Sunday, November 29, 2009

The GEE Residence

The residence was completed at the end of September at which point I happily moved out of communal compound living.The move wasn't without its discomforts, however. For the first 4 weeks we had major problems with power - the generator broke and the city power which had just arrived to our part of town was off and on, mostly off. I threw out so much spoiled food in the first 2 weeks that I gave up grocery shopping for next next few weeks, instead dropping a load of cash (meals in Juba cost easily $20 - 40 per meal) at nearby restaurants. I also had some challenges with the water - it took a bit to get a system down for when city water would arrive, when to open the valves, when to pump water from the lower tank (connected to the city water) through the filter and into the upper tank (which feeds into the house). There was also the issue of the guards. One night I came home and couldn't get beyond the front gate because the guard wasn't responding. Fortunately the security hotline was quick to respond and deal with the guard who was actually drunk on the job. Now the guard thing is sorted, though my favorite guard has malaria and yellow fever and hasn't been at work for weeks! There was also the problem of the locks. Sudanese locks are pretty low quality - they will just decide to freeze up on you and there is no getting in. The residence has 2 exterior doors and one door has had the locks freeze twice and the other froze once. There was one evening I couldn't get into the house because both doors had frozen locks. It was dark out, and the city power and generator were both not working. I called a colleague who ended up climbing through my window which, fortunately, I had forgotten to close in the morning while trying to dress in the semi-darkness. Now the locks are sorted out...we have padlocks and they work great! The final challenge was the Internet which wasn't working (part of the reason why my blog is so far behind!) But it seems to be working, unless there is sever thunderstorm, as does the satellite TV. Here is a photo of our livingroom. The furniture is very comfortable, though outrageously expensive (about twice what we should have paid. Welcome to the Juba economy!) But it was either that or plastic chairs and I decided to be high maintenance after going for a month with nothing to sit on. I lost out on the cute throw pillows (maybe I can get some in Nairobi). You may notice a gawdy pink foam pillow - you'll see a close up in a subsequent post - that's the closest I've gotten so far to my "splash of color."


Here is my housemate and our dinning area. We inherited the cheap pink plates, which will be replaced as soon as one of us gets to Nairobi again. . Here is my room. My only complaint is that the bedposts lean because the carpenters were in too great of a rush to put the bed together and didn't let the wood dry properly. They still hold up the mosquito net so I shouldn't complain too much. It's just hard to see things *almost* done well

 Finally, here is my bathroom. Notice the missing shower curtain...the Sudanese don't seem to do shower curtains.

Church in Juba


On November 29, 2009 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints organized its first branch in Sudan. The Juba Branch will be led by President Charles Lott, with Brother Levi as First Counselor and Brother Ismael as clerk. Other positions will be filled over the course of the next few weeks/months. Above is a picture of the members and friends of the church in attendance.  Below are a few pictures of previous church group meetings.


Thursday, November 26, 2009

Thanksgiving

Most of the staff are traveling this week and next, but those in Juba were invited to their first Thanksgiving feast. In order to ensure they enjoyed the holiday meal, I asked the cook to make Sudanese food. It didn't seem fair to torture them with unknown things like turkey, cranberries, stuffing, and pumpkin pie...not that ANY of those things were available. DRAT! Thanksgiving dinner is my favorite meal of all times and I missed it!
To my delight(?) the menu included kisra (spongy flatbread made of fermented sorghum batter, much like injera, for those of you familiar with Ethiopian food) and okra soup, which, for lack of a better analogy, is the look and consistency of snot. The kisra is the crepe looking item in the food picture. I unfortunately didn't think to remove the covers before taking a photo!
Here are some pictures of the staff enjoying the food. I was kind and didn't make anyone dress up like a pilgrim, indian, or turkey. One staff member insisted that we pray, since this holiday was to give thanks to God for our blessings. So I was voted to say the blessing.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Fletcher Alumns in Juba

As follow up to a previous post where I mentioned how interesting people are always popping up in Sudan, here is a photo of me with a fellow Fletcher alumn who works for the US Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance based out of Europe/Khartoum. We got linked up through the Flether Women's Network, met for dinner, et voila! a new link forged in the Fletcher network (mafia).


 Not quite sure about the UFO in the background...

Saturday, November 21, 2009

The Sky is Falling!

                           
Here is a photo of some of the staff of my project, the Gender Equity through Education (GEE) Program in front of the GEE office. (No, I don't wear that same shirt everyday!)


And then here are some photos from the staff work plan meeting we had in October. Due to the delay in funding from our donor we had no money to rent a location so we had the meeting Africa - style, meaning under the mango trees at the residence (i.e. my house). Fortunately it wasn't mango season yet because apparently you can get a concussion being hit by a mango, and I'd believe it after hearing mangoes dropping onto our corrugated metal roof over the past few weeks now that mango season has begun in earnest.



In the back you can see my new house and the security guard sitting by the water tank. I swear the guy is only about 16 years old!


An enterprising staff member rigged a flipchart stand from an old wire hooked onto the security razor wire atop the wall. (Incidentally, this is the same staff member who sent me the outfit from Malakal, which, to her horror was tied wrong in my photo in an earlier post.) Having previoulsy worked at NGOs with a strong training focus, I was caught unawares that the project didn't own a flipchart stand - let alone have a training room! Despite our humble facilities the meeting was very productive.



Lazy Blogger

I can't believe it's been nearly 2 months since my last post. What a slacker! Though, to be fair, October was filled with a lifetime of meetings, writing the project annual report, revising staff contracts, a week of R&R in Nairobi, and I don't know what else! Despite all the work, I did find time to have some fun. Here is a photo of me and some of my Winrock coworkers at De Havanas, a restaurant/bar/nightclub in Juba.

One of the most difficult things about Juba, or Southern Sudan in general, is that there is little to do beyond going out to eat - and that gets horribly expensive. And everyone seems to drink and smoke an aweful lot...though some claim that the alcohol kills stomach parasites and smoke scares off mosquitoes, which could be true! A good thing, though, is that there is always plenty of time to talk and every person here has a fascinating story to tell which they are typically more than happy to share. At the risk of sounding like a looser, I'll admit that I have a greater variety of friends here in Juba than I had in Washington, DC. And on the whole I have gone out more often and had more rewarding interactions with people here in the past 4 months than I did in my 1.5 years in DC. I think the difference here is that everyone is a little lonely and eager for social interaction. Anytime anyone I even remotely know comes through Juba, we go out for dinner, usually with a good size group of people that we collect along the way. Any/everyone is invited to any/every event. "The more the merrier" truly applies here. We are each others' social network and family!

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Kindle love

I love my kindle. The other night I finished a book and could immediately purchase and download a new one from Amazon. Unfortunately the whispernet technology doesn't work in Sudan, so I have to first download the book to my computer and then copy it over to the reading device, but once I got the hang of it it hasn't been a problem.

I am accepting book suggestions, perferably ones without mention of delicious French food. My last read was Julie and Julia about the woman who cooked her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Then I decided to read My Life in France, the autobiography of Julia. While these books are inspiring me to try out some new recipes (once I move into my house and have a kitchen) for now they are torturing me as I try to swallow the very strange concoctions that the Winrock compound chef comes up with. A fellow sufferer discovered that the cook is imitating fancy recipes but doing all sorts of odd substitutions for food not available in Juba. I think the all time worst dinner, though, was spare ribs...made from some very tough goat. Not good! I've thought about taking pictures, but sometimes the food is pretty...the flavors are just a bit weird. And then again sometimes they work...the avacado, tomato, and canned peaches salad with basil wasn't too bad today. However, the chicken and custard combo just didn't work...aesthetically or otherwise. I'm still not sure how he decided to make spaghetti on a pizza crust...but I guess that isn't any stranger that the beef stroganoff pizza served in Brazil (with crushed potato chips on top).

http://tudogostoso.uol.com.br/receita/35204-pizza-de-estrogonofe-de-carne-com-batata-palha.html

"Beef stroganoff is also very popular in Brazil and Portugal, under the name "estrogonofe" or "Strogonoff". The Brazilian variant includes diced beef or strips of beef (usually filet mignon) with tomato sauce, onions, mushrooms and heavy whipping cream....It is commonly served with crisp potato straws, as in Russia... Sometimes one can also see creative servings of estrogonofe, such as a pancake filling, a topping for baked potatoes, or on pizzas." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef_Stroganoff

Friday, September 11, 2009

Bill of Rights

Like a typical American, I never really think about the freedoms afforded me when living in the US. And I probably wouldn't have though much about them living abroad if it hadn't been for a recent incident. On Wed, Sept 9 the Sudanese government and military staged a huge disarmament activity, going house to house, business to business, in search of illegal weapons. We didn't catch notice of it until about 6 AM when the cook was detained on his way here to the compound. Fortunately there is a large NGO network and a communication tree to spread news like this, so my organization reported in and helped sound the warning. All day Wednesday we were on restricted movement, unable to leave the compound. At about 9 AM a group of approximately 5 soldiers entered the compound to search for weapons. As an international NGO we should have been spared this exercise, but the soldiers went everywhere, even illegally entering diplomatic properties (and later having to issue an apology for violating the Vienna Convention which precludes entering foreign diplomatic missions without permission). It was a little frightening, but not too obtrusive until they came through to search all the living quarters. Since this is a temporary accommodation for me, my suitcases are still mostly packed. I was asked (not very politely) to open each one and move around the contents so the soldiers to verify I wasn't hiding an unregistered weapon. There was a vague feeling of having been violated after the search...and this sense of "hey, can you really do that to me?" It wasn't until later that I began to think about the Bill of Rights and appreciate Articles 2 & 4 - the rights to bear and keep arms and protection against unreasonable search and seizure. I'm reading a biography of Martha Washington right now, and this experience helps me better appreciate some of the things the patriots were fighting for.

I couldn't take a picture of the search, without getting imprisoned or fined, so here is a picture of my room and you can imagine 2 soldiers coming in and pulling apart the bed, searching the closet, and looking through (and touching!) all my clothes both packed and unpacked.

And if you check out this article, you can mentally place the soldiers in my tiny room. http://www.newsudanvision.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1879:south-sudan-security-forces-mount-an-intensive-search-for-illegal-guns-in-juba&catid=1:sudan-news-stories&Itemid=6

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

I owned a farm in Africa...


...well, not a farm, not even a plot of land, at least not yet. But the project has been renovating a house which I will move into in the next couple of weeks and it's hard not to get excited - I've watched too many home improvement shows! This is definitely NOT Design on a Dime! I did have to hold back ..."Don't I get to pick the tile for the kitchen and bath?" "What, no backsplash?" "Not even an accent wall?"

No, silly, keep your comments to things like razor wire for the exterior wall, reinforced doors and windows, and security lighting. And just be grateful that there will be a toilet, 2 in fact! And hopefully hot water. Now that's living the high-life.

I WILL have fun throw pillows, though. C'mon! I could live here for up to 3 years. The place has to have some character. Still trying to decide where to put a hammock, and the herb garden so that when I visit my family at Christmas I can bug them by repeating "I own a farm in Africa..." in my best Meryl Streep doing a Danish accent voice, over and over and over again.

As a welcome gift, the Program Manager in Malakal (Upper Nile State) sent me this outfit. Kind of fun. Makes me look Sudanese, no? Ok, no.

Monday, August 24, 2009

The Women's Crusade

I've now been in Sudan for nearly 3 weeks and, although I have plenty of stories to share already, I've been at a loss for how to start my blog. Just a few minutes ago I read Nicholas Kristof's article _The Women's Crusade_ in the New York Times Magazine and was inspired to start writing my own story. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html

Many of you are development people, while others are interested spectators or minor participants. I doubt anyone reading this blog just doesn't care about these issues. So hopefully you will indulge me in this first post and still come back for the adventure stories and cultural tidbits later on. This blog post will stay true to its name - "musings" - as I strive to find my voice and begin my story.

For me, development and girls' and women's rights is a passion that has always burned inside, but that I have struggled with knowing how to express. My personality is a quiet do-er rather than a boisterous advocate and the term "feminism" always seemed to carry with it a negative connotation in my sphere. But as I've matured emotionally and professionally I've found myself pulled toward activities linking women/girls, education/literacy, and Africa.

This job here in Sudan is the culmination of all my interests and deepest beliefs. I sincerely couldn't be in a happier professional stint (except, of course, if electricity and water were my constant companions!). This opportunity was a long time coming, but I wasn't ready to appreciate it nor prepared enough to be successful at it until now.

Thanks to everyone who has inspired me to be here and supported my dreams.