Always screwin up

You know when you make a personal decision on behavior which you know is wrong, you can't really defend and then it creates HUGE amounts of trouble for yourself and those around you?

I hate that.

I was recently given driving privileges and, due to a series of unfortunate decisions on my part, such as being an idiot, the car stayed out of the compound twice over night. Which was my fault. Entirely. So now everyone is, very rightly, angry with me and my driving privileges will no doubt be taken away as well as, possibly, other consequences.

In my defense, I'm just trying to have a normal life. However, there really isn't a defense and I deserve whatever I get.

I HATE that.

Use your words....

I was leaving my friend's place last night when I heard a gunshot. This isn't too unusual, as you know from my rambling on, so I didn't think much of it, I just turned up the BBC and tried desperately to understand what the economist on "Business Hour" was talking about.

Well, about three or four minutes later, just as I'm turning through the huge lake that has formed on the road in Hai Malakal, I get a call. It's my friend, the one I just left. Conversation went something like:

"Are you ok?"
"Yeah, why."
"Someone was just shot in a car, I thought it was you."
"Nope, I'm good."
"Do you want to come back, are you ok?"
"Hell no I'm not coming back, people get shot where you are. I'm going home."
"Well... good point... drive fast."

Which I did, obviously, and, obviously, I'm fine. Turns out an SPLA soldier asked for a ride home and, when the guy in the car said no, the soldier shot him. Which is, always, the perfect answer to a problem, right?

Snared in a web of my own making

It is amazing to me, how the gossip can circulate in the aid world. And I know, I am, without a doubt, the worst offender of this, getting on to Skype and Facebook and sending out priority 1 "OMG did you hear, Yvette in Laos is totally sleeping with Gerald in Tanzania and Raoul in Kabul is furious" types of messages to people in 10 different countries within seconds of receiving any whisper of a rumor.

I have friends who will immediately drop whatever they are doing to tell me some piece of news in an effort to catch me out, to tell me something first. I think that has happened, maybe, twice.

This obsession with the romantic lives of colleagues whom we haven't seen in years, people we barely know and friends of friends is unhealthy and a bit mean-spirited, yes, but it is also understandable. What the heck else will we talk about? We have no lives. Unless I want to have conversations only about LRA movements and Global Fund indicator development, I am pretty much forced to talk about Yvette and her wanton ways.

I am, at the moment, finding myself, very lightly, caught in this web of rumor and giggles and slyly worded e-mails. Which, you wold think, would make me vow never to gossip ever again, now that I am on the sharp end of innuendo and conjecture. Instead, I find myself intrigued, it is like a sociology experiment, trying to figure out what the connections are that lead to the information traveling around the world at such a shocking rate of speed.

Plus, I'd be a hypocrite if I denied people their tittering.

Beer beer beer and more beer

Oh my. 4th of July weekend. Wow.

Yeah.

Juba knows how to celebrate the 4th, let me tell you. I'm going to sleeping for a week.

On Friday there was a large party at a bar in town which, conservatively, everyone on the planet was at. It was loud and raucous and sweaty and there was lots of jumping up on the bar and dancing (not by me, obviously, but by others).

Surreally, there were also two small children running around. They are the son and daughter of a French man and his Sudanese wife and they come to all the social events in town. They are, maybe, like 8 and 5 and there they were, running around, dodging between the gyrating couples on the dance floor and suddenly popping up under your arm at the bar to ask for a water. Everyone kinda keeps an eye out for them and, as far as I can tell, they have a fabulous time.

I again, found myself swept in to the maelstrom that is my ex-mercenary gentlemen and never had to pay for a drink the whole night. Which is a dangerous dangerous thing. Which explains, I suppose, the 2.30 am moment when I found myself linked armed, standing next to the fetid wadi outside the bar, singing The Gambler with a terrifying SPLA secret police officer who was trying to seduce my, very unimpressed, friend.

Good times, good times.

Saturday was relatively uneventful, I left a party at very early o'clock in a rare bid for maturity.

But Sunday, sunday was a complicated mess of social events and beer. Beer by the Nile, watching men in canoes drift around in to rocks and arguing politics (which I have become very bad at, by the way, I need to learn more about this election). Beer in the USAID compound in a house that was air conditioned, had real floors, real carpets, real furniture, real flatscreen tvs and, oddly, real wall sconces and wainscoting. Beer at the River Camp with more political argument. Beer on the veranda of a UN house while I got my tail kicked at Gin Rummy.

Finally, and best, though, beer at the side of the pool which we sneaked in to at midnight, swimming around in the dark drinking Tusker and taking ridiculous pictures as revenge for the US Embassy not letting us in today.

When I say good times, I really do mean it. Good good times.

Yawn... oppression... yawn

I know, I know, not another one. But I am kind of captivated by Zimbabwe at the moment. Apparently, the US Embassy has been putting people in safe houses when they come to the Embassy seeking asylum, but now they are running out of safe houses. This article talks about the woman who's baby's legs were broken in an effort to get her to turn her MDC-supporting husband in.

Now, she and a bunch of others are living in the courtyard of a house, afraid to go anywhere, her husband is underground and both she and her husband have decided he should keep fighting the good fight.

I swear, I get shivers and teary-eyed just thinking about it. Though, to be fair, I am a bit over-emotional these days.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/144521/page/1

Sexual assault is a laugh riot

Can everyone read what this says? It says "Anti-Abortion! But Pro-Date Rape"

This, I might add, is for sale on Amazon.com.

Now, I have always prided myself on being both a girl who's made a career out of fighting gender based violence and a girl who does not think the term "chairperson" needs to be used or that jokes where the punchline involves sexual innuendo are inherently bad. I hate it when humor gets limited by political correctness and trying to not to offend anyone, ever, in the history of the world.

But really, is this funny at ALL?

In Yei, right now, we are having this issue. The commissioner issued a decree that women can not dress "indecently" (whatever that means) and any man who is offended by what a woman is wearing can "take action."

What this means is we now have scores of women getting beaten, having their clothes actually ripped OFF them in public, reportedly one woman was made to sweep the central square in town in her knickers as punishment, all in order to preserve public dignity.

Because there isn't actually a law in place, or anything which defines what indecent is, we can't really fight against any of the cases. So women in Yei are left not knowing what will set off the hordes of drunk men and soldiers and men have carte blanche to assault whatever woman they think it would be fun to see half naked or it would be fun to beat.

So yeah, not so entertained by the shirt.

I got sunshine

And one more thing. There has been talk to me, again, that I am sounding down on the blog.

I can categorically say that, right now, I am NOT down. I got my driver's license, I'm allowed to drive and I have a fun car. I just got one of my projects funded again for another year almost exclusively through flirting and begging (depending on who was on the other end). I'm getting to do a strategic plan, which I've wanted to do for ages and ages. The weather isn't too bad. Social life is looking up. I might be getting a cat to deal with the rat situation. And, to top it all off, I slept for almost 6 hours last night, the longest I've slept in about three or four weeks.

Seriously. This moment, I am the happiest girl in my immediate GPS coordinates. I promise.

Modern day Australia

You want to know something really really odd? China offers prisoners a deal where they can come here to Sudan, work as laborers, and they get time taken off their sentence. Seriously, there all these Chinese guys in blue pajamas and conical straw hats wandering the streets of Juba sawing things and sweeping and such in front of Chinese construction projects.

Now let's think about this for a second. Sudan is stuffed to the GILLS with men and women who are unemployed, who know the materials, who will work for nothing and who don't need to be housed and fed.

And yet China is paying to ship all these guys over, provide some level of accommodation and, one would assume, food they find at least a bit palatable. Which, I would assume, ain't cheap.

Funniest thing, though? There aren't any guards. I mean, seriously, where are they gonna run to?

B Team Dictator making a strong push for elevation to the majors

God, I'm sorry, ONE more, I just read this and it was FASCINATING.

I'm 100% sure I have no earthly idea where this country is and I certainly had no idea how bad it was.

And I'm the one who is supposed to know these things.

Anyway, very good article about Obiang, the despotic ruler of Equatorial Guinea.

Swear to god, it is a real country.

http://www.slate.com/id/2193870/

I would've been gone

I know I'm posting a lot of news stories right now, but there's a lot of news that catches my fancy these days. This current one:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/144093

has a pretty sad picture attached. It is about a white Zimbabwean farmer who was attacked and brutally beaten, along with his mother and father-in-law, for filing a complaint against seizure of their land and writing a letter to some news outlet about the intimidation of his black MDC supporting farm workers by ZANU-PF thugs. His wife managed to escape with their young children, one of whom had a broken leg from a previous attack on their home but the mother and father-in-law are not well after being beaten for hours and threatened with death.

And he's going to go back.

Nothing will happen to Mugabe. He's happily sitting in Cairo right now attending an AU summit. Sure, other African leaders didn't come to his inauguration, but South Africa won't step in and nobody else will really get involved. And, anyway, what would they do? Occupy?

We are watching the disintegration of once extremely successful nation in slow motion and not able to stop it. And, honestly, I am not blaming anyone, I don't have a solution, short of having someone plant explosives in his cigar.

On a related but different note, I have a friend who is part Zimbabwean and she and I once had a very interesting conversation where she supported the taking of the farms from the whites. She felt that it was the only way to right the wrongs of Rhodesia. Now, I argued that yes, there did need to be land redistribution, but this was insanity and party politics and, anyway, didn't those white Zimbabweans have any rights?

To which she said no. Whites in Africa don't have rights, they are all interlopers and should leave. Even South African whites, who have been in South Africa as long as white Americans have been in America are not truly African and do nothing but keep black Africans down.

I was totally shocked, but I wonder how prevalent a sentiment that is on the continent. And I can't decide who's racist, me for thinking she's wrong or her for painting all whites with the same brush. Probably both.