Life's Little Adventures

As a general rule, I’ve always preferred wearing pants to a skirt. But here in South Sudan, I was informed by reliable sources that it is more appropriate for me to wear skirts than pants. I acquiesced and, not wanting to bring a lot of extra stuff, I only brought two pairs of pants. Consequently, I haven’t really wanted to mess them up, so usually I just stick to my skirts. On the day I spent 7 hours riding on a motorcycle through the jungle, that was a bad idea. Also remember how I said I was going to buy boots (I think it was one or two posts ago)? I still haven’t managed to do so. This is what my legs looked like half-way through the journey:

There were sadder photos of my leg available, but I'm too vain to show those.

I realized two things after looking at that photo:

1)   Any photos you take of your own legs will always look bad. Therefore, I had Repent take that photo because I needed proof. I like it when people feel sorry for me. They tend to be a lot nicer when they see how I'm suffering in Africa--I give my blood for you, South Sudan!

2)   Photos of blood and gore mean that some kind of story worthy of the blog happened to me.

So here’s the story of Repent’s and my most recent jungle adventure:

We planned our trip to this particular area in coordination with the Commissioner of Mundri West Country—basically the most important government official in the area. So naturally we were feeling important. We were planning to travel in his fancy car. And he called the night before to cancel.

So undeterred we hopped on the bike to head out ourselves. Before leaving we had the following conversation (which I have translated into English for your benefit, you are so lucky):

Repent: Good morning! Are you going to be wearing THAT?

Me: Yeah? What’s your problem with it?

Wait, no, that was a conversation I’ve had many times in the past with my parents…here’s the one with me and Repent:

Repent: Aren’t you going to wear pants today?

Me: Do you think I should change?

Repent: Nah, the roads are probably fine. Don’t bother.

Pointing to the sign to Kulundu

So we left. FYI-these were the least fine of any roads we have traveled to date. Several times I had to get off the bike and wade through deep squelching mud puddles or slosh through slippery sand. A few times Repent and I had to push and pull his motorcycle up and over cliff-like river banks. Once while I was looking for monkeys, Repent had to call upon a nearby solider gentleman to help him because he realized that I was really focused on those monkeys. One time Repent lost control of the bike and we careened off the sandy, almost non-existent trail, and landed, some-how upright, in the tall, thick, sticky elephant grass that had mostly covered said non-existent trail. I credit the grass with holding us up. That is some tough grass.

Kulundu kids had never seen a white person before.
They kept their distance.

The point of our 7-hour motorcycle jungle trip was to have meetings in two locations (neither of which lasted longer than an hour).  Kulundu is one of the poorest areas in Mundri West and that’s why the Commissioner wanted us to go there and see about putting in a bore well. In spite of some very beautiful and healthy-looking farms, no one can get in or out easily to buy and sell there so the people remain quite destitute. Many of the children were not wearing clothes and even the women were mostly only wearing skirts. There didn’t seem to be any other clothing hanging around their homes, inside or out. Also, we saw a few cases of mental illness and several young people who have become blind, probably from being exposed to a disease carried by the tse-tse fly that lives by the river where they are getting their water. Repent says that he saw a whole family of blind people while we were there, but I must have been looking for monkeys again or something because I missed it. I saw plenty of other individual cases though. I’m glad that the Commissioner has seen what a tough place this is and wanting to focus on helping out there. I hope that he will be successful.

Lunch

Dinka hero!

After a quick visit to Kulundu, whose hospitable ladies picked thorns out of my leg and made us a lunch of sorghum blob, termite paste, and honey comb, we decided to take an alternate route to Amadi, where we wanted to go discuss bio-sand filters. Somewhere in the middle of the jungle the road disappeared. We decided to stop and look for it while admiring the large hyena tracks we saw in the dirt following the footprints of the cows that the Dinka peoples herd in that area. We also saw some far off monkeys! Just at the point where I was excitedly planning to camp in the jungle for the night, hoping we could see some hyenas, we noticed a man a short ways away from us, just watching us. We headed over to see him and ask for directions. I would write our conversation, but we really didn’t have one, as he was Dinka and spoke no Arabic or Moru. However, he did kindly point us in the direction of the road and pause a bit for me to take a photo to remember our almost-camping trip before disappearing into the jungle.

Taking a photo of myself laughing at
Repent who just barely made it across the river.
It's so fun to work with me.

Eventually we made it to Amadi, had a 20-minute conversation with the chief about bio-sand filters, found the road out to home, and made it back without any other serious mishaps. So there it is--just a day in the life…a blog-worthy one, of course. For example, today has not been blog-worthy. Today I went to immigration. It wasn’t as bad as the time I went when the officers were all in training. Each man sat at a computer with a helpful young lady at his elbow pointing out all the letters he needed to type into the compter.  She would say, “Amanda—A (the ‘a’ is over there), M (go back to the other side for the ‘m’)…” That went on for a long time. I thought about offering to type for them, but I didn’t want to embarrass them with my Mavis Beacon speed typing. Today I was just supposed to pick up papers so I went upstairs to the room where the papers were supposed to be and waited. Then was told to go downstairs and wait (which I did). Then I was told to go upstairs and wait again. Then I was told to go downstairs again. Finally downstairs I was told that my papers were not yet finished. So I came here to sit in the IAS office, write emails, Skype with my mom, and finish this blog post which has turned out to be about a blog-worthy day and a non-blog-worthy day. Maybe the papers will be done this afternoon, maybe not. Maybe I will be on a bus to Mundri tomorrow, maybe not. Maybe if I get on that bus, I’ll have to wait at the river for the water to go down before we can cross it, but maybe not. Or maybe I’ll be going to Uganda for a couple of days, or maybe not. Maybe I’ll update this blog again in the near future, maybe not.  Life is always more exciting when you don’t know what’s going to happen next.

Bonus photos of hyena footprints for you:

Repent is such a great tracker--
I thought it was just a chubby dog.

Compare and contrast the size with the dog footprint (left)