We’ve been going four days of this workshop here in Mundri, and things are progressing well – I’ve been learning a lot about development planning and the local concerns of the people as well as having fun being secretary, token white-guy and minute-taker extraordinaire – its nice being asked to correct spelling and give the precise definition of English terms that they want to use in their plans.
The computer issue is also progressing slowly – there is a chap from Lambeth Palace visiting Khartoum next week who might be able to carry a new laptop out here for me if I manage to order on online in time and have it sent to him in England. However, I’m still not sure whether the insurance will cover it, though Charlie says there is some French IT wiz in Juba who will almost certainly be able to extract the hard disc, so hopefully I won’t lose all my Oxford work, photos, music, etc. Thank goodness we’ve been able to go to the MRDA office for internet otherwise I would have been totally screwed! Each day we’ve driven out there to spend about half an hour online, and it’s been great to receive news from Oxford, Newcastle and Port Moresby already!
The compound we’re on here is small, meager in its facilities, but perfectly livable in after some of the Kokoda Trail experiences! Each of the four huts sleeps two, the Bishop’s hut having a purple curtain over the door, and there is a toilet block with a sit-down pit loo and bucket shower room. The centre piece is the “tukul” or “paiyot” – a round meeting hut with mud walls, thatched roof and fly-wired open windows, very like a hauswin in PNG, though this even has solar powered lighting for the evening! Each day we’ve been meeting here for sessions led by Wilson Kamani, the head of the Sudan Development and Relief Agency (SUDRA) – the ECS’s development wing. The diocesan delegates then split into groups and go and discuss their various issues and ideas before coming back together to share their plans and finalize the wording, which can take hours!
After the laptop incident I thought things couldn’t get much worse, but I was wrong. Whereas at in Oxford one talks of “Freshers’ Flu” at the start of Michaelmas Term, here one seems to get “Freshers’ Diarrhoea” as your stomach adjusts to the food – or at least I got it very badly for 24 hours on Wednesday and Thursday. Having left my anti-diarrhoea tablets in juba after trying to pack for 10 days away in 10 minutes I was up in the night a total of 10 times to go to the loo and did not sleep at all whilst feeling very sick. On Thursday though everyone was very kind and took care of me as best they could, Bishop Bismarck (what a cool name!) even sending a boy to the pharmacy to get me some tablets! That said, all the hospitality here has been exemplary despite the (by western standards) meager resources, and we’ve been treated to bottled coke/sprite/fanta/marinda at lunch and dinner, been cooked for and provided with constant tea (or sugar water as it is here in Sudan!) and even given wild honey in the comb on Wednesday evening.
So it’s going OK despite the early setbacks. The bombshell though: I’ve been told I’m preaching on Sunday in their English service…!
I’ve just discovered that my laptop is broken thanks to sitting in the back of the ECS hilux between Juba and Mundri over the weekend 13th-14th October – great! The insurance better pay out, and even if it does it seems like it means no CDs, DVDs or all my hard disc info until a new one can be procured from Britain, so I’m feeling pretty lonely right now and decided to start the first of these newsletters on paper while I had the time.
The trip out here was eventful to say the least. I was meant to fly all day on Monday 8th October Gatwick-Brussels-Nairobi-Entebbe (Uganda), overnight in Entebbe, obtain my Southern Sudan visa and Eagle Air ticket to Juba (Southern Sudan) from the ECS’s “man in Kampala”, Fr. John Malesh at the airport and then fly to Juba on the Tuesday morning – somehow I thought that the pace of African bureaucracy wouldn’t allow it to go quite as smoothly as all that, but it was actually the Belgians who screwed up first. A 40 minute delay at Gatwick resulted in Brussels Airlines preventing me from boarding the Brussels flight on the premise that I’d miss my connection to Nairobi due to the delay, so having gone back through security the wrong way I had to wait for a couple of hours whilst they booked me on an 8pm Kenya Airways flight to Nairobi out of Heathrow, which of course resulted it having to change airports and a whole day wasted hanging around Heathrow.
So I finally arrived at Entebbe from Nairobi at 9.40am Tuesday morning having missed the flight to Juba I was supposed to be on. Benon, a chap from the Kampala ECS Office picked me up and drove me into Kampala to John Malesh’s house, where he couldn’t have been kinder and more welcoming. However, that day – 9th October – was Uganda’s 45th Independence Day, so the Government of Southern Sudan (GOSS) visa office in Kampala was shut, resulting in another day’s wait for my visa, which I obtained on Wednesday morning after the Wednesday Juba flight had departed! Going round to the Eagle Air office I was told the Thursday Juba flight was now fully booked, so I would have to wait until Friday morning to fly – so I actually spent three unplanned days in Kampala in the end, during which I was treated to drives around the city, use of the internet in the ECS office, a visit to a school and dinner on the Thursday night at “Ethiopian Village”, Kampala’s Ethiopian restaurant. The food was a sort of Bolognese served in an edible wrap which one tore up and wrapped around some meat to form a tortilla-esque tube which you ate. This was washed down with beer and strong coffee to finish, the latter being accompanied by a pot of incense which was placed on the ground before coffee was served.
On Friday 12th October I finally managed to board a Jurassic Park-style Eagle Air Beechcraft 1900 flying to Juba, having had to pay US$60 excess baggage but managing to get through security with a Swiss-army knife, scissors and several razor blades in my hand luggage (I love Africa at moments like this!). After a horrendous landing in Juba at around 1pm beginning with circling right over the town at around 500 feet and culminating in a two-wheeler down the runway, I was met by Charlie Goldsmith in the most relaxed arrivals hall I’ve ever visited – no security, no customs, and just one bored policeman stamping visas – and told that he was departing for Khartoum in three hours! This prompted a whistle-stop tour of Juba with a quick stop over at my new house to dump my luggage, during which time Charlie attempted to explain everything that I’d be doing in the next fortnight as well as a pot history of ECS development projects in under an hour. It all went straight in one ear and out the other, so that by the time Charlie had left, I had met the Provincial Secretary Canon Enock Tombe and Development Coordinator Wilson Kamani and had been dumped at the World Relief Programme office in order to obtain a refund for the printer cartridges I had been instructed to convey from Britain, I had forgotten where Charlie had said to go next! Fortunately the WRP knew – the Joint Donor Programme centre – and even gave me a lift round there, where I was to meet American development worker Miranda and British Government Department for International Development (DFID) chap Richard, both friends of Charlie, who looked after me well. Food was eaten, Carlsberg was drunk, The New Statesman was read in Richard’s air-conditioned lounge, and email was checked in the Joint Donor Programme’s air-conditioned offices, before Richard took me to dinner at an Indian restaurant by the Nile at around 7.30pm followed by G&Ts at the Mango Club, also on the river, me feeling like Pierce Brosnan in The Tailor of Panama!
At 7.40am on Saturday I was summoned during shaving by our driver who had come round to pick me up for me trip with Enock and Wilson to Mundri in Western Equatoria State (115 miles NW of Juba) to conduct an Inter-Diocesan Strategic Planning Workshop for development projects in Mundri and Lui Dioceses for 2008-2013. I had to pack very quickly before we picked up Enock at Juba Cathedral compound and set off from Juba heading SW towards Yei at 9am – stopping on the road for landmines to be cleared ahead of us! The roads are appalling – mud tracks full of potholes churned up by huge lorries bringing goods from Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – so it took us until 4pm to reach Yei. This was only halfway, as we had to go this long way round due to the lack of a bridge to go on the direct road, so by around 8pm we were still nowhere near Mundri and stopped at a guest house for the night – an individual mud hut each, pit loos and a small “café” where a dinner of buffalo and “ugali” (mashed yams – i.e. the basic stoge in these parts) was obtained.
At 2pm on Sunday 14th we finally arrived in Mundri to find the service in the cathedral still in progress – four hour services being common apparently – and we all had to give a short introductory speech at the end of it before we were shown to the compound where we’d be spending the next ten days and began that age-old African pastime of sitting around outside trying to decide what to do next! I would be sharing a hut with Canon Enock, and the bucket wash in the evening felt fantastic after 48 sweaty hours on the road – albeit entailing standing outside wearing nothing but a stiff upper lip with a plastic washing up bowl of water, a cup to throw it over yourself and only a few panels of corrugated iron preserving one’s decency!
On Monday we were able to visit the Mundri Relief and Development Agency’s (MRDA) HQ to use the internet as well as getting an excellent presentation by the director of all the work they’re doing in the community at Mundri – educational, health and financial. After returning to the Bishop’s compound we learned that the Lui delegation still hadn’t shown up, so we would have to wait until Tuesday to start the workshop proper. It was in the time spent waiting around that I thought I would begin to write a first newsletter and discovered my computer had been smashed en route, which gets me back to where I started, so that concludes the first issue.