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.