Camp Walks and Mexican Night

Time goes by both more quickly and more slowly in some ways here.  I feel like I have so much to report on, yet it's only been three days since my last post.  Later on Thursday I got my first walk through the neighboring IDP (internally displaced persons) camps.  There is St. Mary's, the Cemetery Camp, and the one by the slaughter house which is actually directly on the other side of the wall of the hotel that runs past my room.  I went expecting to get a tour from Cathy, the woman who runs the girl's shelter, but instead ended up going with two of the social workers.

I'll say up front that the whole experience made me extremely uncomfortable.  Basically I was there starring at people as we walked through these camps with the houses strung together from sheets of recovered metal, torn tarps, sticks woven into walls, and whatever other found objects might serve as walls, lashes, or roofs.   The flies and the mud are incessant, and they live in the mud when it rains (which it does nearly ever day here) since few of the shacks (I tried to use the word hut and the social worker told me that hut was too kind a word for any of the homes, she said shack was more appropriate) had any flooring.  I'm told their water comes from the puddles around the camp.  It felt somehow terrible to be walking around viewing it almost like a tourist.  I know that seeing the camps is informative and will hopefully help me better understand the conditions that some of the people I will be surveying live in, but I couldn't thinking how tired these people must be of white people coming to stare at them like some sort of exhibit.

I felt a little bit better when I got to engage with the people.  The social worker said hello to everyone we passed, and I tried to use my fledgling Arabic to be as friendly as possible.  Some people stopped us to talk and she would translate for me.  In the Cemetery Camp (named because the camp is located on a cemetery, they've been living there for about a year now), we sat down with the chief of the camp and I had the chance to ask some questions.  The camp is about 168 families, they stay in the camp to keep their children enrolled in school because there are programs here that will help pay the school fees, so they resist moving further out of the city where schools are scarcer, and I imagine aid for school fees is harder to find.  When meeting the South Sudanese a handshake is immediately required, even if you are in a large group or just exchanging greetings it seems almost a requirement to at least give a handshake if you make eye contact with someone.  Even the small children extend their hands for handshakes and a Salam Walekum.  

In the camp by the slaughter house the question of the nightly drumming was answered. I'd asked the social workers about the drumming but they didn't know, so they asked one of the women we talked to at the camp.  The woman had a pretty good laugh at my expense when she realized I thought they were beating on actual drums. It turns out once they've killed the goats or cows they stretch the hides as they pull them away and beat them to separate the skin from the meat.  From the sound they must hold the hides really tight as they do it, because it sounds exactly like a drum, but is actually just a part of the slaughtering process.  I was glad someone found some amusement in my ignorance, she was still laughing when we walked away.  I hope that if I return to the camps it can be with some particular purpose, and not merely as an observer.

After the camp tour it was back to the Bedouin (the hotel) for the evening and dinner with my boss and another friend.  Ordering at the Bedouin is kind of like menu roulette, despite what you order, you just never know what you're going to get.  It's definitely not good food, but its edible (and fairly sanitary, knock on wood) and fortunately there is enough ketchup or salt or peper to make things better.

I spent most of Friday in meetings.  First we met with the social worker team from the Ministry, along with the Minister for Gender.  We met under a large tree sitting in plastic chairs because their building doesn't have electricity yet and it's hotter inside then out in the shade.  I have the feeling a lot of my meetings will take place under trees, and it's actually not a bad option compared to an un-airconditioned room.  We laid out goals, decided on a geographical scope for the project, and generally got some basic understandings for how the project would run on paper.  I'll spend about a a week and a half at the end of July traveling around to the five other counties in Central Equatoria to conduct meetings with service providers in each of those areas so we have a more comprehensive picture of the whole state as opposed to just Juba.  While much of the project will focus on Juba, hopefully this week of travel with a day to two days in each county will fill out the picture for the rest of the state.  The travel will be the worst part, while the counties aren't actually far apart the roads are so bad during the rainy season that a 75 mile drive can take three to four hours.

For those concerned with my travel into the more rural areas my boss has assured me there are good places to stay in each of the towns that I travel to, and for the two towns too small to have proper lodging I'll probably only stay one day and travel back to a larger town at the end of the day.  Apparently Yei is quiet nice and so will probably serve as one of my bases while I'm outside of Juba.  I'll be traveling out to these areas with another Israeli who will be arriving in late July.  She is a therapist who has helped set up psycho-social support in the other counties and who will be checking up on her teams while I'm doing my interviews.  It sounds like a really interesting adventure, and I'm excited to get that part of the trip organized, although slightly worried about just how much I'll be able to get done with limited time in each place.

After that meeting it was off to the police station to meet with the woman who runs gender issues for the police.  My boss describes her as extremely capable, and so I had a quick introduction to her and promises were made to speak next week to get a better sense of what the police department has going on in relation to gender issues.  The final meeting was back at the Bedouin with some representatives of a Christian organization that runs outreach programs for youth. They're working with IA to develop a program for students on GBV, and I'll probably speak with them later to learn more about their programming.

That was it for the week in terms of work.  Friday night was Mexican night down at AfEx (African Expeditions, the fancy hotel down the street) so we went for giant burritos that weren't half bad.  After that it was back to the Bedouin, which had outside of it a sea of UN/MSF/INGO cars parked outside of it.  Apparently it is the place to be some weekend nights and attracts a huge INGO crowd.  The bar was packed, and the music wasn't bad, although eventually we ended up on my friends terrace to escape the crowds.

Saturday was pretty lazy, I'm still not sleeping the whole night through so it was a late start on the day, but my fridge arrived yesterday which was pretty exciting.  Last night my teacher friends (many of the people I've met here are teachers for the British Council teaching the army English) and I went to a Greek place for dinner.  The food was really good, somehow despite being a Greek restaurant they have a whole Indian menu, but the tandoori I ordered was pretty great, so no complaints here.

Today is looking to involve some time at the pool and dinner out somewhere, so pretty relaxed day.  I am slowly adopting the ways of the Brits I hang around (okay, some Brits, and then a lot of people from former British colonies who are absolutely not British but all have some variation on a British accent, ie: Australian, Zimbabwean, etc), and had beans and toast for breakfast this morning.  Fortunately it taste a lot better here then I remember it tasting in England. I think the weekend has been good for me in terms of just relaxation and getting over the last of the jetlag, but I've mapped out my plans for next week and I'm hoping to start meeting with INGOs in the coming days.  We'll see how that actually pans out, but I'm hoping to start getting some data and setting up meetings.

Most importantly the GBV sub-cluster meets on Tuesday, so that will be a great opportunity to meet people face to face and hopefully set up some times to meet with service providers.  The GBV sub-cluster is a part of the Protection Cluster run by the UN, the cluster system is how things are organized on the ground in an attempt to coordinate between different service providers in different areas.  Some people find them helpful and others seem to think of them as a giant waste of time, but I'm excited to see it in person nonetheless after learning and hearing about about the cluster/sub-cluster system for some time.

That's all for now.  Hope everyone has a great start to their week!