Sudan is no longer dusty...

Today it started raining in my office... OK, maybe it started raining outside first, but within a few minutes, the water was trickling down my neck and onto my keyboard. I moved my desk, I moved my chair, I moved my computer... but when the water is coming through the wall and splashing upwards, and when it comes sideways through the window, and when it inexplicably rains diagonally through the doorway, there's not much to be done.

I thought that the advantage of having an office that was once a shipping container would be that it was water tight... apparently this is not the case.

I just went outside and checked the rain gauge (betcha didn't know that part of my job was to collect rainfall data) it has rained, with no warning, 35mm in the last hour. That's about 1.3 inches. As a point of comparison, this past December a rainfall record was set for LAX. It rained 1.6 inches in 24 hours. 

I should also note that this is not yet the rainy season.

Speaking of my office...

I wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong idea, this is no "Mad Men-esque" spacious executive suite with a gleaming mahogany desk, floor-to-ceiling windows and a wet bar in the corner. Firstly, my wet bar is in my bedroom closet, and consists of a bottle of martini bought at the duty free and some tiny airplane sized bottles of gin. Secondly, my office was, as aforementioned, a shipping container, cemented to a concrete cube, cemented to another shipping container. This 15x20space is shared by 4 of us-- our office administrator, the radio operator, the chief mechanic and I.  This means that there is a continuous stream of vendors, employees, beneficiaries, security guards, drivers and men smelling vaguely of motor oil using the corner of my desk as a place to fill in paperwork and perch while waiting their turn with admin. There is also a cacophonous squawking from the radio of drivers reporting their locations throughout the day. Adding to the hustle and bustle is that fact that as this “building” isn’t attached to the main office, the internet signal isn’t really strong enough to send and receive emails, so every 90 minutes or so, my laptop and I make the trek across the compound the perch on someone else’s desk so that I can “replicate”. (The term for sending and receiving emails that our email client uses)

As you can imagine, it is sometimes difficult to concentrate. Which means, that in the evening when the radio is silent and everyone has gone home, I often sit in the office to get some more work done… when my evening-time officemates join me-- mosquitoes and bats.

Signing off for the day from my leaky, noisy, distracting and vector-filled work space.