a dinner invitation

Adorable little boy in Ezo with a mango.

Tomorrow, I'm going for dinner at a colleagues house. Rather, I'm going for dinner at her grandfather's home. She and her family live about 30 minutes by motorbike from Yambio. Her grandparents and parents live much as their grandparents lived before them. Their houses are tukels (grass-roofed brick and mud huts), they cook over wood or charcoal fires outside, and they eat what they grow-- cassava, greens, maybe some ugali made with maize flower. When I was there last, her grandmother came chasing after me, on the dirt path, with a plastic cup full of small red fruits. They were palm fruits. One can boil them to extract an oil that is used to cook with and flavor greens. I didn't even know that palm trees had fruit before this. I also didn't have the heart to tell her grandmother that I didn't have a clue what to do with the fruits.
There were kids running all over the place; dirty, happy little boys and girls, showing me to how to fetch mango's with a long pole and giggling into their hands when I made faces at them. One little girl, my friends' niece, is about 9 years old. She was born deaf. I've never seen a happier, gigglier little girl. Even though there is no standard system of sign language, her family communicates with her by facial expressions and hand motions. Everyone understands each other perfectly and she is clearly the darling of the family. I asked my friend if she knew why her niece was deaf. She said that the week before this little girl was born; the LRA came and attacked her mother's village. Her mother ran away and then fainted. She was unconscious for two days. A week later the baby was born. My colleague asked me if I thought this was how she had become deaf. I didn't know. I don't know. I hate the LRA.
Eventually, I told them that I had to leave. I can't take public transportation (a guy who will drive me the 1/2 hour back home on the back of his motorbike) after dark. OK, maybe I'm not supposed to take these bodas regardless of the time of day, but how else could I visit these amazing people down windy, red dirt paths, through the bush? As I started to walk away, my colleague, who is a lovely 21 year old, well educated young woman started up the path with me. “Oh! You don’t have to come back to town with me, I can make it.” I said. To which she replied, “ I don’t live here, I live in town. My father doesn’t want us to stay here in the night. The LRA might come. So he sends my two eldest brothers and I to live in town.” So, we went, leaving her grandparents, her father and stepmother, her sister, her niece, and a half dozen other children in their tukels, under their mango tree, tending their fires, waiting.
On our way out she says, “You see that big mango tree over there? I was conceived under that mango tree. And over there, that’s my mother’s house.” Even as I’m grimly thinking about the LRA and those cute kids, I laugh at the easy spontaneity with which she shares these details, I giggle at the absurdity of being conceived under a mango tree… of your family sharing that story. I remember I had a friend in high school, Daniel. When we turned 16, his father handed down a very, very old van to him. After a few weeks of proudly driving that van around, bragging about the shag carpeting, his father nonchalantly mentioned, “Hey, you know, you were conceived in the back of that van…” I remember Daniel’s face as he told us that story the next morning in the high school parking lot. I was smiling to myself at the memory. “My father can’t go there anymore… and if my sister cooks food there, he won’t eat it.” Recalled back to the moment, I looked up at the dilapidated tukel and overgrown area in front of it. She then told me the story about her mother, how she died when my friend was only six. In Zande culture, when someone dear to you dies, you move to a new home- a new compound. Otherwise, that person’s spirit might stay with you, not giving you peace. The mango tree story became more bittersweet the more I thought of it. Everyday, this young woman walks by that spot, she sees the tree where her life began; she sees the house where her mother’s life ended.

This is life here, a series of ups and down, separated by only moments. Visiting a charming family, playing with little kids, eating warm mangos that fell from a tree minutes before.

High.

Conducting a focus group with IDPs in Ezo

Realizing that this paradise can end in a heartbeat with a bloody LRA attack.

Low.

Smiling at an old memory and an even older story with a new friend.

High.

Thinking about the loss of a young girl when her mother dies and a father’s grief.

Low.

Jumping rope with kids in Ezo.

Last Thursday, I conducted an assessment among internally displaced people (IDPs) in Ezo county. As we went house to house asking questions about crops and schools and water and sanitation, I saw kids with distended bellies full of worms. There were mothers who were a decade younger than me with 4 kids hanging onto them, some of them their own; some of them were orphans of the war and the cross-border violence. I saw men, who were once proud farmers reduced to taking charity from foreigners… charity that was soon going to run out. People were drinking water so dirty and smelly that I couldn’t even bathe in it. The Dickensian sight of children in rags and bare feet was depressing as hell. Women told me that their children were afraid to go to school. They were afraid of being attacked on the way, they were afraid of coming home and finding their mothers missing or worse. Children told me stories about seeing dead bodies. They told me stories about amputations, beheadings, torture, abductions. They were terrified. We talked to them about all this. All the while I was praying that I wasn’t making it worse by asking them to dredge up these memories. After we talked, we skipped rope, played silly games, sang some songs, and ate candy together. Little girls braided my hair. Little boys held my hand.
Highs and Lows.

Giving a speech to open a new HIV counseling 

and testing center

I came back to Yambio and saw an article about foreign investment in South Sudan. All I could think of was industrial farms, abusive labor practices, indigenous land rights being taken away by corrupt politicians, blood diamonds, and much more violence.
Another Low.
On Wednesday, I went out with some staff early in the morning to monitor a seed fair. We invited IDPs and farmers to come together. The IDPs were given coupons for seeds. They “paid” farmers with their coupons and farmers cashed the vouchers in for cash at the end of the day. Happy people. Happy farmers. These IDPs had the dignity to choose their own crops, something which traditional aid distributions deny them. They could buy local, familiar seed, preserving the regions biodiversity. They had a day of celebration with their friends and neighbors at the fair. They could look forward to working again, to feeding their families, to being productive. As bad as the IDP settlement in Ezo was, Wednesday helped. 150 families had seed to plant. 30 vendors made their money for the season. We did this. In some, small, small way, I helped do this. 150 people out of 70,000 IDPs. It’s a drop in the bucket, but it felt good.

Another High.

South Sudan is full of highs and lows. I love my work, I love my life, I feel like I’ve found my place. That’s a high. I look around and I see women and children dying needlessly of easily preventable causes. I see the sky falling in Abyei, I see another war coming. That’s a low. I don’t know anymore how to feel. I just know that I wouldn’t rather be anywhere else.