21st Century Fun in a 19th Century World

Technology is fun. Especially for people who don’t see it very much. Yes, it is true that more people in the world have cell phones than toilets. I personally know many people in this category. Though I would rather have a toilet than a telephone, I realize that for many people, that isn’t the obvious choice. Also, playing Angry Birds is hugely entertaining for many people, and in honor of my Angry-Birds-obsessed nephew whose birthday just passed, here are some photos of kids having the best day ever on the khawaja’s ipad.  Note: I more often let kids play on my phone, but then I can’t get photos of them with my phone because they are using my phone.

It’s not just kids that love electronic devices. Repent has gotten really good on the iPad and the computer. He’s started learning Excel, and he’s really loving it. Mostly, he uses their old desktop, but sometimes I let him do stuff on my laptop. Since my version of Excel is later than the one on their computer, and there is no way to update their version with no internet, I don’t do this often, because I don’t want to confuse him. But someday maybe he will have his own laptop.

 One rainy day, Repent and Esther and I were trapped in the house. I had a full battery on my computer and the next day was planned to be a charging day, so I thought it would be fun to watch a movie with them for a bit while we ate lunch. I selected one that I thought would cross language and culture barriers—Animals are Beautiful People, a documentary about wildlife in the Namib Desert, made in 1978, according to the torrent file. I’ve loved this movie since old family friends first showed it to me as a child. With a background of beautiful classical music, including many of my favorites like Beethoven’s Pastorale, Grieg’s Morning Suite from Peer Gynt, The Moldau from Smetana, and more,  while an uppity-sounding Englishman tells the story with moments of dry humor and pathos (the baby pelicans die and it’s sad, OK?). I love that Repent and Esther aren’t self-conscious at all about laughing uproariously at silliness. I know that I am too jaded and cynical and snobby about comedy, so I will give a casual smile at the monkeys somersaulting down the hill, but Repent and Esther laugh til they cry.  I think their favorite part was when the man dressed up as an ostrich to try to get close enough to steal its egg, but the ostrich chased him away anyway. But don’t think that they were feeling superior to the people of the Namib Desert. When the man is hunting and the bird keeps cawing just as he is about to shoot his arrow, effectively scaring away the intended prey, Repent couldn’t take it. “Ter de bataal,” he said, scowling at the computer and shaking his head. “That bird is bad.” He was picturing himself on the hunt with his bow and arrows and if a bird kept messing with him in that way, he’d do the same as the Namibian hunter—roast that bird up for dinner. Repent was very satisfied with that turn of events.

Here’s a photo of Esther and Repent laughing hysterically at the animals after they ate the fermented fruit and being stumbling around drunkenly.

OK-this isn't the photo where they are laughing hysterically,
but that photo was too blurry.

Finally, here is a photo of Repent playing the Strawberry Shortcake game that I downloaded for my niece because South Sudan doesn’t stigmatize grown men who like playing kids’ games on iPads. He got a huge kick out of changing her clothes—just like Evie did.

I Do Not Live in a Cardboard Box (anymore)

Note: Some parts of this post were originally written in various emails to various people, but I realized the eloquence of my writing should be for the masses and not just the one or two people that I occasionally correspond with…and also cut-and-paste is a great time saver. I don’t think the recipients of the emails read my blog, so no one should be offended. But honesty is important, and I don’t plagiarize, even from myself, so this is Me giving credit to Me for my own words written elsewhere.

I have finally moved into my new house, and I love it like I gave birth to it.  It is like a square cake cut into four pieces. The front two pieces are slightly bigger than the back two pieces. (Of course, if it were a chocolate cake, you wouldn’t really need to cut pieces—just grab a fork and go for it.)

All-purpose room. Yes, there is a pile of shoes at the door
because all normal people do that

The front two rooms are the bedroom and the all-purpose room. I’m calling it the all-purpose room because currently it houses a plastic trunk full of miscellaneous items, my bike, the soccer ball that I keep around for entertaining children of all ages, a ripped up poncho that I should throw away, but I keep thinking that I might want to use some of the plastic somewhere later, two buckets of water (for cleaning and flushing), and several bottles of water for drinking. The bucket water is from the storage tank, which has lots of dirt and grunge in it, so I don’t really want to drink it, even if I would probably be fine drinking it (I ate bad rice the other day, knowing it was bad, but I didn’t have any other food. And I was totally fine. And turbid water is often safe to drink if the turbidity isn’t hiding bacteria, protozoa, and/or viruses—a helpful fact from a WASH professional). It has a solar-powered light, but it is not working. But by the time that I actually post this, it might be! We are supposed to be getting more solar panels that will actually work. Of course that was supposed to happen sometime last year, but you never know…

Behind the all-purpose room is the kitchen. I have a table that I stole from the big house and I put my gas stove on top and whatever cooking stuff I need that I can fit on the side (non-flammable closer to the stove because it makes extra-hot fire). I also stacked all my spices and various other things in the windowsill because even though they should be kept in a cool dry place and that is not a cool dry place, they are very convenient there for grabbing and dumping into the food (the hot pepper is in the Blue Band container—must be easily accessible). I also have a small stool that I stole from the big house and am using for storage and a chair that is also for putting stuff on, mostly my lantern because the solar light isn’t working in the kitchen either and I often cook after dark. OK,fine- I make tea a lot at night. Then I have another plastic trunk (teams bring stuff here in them and then leave them and I put them to use) where I store food and tea and stuff that I don’t want rats to eat. As of today, there are no rats in my house, but I want to be prepared. The trunk is not pictured and neither is the large red plastic basin where I wash dishes. We were supposed to put in a kitchen sink, but it didn’t happen, and I’m fine using the basin. But I am hoping to put in a shelf over the trunk where I can store stuff because it is really cramped in there and I’d like to actually get more stuff like pans, bowls, plates, and other modern conveniences. Also, if I get to go to Indonesia next year, I’m getting my mom’s old stove-top oven to use on my stovetop. I don’t know how I’m going to get it to South Sudan, but I will do it because I have the will and I will find the way.

A late-night kitchen visitor

Archie has a cute face
but frogs are loud at night
and jump around a lot,
so I kicked him out.

If you noticed from the photos (maybe you didn’t—photography isn’t one of my skills), there are shutters on the windows in the kitchen and the all purpose room. There aren’t any on the bedroom or bathroom. These shutters are on the market-side of my house and help block the annoying noise of people’s thumping music. But fortunately we have been put under martial law recently. Restrictive political policies can be wonderful. People are required to be off the streets by 10:30. Also there is a blessed diesel shortage, which means that generators can't be fueled, which means that speakers can't be plugged in, and things have mostly been quiet before 11. Still, the other night there was some rocking party that somehow lasted beyond 11. I'm not sure how it did that, but I planned many gruesome deaths for all those involved, and it made me feel better.

My bedroom has curtains but no shutters. I could get shutters, but I don’t really want them. The curtains are made from old bed sheets and I had them in my old cardboard room. I brought them over, but since there are no bars on my window I had to find another method of keeping them out of the window when I want sunlight (previously, I just hooked them over the bars in a very classy way). I remembered later that I had a couple of green ribbons that had been tied on some Christmas present. Though I kept thinking I should just throw them away, I hadn’t yet. And they make perfect curtain ties. Lesson learned: never throw anything away that might possibly be reused at some unknown point in the future (thus the ripped up poncho in my all purpose room).

Note the cheery yellow floor mat-it was originally a
camp towel from Wal-Mart. I went there thinking
"Life in S.Sudan is basically the same as camping,
let's see what I can buy cheaply on the camping aisle."
And it turns out that the camping aisle is Walmart's practical joke
on non-campers. Fortunately, I have a sarong, which is the best
quick-dry towel ever, but my boss (who knows about camping--
he drives a Jeep and probably knows about hunting and stuff too)
brought me a legit camping quick-dry towel from some
store whose name I don't know, but it is one of those
with a logo made out of a combination of mountains and raindrops,
so you know it is for people who are serious about The Outdoors.
I use it as a blanket along with the Ethiopian Airlines blanket that
I snagged in anticipation of a long cold layover.
Seriously, AC doesn't ALWAYS need to be on high!

I spend most of my time in the bedroom, but I also really enjoy my indoor bathroom—it’s so nice not to have to pee in a cup at night and not to worry about whether to wear my boots when hiking through a forest of grass to the outhouse. I also don’t worry about being cornered in my bathroom by drunk men who sneak in through broken fences at night. It’s really great. It’s also convenient that the solar lights in my house that DO work are the ones in the bedroom and the bathroom. Yes, they attract every insect that the screens on the windows can’t keep out, but I can read at night without using my lantern, which I need in the kitchen. And I can’t get decent batteries here, so I try not to use the lantern too much.

My beautiful bathroom! It's actually very clean, but
the guy putting in tiles didn't know how to do it,
and the tiles that he actually got in the floor,
he added extra cement to, to make sure they really stuck in there good.
But I scrub it clean often, and Karioki (Lexon's son and my super-good pal)
came over the other day and said, "Wow! Your house is so clean."
So--proof. From the mouths of babes.
Not pictured: my sarong hanging on the hook beside the shower.

So that’s my beautiful house! There was a medical team here the first week I moved in, and I was able to actually genuinely like everyone who came and enjoy their company, but if I had been sharing a room with them, as I would have done pre-house, and heard them snoring and talking until all hours of the night (people don’t sleep well in strange places when they have jet lag, I’ve noticed), I doubt I would have felt so kindly towards them. So this house is already making a big difference in my life and the lives of others in South Sudan.

My backyard where I hang laundry, and where I've started
digging out the grass so that snakes don't come in and kill me and eat my lizard friends.
Also here you CAN see my red wash basin and mostly empty trunk for food.
(I will replenish you, my friend! Jelly beans and gummy bears, i.e. sustenance, are coming!)

I had a party and invited my pastor and a bunch of friends to come pray over the house and he also prayed that I would get married soon so I don't have to live here alone, so that's been taken care of too now. But I don't actually live here alone. Roger the lizard lives here too and eats all the bugs. I sometimes let him sleep on my pillow, though I did yell at him when he crapped in my bed on my clean sheets. Of course now he's started inviting his friends too, and it's getting a bit crowded. I think I'll have to speak to him about that. We don't want to create a fire hazard in my new beautiful abode of peace and tranquility. Also, Lexon says that if there are lots of lizards, it will attract snakes who like to eat them. I want to keep Roger safe, and also I would rather not die a painful death after a black mamba bite, so we keep alert here.

Friends and pastor dedicating my house on a rainy day.
It started raining right as we began to pray and finished right when we stopped.
I thought that was a little annoying of God, but He is up on his cultural appropriateness,
and everyone else was really excited, "We say that when it rains, it is a blessing from God,
and He is blessing us now!" But seriously, God. It's time for dry season because we need to drill some wells.

You are all welcome to come visit. I’ll make Roger sleep in the floor and you can have his pillow.

This is the best photo I have of Roger--
he is a bit camera-shy.

Bonus photo: here is a shirt that I saw in the
Camping/Hunting section of Walmart.
I am not really a Fashion Queen type of girl
but I'm pretty sure that this pattern would be considered
'camouflage.' I know that fashion doesn't always have a
purpose, but this WAS in the hunting section.
If someone is wearing this shirt while traipsing about the forest,
searching for prey, don't you think Bambi's mother would have seen her
and thereby avoided a lot of heartache for children and small woodland creatures?
Unless maybe the wearer of the shirt was in the forest on a day with an especially pink sunset... 

Running for Life and Happy Birthday, Dad

I've used this photo before, but it is one of the few
post-run photos that we have since I don't
usually like to take photos of myself when I look disgusting

When I was 11 or 12, I was home-schooled for a couple years. Being an introvert whose favorite pastime was reading anything she could find, my parents thought I needed some kind of physical activity in my life. They decided on Morning Runs with Dad—he was going anyway, so it didn’t mess up his schedule at all. I was initially pretty excited. In my last year at the local international school, I’d been forced to run the mile in the PE tests. Being genetically predetermined to a debilitating strain of extreme competitiveness, I had to win at every test. I was stressed out about the mile test, but I did well. I might have been first for the girls. Even if I wasn’t, I choose to remember it that way because—debilitating strain of competitiveness. So I was already kind of intrigued by the idea of running until you feel like you want to die and then running a bit more to see if you can break the barrier between Life and Running to Death.  Running is a sport for the masochistically inclined. My dad sweetened the deal by promising to buy me legitimate running shoes if I ran with him for 6 weeks or 8 weeks or however long it takes to make a habit—he had done his research on the number of weeks, but I don’t remember exactly what it was.

Current running shoes.

Every morning we would get up around 5:30am and speed off to either run the steep volcanic hills of Hegarmanah (our neighborhood) or hop on his Vespa and putter over to the track in front of the Gedung Sate, where we would run around in dusty circles, both of us with our genetic debilitating competitiveness, trying to outrun any one who looked like he or she wasn’t just wearing matching jogging clothes to sit at the park and drink tea with friends (as I recall, the track was mostly filled with those types of people).  Running hills taught me about perseverance and “what goes up, must come down,” and running at the track taught me “delayed gratification.” After finishing a run at the track, I always wanted my dad to buy me one of the beautiful refreshing-looking bottles of water that the kaki-lima (means ‘5 feet’-for the two feet of the seller plus the 3 feet of his modified bicycle or wooden push cart) would pull out of the depths of the ice box welded to his bike, waving them around so we could see the beads of condensation glistening in the morning sun looking extra-thirst quenching after a long run dodging fashionable people in track suits buying glue balloons or inflatable Teletubbies for their children. My dad would always say, “Let’s just go home and get a drink there. It will taste so much better after you have waited for it on the ride home—delayed gratification, you know.” My dad is not really a water connoisseur.  He’s actually just a cheapskate, but that is also a trait that he genetically passed down to me, so I don’t blame him too much—though I LIKE CHEESEBALLS MORE THAN PRETZELS EVEN IF YOU GET MORE GRAMS FOR YOUR MONEY WITH THE PRETZELS!

Of course, after I achieved the running shoes, what should happen? I wanted to stop running. But would my dad let me stop? No. And what’s more, he shamelessly manipulated me, challenging me to run farther one day or faster then next, playing on my competitive disability. In those days, he could keep up a running commentary the whole time we were running. He had a captive audience to listen to his thoughts on politics, sports, history, art, best bands of the 60’s and 70’s, and what I should do with all the rest of my life. Sucking wind at his side, I couldn’t try to get a word in edgewise, and he waxed eloquent.  And then what should happen? I didn’t just get into the habit of running. I got addicted.

That's me in the green jacket marathoning it.

I went off to boarding school for high school and while the rest of my friends slept in until breakfast, I was out the door by 5:30, running around our school track, watching king fishers streak their bright blue feathers through the dark green jungle around the track. Then I went to college, and I got up as soon as it got light there and sometimes before it was light (the Equator is the only place to live if you like consistency in sun rises, and I really do). I ran around with the ROTC people, while that one guy that yells at them all to run faster, tried to get me to join up. I don’t know what his exact military position is because I’m not really savvy with all that yet. Josh is only slightly helpful about these things. I still don’t know if a 1^st LT is better than a 2^nd LT because first place is better than second place but second grade is higher than first grade. So logic fails me here. But obviously I didn’t join up because I don’t like to wear the same clothes as everyone else and I also don’t think I could pull off those uniforms anyway. Some people can make them look good, but those are not short stumpy girls. Later I ran around Syria, Jordan, China—I ran on an old gladiator track more than 2000 years old with gashes in the few remaining columns where chariots had crashed into them in races of old in southern Lebanon. I ran through the mountains of Yemen with Captain Roy. I ran by the Mediterranean in southern Spain, by the Nile in Khartoum, down Beale Street for the St. Jude’s marathon in Memphis, around cows and mongooses in India, and now I’m running on a red dirt/mud road through the bush in Mundri, South Sudan.

Running buddies at school

Running in Mundri pretty fun. Yes, I’m getting old and decrepit and my knees and my heels hurt if I run every day, so I usually just go every other day. My shoes are the disgusting mess you see pictured in the photograph. I jump pot holes and puddles, scramble over rocks, slough through sand pits, leap ant tunnels, and dodge women carrying jerrycans of water balanced on their heads, the odd motorcycle, or sometimes, a caravan of UN soldiers with two tanks and a bunch of trucks full of blue helmeted men.

Everyday when I run I am a novelty to people I pass, even though they see me running frequently. The children especially get very excited, yelling to everyone that “the khawaja” is passing, while sprinting to the side of the road to wave and shout hello. Other older children are on their way to school, dressed in bright green or blue uniforms, depending on the grade and the school. Many of them think it is hilarious good fun to join me for a brief morning jog. Very few last more than 30 seconds, though I’ve had bigger boys run for about 5 minutes, asking me to give them my watch, a soccer ball, all of my money, etc. The ones who go to the primary school that happens to be on my route, will sometimes stick with me, if I’m close enough to their school when they start, dropping off when they reach their turn off road.

Running to Mundri 1 PS

One day when a little girl started running with me near the beginning of my run, I kept expecting her to drop off. She was wearing her red skirt and blue shirt with black jelly shoes and carrying her book bag in one hand and a yellow ruler in the other. She dropped behind for a bit as I passed on a narrow band around a large pond in the middle of the road, and I said, “Goodbye—you were super tough!” But she didn’t stop there like I thought. She popped up beside me a few minutes later, sweating and panting, but there was a look in her eye that I recognized—the look of someone with a debilitating strain of competitiveness. She was going to run with me all the way to her school or die trying, so help her God. I’m sure that God was probably really impressed by her tenacity, but He decided to let me help her. I slowed the pace a little bit, slid over closer to her and said, “Here-let me take your bag.” She handed it over without a word and settled in to make it to the top of the first hill. I sped up a bit and we hit the second hill. She kept pace, ignoring the other kids who shrieked with laughter and joined us for the obligatory 30 seconds, telling the boys who sprinted by snickering that she had started running way back by her house. We got closer to her school and I kept encouraging and pushing and we sprinted in to touch the wall, followed closely by a pack of joiners. I stopped my clock and snapped a terrible photo of the two of us for posterity, and also because someday I want Daya to represent South Sudan, running at the Olympics. And I can show that photo to all the excited reporters interviewing her after she wins gold. Then I jumped back on the road because I still had another 4 miles I wanted to run.

Daya is the one in the front with one eye half-closed--
I didn't say it was a flattering photo, but I couldn't
see the photo in the morning sunlight, so I just guessed.

But seriously: a nine year old girl ran 2 miles at an 8mph pace in jellies and a skirt, holding a ruler and a book bag (for part of the run until she gave it to me--and it was not empty). Imagine what she could do if she had proper running attire and a rubber track! And a friend of mine who is starting a soccer league asked me if I would help coach a girl’s team, and though I’m hardly a soccer role model, I think I’ll try to help him out next year (this year I will not be in one place long enough to fully unpack). But I want to see girls here play and have fun and develop debilitating strains of extreme masochistic competitiveness that they will later genetically pass down to their children.

My team practicing on the local basketball field.

And if you want to support a local team with uniforms, shoes, or a soccer ball, let me know.

As for me, I have a few more years left to run, and I plan to enjoy them. My dad recently thought he was finished for life, but then I came to visit and made him start up again. Of course then he went and had heart surgery, from which he is trying to recover, but maybe I can get him jogging again next time I visit because it’s now my turn to monologue about history, linguistics, traveling, movies/TV shows that he would hate, and all the dangerous countries I plan to visit in the near future.

Happy birthday, Dad. Because running is still fun, and it’s also a method of exercising that is way cheaper than getting a gym membership.

I also inherited his photogenic good looks