Pained ramblings

First of all, Owwwwwwwwwwwwww. The infection has apparently spread from my eye down my face, so the whole right side of my face is swollen and everything, breathing, walking, blinking, thinking too hard, is like getting punched in the face.

Since discussing this is both self-pitying and boring, I'll direct you all to an article in the New York Times on expats in Liberia. I'm a bit conflicted with this thing. Basically, it is some reporter who no doubt has a lovely little loft in Brooklyn coming out to Monrovia and seeing all the sushi joints, all the swimming pools, all the casinos and then saying that aid workers are wasting the resources meant for poverty stricken Liberians on frivolous resources.

Now, when I was living in Liberia, I was the first to say that the Sushi joints and the pools and the parties were a bit excessive, bacchanalian even, at times. However, you know what, they were certainly no more excessive than what is going on every weekend in every city in Europe and the States and considerably less decadent than life in, say, New York or London. Considerably, considerably less.

Now, this reporter was all worked up, I imagine, because he wants to believe that every aid worker is a saint who never does anything but ponder the inequalities of the developing world and hand out scoops of bulgar wheat. Instead, he shows up and discovers a life just as messy and frivolous and meaningless as anything in the real world. Only set against a backdrop that people in the real world can pretend doesn't exist and we are forced to acknowledge every time we want to go out and buy some cigarettes.

I mean, he makes it out like the money which we were using to go to the casinos would otherwise be used to feed a small child, only we heartlessly diverted it in to bottles of wine and surfboards.

We are doing what every other young, silly, single person who can afford to does. We are spending way too much money on booze and way too much time on attracting the opposite sex. We just wear more khaki than the rest of them and trousers with more pockets.

So could everyone PLEASE stop being bloody well shocked that humanitarians are just as beset by human frailty as everyone else.

And could someone send me some very very strong drugs before I cut my own head off?

Why you all wish you were me right now

It is actually looking MUCH better:

The mange

Last night, I was in bed, all exhausted, ready to go to sleep and my eye, which has been giving me trouble, started hurting and itching like crazy. Really really hurting. I lay in bed for about two hours, trying not to touch it until I couldn't stand it any more. I went and got a warm compress and sat there for another two hours trying to get the pain and itching down. Still nothing.

At this point, it is around 4 am and I decided it might be good to get a change of scenery, I went out and put the television on, ended up watching The Last King of Scotland until 6.30 in the morning. My eye was still killing me, but I was so exhausted I fell in to a fitful sleep from 6.30 until 8.00.

However, when I woke up at 8.00 in the morning I had somehow, in those two hours, turned in to some sort of a character in a horror story. My eye was swollen to the size of a ping pong ball and, obviously, swollen shut, leaking some sort of pus-like substance out of the side and it felt like someone was stabbing me with a pencil in the tear duct every few seconds.

I walked out in to the office where everyone went "YICK" and started inching away from me. Obviously, then this was a case for the clinic. I walked down to a place near us run by some Lebanese, I think, and the nurse, comfortingly, said "Ewwwww, that's gross" instead of hello.

Apparently I have some sort of an infection and am now on an interesting cocktail of drugs and drops. The swelling has gone down to the point that I can now open the eye but believe me, I am even less likely to win a beauty contest now than usual. I got through all the customs searches at the airport like a breeze, though, I don't think any of the inspectors wanted to touch me.

Pied pipering

I was out for a jog this evening and, since the main roads are congested, I was jogging in the settlements behind my house. It is actually a lovely run, right on the edge of town, the green flats all lovely and ladies at the water pumps calling out "Good morning good morning" to me (it was 6.30 but it is always good morning in Sudan for some reason) and, ya know, it was all very lovely.

Then this young guy wobbles past me on a bike, so drunk I could actually see the alcohol waves emanating from his body. As I went past him he literally jumped off his bike while it was still moving, in retrospect a pretty smooth move for a man at his level of intoxication, and he started jogging behind me, mumbling to himself. The sun was behind us so I could see his shadow, every move I made he mimicked. If I ran left, he ran left, if I jumped up a bit to get over a puddle he jumped up a bit to get over the puddle, even if it actually landed him in the puddle since he was about five feet behind me.

I wasn't that nervous, I was in a crowded area and I knew if he tried to grab at me someone would help, so I just started doing lots weird zigs and zags to see if he'd follow, which he did. Everyone we ran past thought this was hysterical; girl in bright pink track bottoms and sunglasses and deee-runk Sudanese kid having a sort of Forest Gump moment on the back streets of Juba. Soon, every child I ran past began to join in. By the time I hit the main road I had a train of about eight or nine people following me, mimicking my every move and I'm doing, like, Riverdance kicks every third step just to get them to copy me.

By the time we hit the road we'd run about a mile and I think my alcohol loving friend was feeling the pace, god knows I could smell the booze coming off in his sweat to the point I was getting loopy from the fumes and he stopped, forcing all the kids behind him to stop as well.

I ran off down the main dirt road, waving to my fan club and getting screams of encouragement and "Good morning" from all of them as they turned to go home. I swear, you can't make this stuff up.

Don't be a Mauritanian lady

In Mauritania, under article 307 of the law, it is said that it is not possible for a woman to get pregnant if she is raped and so, therefore, all pregnancies must have been the result of consensual sex.

I mean, really, WHERE does something like this come from? What cracked out, male religious leader took his vast knowledge of biology and decided this was worth enshrining in law?

I used to hear strange arguments like this a lot in Liberia and Darfur. I remember once screaming at a police commissioner, in the middle of a large public meeting, because he had told me in no uncertain terms that it was impossible to rape a young girl because all young girls inherently wanted sex all the time and therefore it was always voluntary. I think I actually may have said, in a ladylike and diplomatic way, that he should learn to be a real man and (I shudder at this now) "keep it in his pants."

I know I said I wasn't going to post until I could say something nice and blah blah blah, but I was just watching a BBC report about this and it got me all het up.

Missonaries, Mercenaries and Maniacs

A combination of factors have led to the relatively low posting rate lately.

1. I am in Juba where the stories tend much more towards the "...and then I sat at my computer and planned a meeting" type. Super exciting.
2. I am in an extremely foul mood which has lasted for about a week now and apparently is rather evident from what I've been writing.

I was having a debrief session with a colleague I supervise the other day, another expatriate, and she was pretty stressed and pretty unhappy and one of the things that was bothering her was that she was "afraid she might turn in to" me.

It wasn't said with malice or anything like that, she is just an extremely idealistic (in a good way) person and was afraid of sinking in to the morass of cynicism I seem to swim around in. The conversation basically was about whether she should get out of conflict-style countries and go back to your more long-term development settings, where people tend to be less bitter, have more normal lives and not scare others in to new career paths.

Now, obviously, when you have become someone else's example of what not to become, something has gone wrong. And, until I can write without sliding in snarky, bitter little bon mots (or, not so bon mots, as it were), I'm keeping schtum.

How's this for a little Oprah moment on The Thirsty Palmetto!

Evil spirits, clearly

There is a big SPLA conference going on here, as I mentioned, and it makes for some interesting characters in town.

Yesterday, I was at this conference center (quick aside, erase from your mind right now all images of buildings and power point screens and laser pointers, replace that with a group of thatch, low walled gazebo looking things next to the Nile, add flies) where, apparently, a lot of the guys were hanging out.

We're there, in small groups, having a discussion about expansion of primary health care in a situation where there aren't enough trained clinical staff when I see this really really tall dude in a suit made for a man about 100 lbs heavier and about 5 inches shorter walking up from the river. At first, I just noticed him because of the suit, it was funny looking, I like funny looking people, I stared.

Then I noticed his walking was a wee erratic. THEN I noticed it wasn't just a wee erratic, he was weaving back and forth to the point that it was difficult to tell what direction he was going and because he was so tall and his legs so long, his body was weaving independently - his legs would be weaving due east while his torso would be weaving south-southwest and his head was just lolling in every direction.

He managed, by some miracle, to make it to the bar (of COURSE there was a bar, this is South Sudan, I think the churches may have bars). He was, maybe, five feet away when he yelled quite aggressively and started to put his hand up to signal the bar guy he wanted a (or, more appropriately, another) beer. This sudden movement totally threw off his drunkards equilibrium and he pitched forward, slamming in to the bar top and crumpling in a bad-suit-wearing-drooling heap on the floor. Everyone didn't even blink, they just went about their business, stepping over the nice drunken giant on the floor.

This, by the way, was 11.30 in the morning.

Tsunami redux

I logged on to my organizations website today to try and find an address for something and I see we are raising money to support all of our activities for the poor starving people of Burma.

We don't work in Burma.

Juba by night - the joy and the pain

Man, something aboslutely disgusting has just had a major hatching in Juba, they are, like, big flying brown maggots and they are EVERYWHERE in my office at the moment. I'm literally bobbing and weaving as I type this.

God I love nature.

Anyway, tonight, I was coming home from a meeting down by the Nile at around 9pm. Now, as I think I've mentioned about 1,000 times, vehicles are not our strong suit and so I was on a boda boda, the local motorbike taxis. My driver was, at a conservative estimate, 8 years old and not 100% clear on how to drive a bike. He also kept taking "short cuts" through little back streets which were so rutted that I felt like one of Charlie's Angels in that dirt bike scene from the second movie.

However, once I got over the shock of being driven around by an infant, it was lovely. The moon is full right now and the streets of Juba are really quiet because the SPLA (the Sudanese People's Liberation Army) is in town for a conference or something. We were cruising down these little back alleys, me and my baby driver, between the wee huts, no light except the moon and the torch mounted on the front of his bike, lots of quiet conversations behind thatch fences and smoky fires.

Ow, a flying brown magot just banged in to my eye. I'm going to bed!

Beware when the so called sagely men come limping in to sight

The area outside the gate for the Uganda flight in the Amsterdam airport was awash in people in coordinated t-shirts, always a sure sign the church groups were on the march. Sure enough, group #1 was "His Holy Hands" (picture of a halo over the African continent) and they were building a school. Group #2 was "Hope and Peace Ministries" (rising sun over the African continent) and they sponsored kids in villages and were going to visit them, group #3 was "Saviors of something or another" (big handshake across the African continent) and they were, well, I'm not sure what they were doing, but they all had thick East London accents and tattoos.

There were more. These were just the ones which came up and told me what they were doing. And believe me, they all will come up and tell you what they're doing if you make any sort of eye contact at all. Even passing glances.

I never really had contact with the missionary types or the summer "goin' to africa to save me some babies" crowd before. They weren't in my part of India, they hadn't made it to Liberia and they sure as hell weren't in Darfur, so my only previous contact with them was in the Kampala and Nairobi airports, where I would quietly judge them.

I can't help it. I know I shouldn't and I'm just being a horrible horrible snob and, given how ineffectual I feel much of the work we big, well funded, experienced NGOs do, I'm not even sure where I get off, but I just object SO strongly to these types of people. The ones that come out to Africa once a year to shower money on some village and will talk your ear off about how grateful everyone is and how it changed their lives seeing that little girl hold her first ever toy or whatever.

See, I'm just nasty about it. I even kinda shocked a guy on the flight from Yei to Juba today. He started talking to me and it turned out he ran orphanages, which is one of my pet peeves, I hate them. Anyway, he was telling me about how they had this one little girl who was so smart and lovely and all and her mom (MOM people) came for her and he said no because he couldn't guarantee she'd get the same level of schooling in her home village. I told him I thought that was a bit paternalistic and I wasn't sure he had the right, morally or legally, to keep a girl from her family nor did I think the whole idea of a orphanage where the kids had living parents was particularly sensible.

He looked like I hit him. I'm sure he's never gotten anything but hugs, teary eyes and canonization from anyone for his work before.

I'm going to hell. Immediately. And I deserve it.