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.