You are very welcome...

The title of today's post comes from the greeting that I receive almost without fail from all of the South Sudanese I meet in the course of my work.  Along with the absolutely required handshake when I enter a room it is usually accompanied by these words, "You are very welcome" or "You are most welcome" which are often repeated multiple times throughout the conversation at regular intervals.  The locals are always sad to hear I am not staying for longer, but assure me that South Sudan will become my new home in no time.

So there are some interesting things about life in South Sudan that even after many different experiences abroad leave me a little surprised.  This time around it's the fact that the hotel (and from what I hear all hotels) will not wash women's underwear.  Apparently men's underwear is no problem, and other women's clothing isn't problematic, but women's underwear is just too much.  It's a weird thing to run into, mostly because I considered places I lived in the Middle East to be much more conservative in terms of lifestyle, dress, etc. and never encountered this problem there.  Things in general are much less conservative here then in Egypt or Palestine, it is the norm for women walk around in skirts and tank tops and things I never would have considered in my previous locales.  It's a Christian country so drinking is widely considered acceptable and beer ads are everywhere.  It's an interesting contrast, but more realistically just a real life annoyance for me to have to wash underwear by hand and then try and find all sorts of creative ways to hang them around my air-conditioned room to dry since I don't think anyone would take kindly to me drying them outside in the sun/heat.

On the topic of the weather, I've discovered I'm actually here during what is considered the cooler part of the year since it is the rainy season.  While more humid it is significantly cooler then it is during the other parts of the year when as one of my friends put it "I couldn't even look at my jeans."  Jeans are a little warm now but they're fine for the most part and help avoid bug bites.  However, it hasn't rained much at all since my first week, which is a little unusual I'm told, although it could more then make up for it later in the summer.  Since there's not much agriculture in the area I'm told it doesn't really matter for the local economies whether it rains or not, although I'm not sure if that's true of all areas of the state, especially when it comes to cattle grazing.

Anyways, in other news, I finally got to the GBV sub-cluster meeting over at the UNDP offices on Tuesday, which was great, I was able to snag people after the meeting and get emails, schedule meetings, and generally start setting up some real work for later in the week.  The meeting itself was interesting, but more logistical then helpful in an overarching sense.  Afterwards I spent the day working on getting the surveys I'll be using into workable shape which ended up being a project that took a good chunk of the rest of the day between me and my boss as we traded versions and tried to strike the right balance of information gathering.

On Monday night I had the chance to have dinner with another Wellesley girl who works in Juba, which was excellent.  She's actually lived here for three years, since well before independence, working for MercyCore and Internews.  It was really impressive to hear about her work, which she somehow landed right out of undergrad. Unfortunately she continues the trend of people I meet who are leaving in just a few weeks, so hopefully I'll get to see a little more of her before I go but she's headed back to the states to start a PhD program soon.  Nonetheless dinner was lovely and it was good to make a Wellesley connection.

Dinner was at an Indian place down the road a bit, my British Council friends and I went along with another Brit here doing some PhD research.  It was a lovely dinner with our usual amount of American v. British English analysis.  They were simply shocked that I didn't know the phase "Mutton dressed up as lamb."  Now maybe my readership is more familiar with this saying, but I hadn't heard it before, apparently it's quiet common to specifically refer to a woman who is dressed up too young for her age.  I thought it was a fabulous phrase, and one I look forward to incorporating.

Today (Wednesday) I had my first meeting with a service provider and had the chance to run a still preliminary version of my survey through some beta testing.  It went well although my boss and I are still working out some kinks and testing the boundaries of what I consider relevant information versus what she would like to get out of the surveys.  She wants to include some donor information, I'm not sure of my comfort level with that since I'm not here to solicit money for GBV programs for IA or the Ministry.  We're working on a balance that won't make me uncomfortable, but I feel like it rides a fine line.  On the other hand when working for a client, even an NGO or a government agency, getting the information they want is important, so I don't feel like I can totally disregard what she's asking for, but I made her aware I don't want to directly be involved in collecting donor information since that was not laid out at any point in the Terms of Reference for the project. Not to mention we're already asking for a lot of information and the survey runs around 45 minutes right now, so I do want to keep the survey limited to relevant questions.  My boss has said she understands my concerns so I'm sure we'll find a way to work it out.

In other news the hotel seems to have acquired a chicken that is now roaming the grounds.  At least its not a rooster because those things are loud, the one from the IDP camp next door is enough noise around here in the pre-dawn hours.  However, I discovered early this morning that chickens do make noise! I know, not a revelation, but for someone who has never really interacted with chickens before I was surprised at just how loud one chicken can be when it woke me up early this morning with its clucking. I hope it doesn't make early morning vocalizations a regular thing.

Also, I managed to take a few pictures, they are mostly out of the windows of the car when I'm pretending to use my cell phone so they are askew and somewhat less then ideal, but they're all I've got at the moment.  The first one is just for amusement, down by AfEx where we go to eat on a regular basis there is this:

If you can't tell that is a whole fleet of brand new John Deere tractors that don't even have the seat covers taken off of them (or someone is very carefully putting them back on after use).  I have no idea what such an amazingly modern and lovely fleet of vehicles does here, and so far they haven't moved, but they make me feel a little more at home, although the first time I walked around the corner and saw them it took a second for me to figure out what was going on and where I was.

This little guy is Habibi (loved one in Arabic) is our traumatized office monkey. Some kids rescued him (I'm not sure from what) and he tends to hide out in the corners of the office or the yard.  But my boss now has him eating out of her hand and he stays in our office quiet a bit.  I don't work from the office that much (the allure of the AC in my room makes the hotel my main work space), but I like hearing the updates on him.  He's pretty cute, but I keep my distance since I didn't end up getting the rabies vaccine before I left.  He's a pretty well behaved monkey.

 Here's a shot of the area around the city out the front of a car.  Sorry, but it's the best I've got given the restrictions on photo taking.  Here's a couple more to give you a feel for the landscape around Juba, this is just outside the city, so it's not exactly where I am, but gives you a feel for the lay of the land.

The last one is actually taken from the base/side of the mountain you saw us approaching in the picture above it looking back on to the city.  I know it's not much, I'll try and be better when I can be about taking photos, I'm just not looking to have my camera taken away from me, or incite any of the locals to anger, which apparently cameras do pretty quickly.

It's Thursday night now, I think I started writing this post on Monday and the week has just flown by. This morning I had a meeting with the Minister for Gender and Social Policy for Central Equatoria, and she was awesome.  This is a lady who likes to get things done and makes no bones about it.  She was quiet a presence in just the 15 minute meeting we had, but it was nice to see a government official who was clearly involved, knew her staff, and was working on moving things forward.  The government is really into it's titles and such, and Ministers here are referred to as Your Excellency (a title I previously reserved for royalty and I think ambassadors?) but it always makes a meeting better when you get to refer to someone as Your Excellency in total seriousness.

Anyways, I suppose that's enough for one blog post.  I have a couple of meetings tomorrow and hopefully we'll get the surveys squared away tomorrow and over the weekend. I've got a bunch of meeting set up for next week so things really will get rolling then!