown I flew to Juba, with a suitcase packed with shampoo and other toiletries, that I had heard were excessively expensive. I've been here just over a week, and I've moved from my small guesthouse run by super friendly Eritreans to a studio flat, run by Lebanese. The studio, like     everything in Juba, is vastly overpriced. I pay $1,700/month for the flat (a bed, desk and wardrobe), 24-hour electricity (although only 16 hours a day on weekdays) wifi (as long as the electricity is on) and security. The $1,700 price is a super good deal and I had to turn on the charm to battle the landlord down from $2,000. When I asked my landlord why he came to South Sudan, he said: to make money. This country has oil, every country with oil has a lot of money, he said. He and his brother have this compound of flats and a construction company. Their other brothers work in construction in Kinshasa, the DRC, which they tell me is much more European than here. 

Everyone I meet who runs a business here seems to be from somewhere other than South Sudan. The Eritreans and Ethiopians have the restaurant and guesthouse market wrapped up, and I have met Kenyans working as drivers, and in Jit, the western-ized supermarket. But it's not just the oil, of course, it's the aid money. Some of the heads of government agencies drive Hummers. But it's impossible to get parts for them here, so once their shock absorbers are gone, and with these dirt and stone, rutted roads, that doesn't take long, they're abandoned and new ones bought. Land is being snapped up by foreigners and the Juba elite to build fancy apartments and offices for NGOs and donors, while round the corner from my compound, hundreds of people live in shacks, built with pieces of corrugated iron. It's a story that's been told in every country where donors flood in, bubble economies built on overseas aid and inflated aid worker salaries. I'm not sure yet where I fit in. 

It's a crazy place, Juba, so I am told, but I have yet to really see that. So far, I think it's just poor. It doesn't feel edgy, not like Kabul, with its checkpoints, car bombs and lock downs. You can walk around here, although often it's too hot to, and after night, it certainly is not a good idea. I hung out with a few journalists the other night, drinking $25 bottles of wine by the pool at a hotel in the nape of the Jebel mountain range. These journalists buzz around on motorbikes, or 4x4s, and head into the border areas to see the refugees bombed out of their homes by Khartoum, or to the jails, to see the death row inmates two to a single bunk bed. I have managed to pick up some consultancy work, setting up women's groups in the rural areas that will enable to them to talk about issues that affect them - food security, early marriage, domestic abuse. It's a short term, part-time consultancy that barely covers my rent, but one step at a time. 


In the absence of real work, I live in the bubble. I spend $16 to lay by the pool at a hotel where the maids wear uniforms that have come straight from a plantation in Atlanta, and I pay $10 for the internet at the journalists' den where you can get a French Press coffee and a veggie burger. This morning I was sitting in my local cafe having a ridiculously milky coffee (nescafe of course) and I heard a couple of screams. At the time, I was trying to take a photo of a cat (of course), surreptitiously with my ipod as people get anxious when they see cameras, a remnant from a country at war. I ignored the screams (they didn’t sound like “we’re under attack” screams) and turned back to my coffee, and there, to my right, sauntering at arm's length from my table was a primate, a gibbon, I think. It was on all fours, its back the height of the table and was the colour of Ray, my cat. In the seconds it took for my brain to run through the options - slowed by 18 months of domesticity in England - “too big for a cat, dog, fox .. it’s a monkey!”, it had ambled past me and climbed up to sit on a waterfall. I took a photo, confident that no one could fault me for snapping a monkey in a café, and they didn’t. 

Foodwise. Well, everyone said I would probably end up eating meat as I wouldn't be able to get any non-meat protein here. But they didn't know about the omelettes. Omelettes are to Juba what banana pancakes are to South East Asia, every cafe has them in a variety of guises; cheese, mushroom, and the pictured Spanish Omelette, which isn't really Spanish as it doesn't have potatoes, but does have green and red peppers, so while I'm getting my protein and five a day, I may end up with high cholesterol.