Back in South Sudan…for a week...

If you are doing a study of my blogging habits, you may have noticed a correlation between lack of blogging and me being in the US with family. If so, it is likely that you have ascertained that I have been in the US for the past 2.5 months-ish. It’s not that my life is less interesting there—I have plenty of great stories about my nieces and nephews, but I have people to share my stories with there who appreciate them on the same level that I do. For example, if I talk with Lexon about the time when Repent and I got lost in a jungle full of hyena footprints and had to ask a nearby Dinka for help getting out, he might not acknowledge what a significant event that was….or wait, he did laugh loudly at that story when we told it yesterday…I guess that was just an epic story that crosses cultural boundaries. OK, fine. The truth is that when I don’t have to spend some of my time responsibly for work or school or whatever, then I don’t usually spend any of it in any manner that might be viewed by others as responsible. And clearly, writing this blog is the definition of spending my time responsibly. Thus, I don’t blog while in the US with my family. Now that THAT has been explained…

See how cute they are? Of course I miss them!

After scraping off layers of dirt and sweat from walking up and down dusty paths to and from water sources, carrying snotty children or muddy puppies, I thought I might have enough fodder for a blog post. I’m back in South Sudan for a week, filming in villages for a promotional video on our projects here that we are working on. I have to say, it’s not usually my favorite thing to do. I mean, I do think it’s important to have visual aids when talking about our work because it shows the outside world what it’s like to live here, and it helps us raise money to do what we do, which I think is pretty important. The guy who does our video stuff is really good at what he does, but I still sometimes feel a bit rude telling people to smile at the camera while drinking from their hand pump or stopping the car in the middle of the road to get footage of women carrying jerry-cans of water on their heads (though that is pretty impressive, and I’ve taken plenty of those photos myself). I do like attaching the Go-Pro camera to the front of the car to see what these crazy roads look like from the front of our poor brutalized vehicle, and I find it interesting to interview people we work with and hear their opinions and stories.

With baby Avwa

So we’ve been visiting villages, and God must know that I’m missing my nieces and nephews, because I’ve gotten to hold and cuddle lots of cute, similarly aged kids, none of whom were put off by my weird newly-sunburnt skin. Kids in South Sudan are different from kids I knew in other places I’ve lived. I don’t want to lump all Asian kids together, but in my experience, it usually takes them a while to warm up to foreigners they don’t know. Many times there is screaming and hysterical crying the first time they come in contact with someone with creepy white skin. I experienced this in all regions of Asia where I have lived and traveled (so basically, almost all of the regions of Asia—I have a pretty good research base for my generalization). In South Sudan we have some children inclined towards screaming hysterics when they see odd-looking strangers. I’ve been on the back of a motorcycle with Repent, riding through a jungle village while children scattered in all directions yelling at the top of their lungs and crying. But really, the screamers are only about 30% of the kids I’ve seen. Compare this to Asia, where approximately 60% of all children are likely to scream, cry and/or run away as fast as possible, and it is amazing. In South Sudan 60% of the kids will chase after your car, motorcycle, bike waving and yelling greetings (Disclaimer: none of these statistics are based on Math or any principles that may have been derived from or associated in any way with Math). My favorite local greeting is the little poem composed by Moru children and recited with great enthusiasm over and over whenever a foreigner happens by their general vicinity (forgive the spelling, I haven’t officially studied Moru yet, this is my own transliteration. I know that all of you reading this blog are proficient in Moru and this will be really distracting, but try to bear with me):

            “Ombonje keneesa ya…Ombonje keneesa ya…Ombonje keneseesa ya.”

            Translation: the foreigner is going to church.

            Note: it does not matter if the foreigner is not, in fact, going to church. Poetic             license, I guess.

            Proper method of declaiming the poem: 3 times in a sing-song voice

            Optional ending: How are YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUU?!!!

            Non-Morus don’t have a poem, but yelling “Kawaja, kawaja” seems to work    fine for them.

But the last 10% of kids in South Sudan are the real shockers. They are the ones who don’t care about my creepy white skin or my weird hair. They just want to love me. They’ll run up and give me hug, having no idea who I am. They’ll slip their little hands in mine and look up at me and smile and melt my heart. And only sometimes to they follow that up with, “Give me money” or “give me ball.” That does tend to kill the moment for me, but it also makes me wonder how the heck all white people here got the reputation for handing out money and toys to children here who learned how to ask for it in English. I totally blame us because that had to have come from somewhere. I     mean, your average suburban American kid isn’t going to walk up to, say, a Chinese guy and ask him for money or presents or whatever because there really is no precedent for that. They do stand in line for hours to sit on Santa’s lap at tell him what they want (at least according to movies I’ve seen), and precedent has told them that this pays off. I can only imagine that South Sudanese children have some reason to expect a payoff for using their hard-earned English phrases.

I carried Abouk home

These last two days I’ve had a few from the last 10% that have been the melt-your-heart kind. Baby Avwa fell asleep in my arms and baby Shamsul let me pick him up and cuddle him with no visible signs of displeasure.  This afternoon while trekking back from the local water source, little Abouk (one of the little kids in our entourage) tripped and fell. She started crying, and I went back to see if I could help. She rejected her brothers’ help and reached up her arms to me. So I carried her the last mile. Even though she got a tiny bit heavy by the end of the walk, it was great. Also, Repent told me that last week that his five year old Gadi kept asking, "Ombonje maro miteen rejaa?" That's Arabic and Moru for, "When is my foreigner coming back?" I'm pretty OK with being Gadi's foreigner.

So that’s life—for the next week anyway before I head off to Spain, Morocco, maybe/probably not Kenya, definitely at some point Sudan, possibly some other place after that. Oh yeah—I almost got a puppy! It was cute and chubby and we loved each other deeply for a moment…until Lexon and Repent talked me out of getting it now since I’m leaving on Thursday and they don’t want to take care of it while I’m gone. I was sad, but at least now I’m sure that Mark will let me get a puppy and I’ll get one when I’m back for longer and I can make sure that it loves me the most of anyone.

And there you have it—between a puppy and cuddly children, I’m satisfying my almost-30 maternal instincts here in South Sudan.