Sometimes I Write About Serious Stuff

JJ (BF from different island), me, and Kristen,
after a night of hard-partying probably, since I still
look hung over.

When I was in sixth grade, Kristen and I were BFBD (Best Friends by Default). This is a thing that happens when you are the only girls in your class in a small international school. But for us, it worked out great that year. Together we learned so much—how to ruin chocolate chip cookies by dumping an entire bottle of vanilla essence into the dough (because if a little is good, so is a lot—you would think anyway), how to write “DUS” (‘Don’t UnderStand’) as an answer to weird workbook questions that didn’t make sense, how to make more paper footballs than any of the boys and win the contest (there were more of them, but we had more passion and I have a debilitating strain of extreme competitiveness and I’m pretty sure Kristen has one too).  And then, people don’t tell you this, but memories of sixth grade antics can often stay with you for life. Kristen had a phobia of anyone, especially a boy, seeing her walking towards the bathroom because he might be able to guess why she was going there. I don’t know why she thought that was so embarrassing because actually we often went to the bathroom just to hang out and not be in class. (Sixth grade me was not the model of motivated academic integrity that I became in later years.) But this post is not actually about sixth grade. It’s just that the other day I was thinking about how Kristen and I would pretend to be going to our lockers or staring off over the balcony if someone came out into the hall while we were heading towards the bathroom.  A couple weeks ago, while I was doing some village site selections, I was thinking of that because I kept having to obviously leave the meeting to use the facilities, which in this case were the various scrawny trees that were far enough from the main path to provide a modicum of privacy. But not too far because whatever it was I ate wanted to be free of me.

Sneaking out of this meeting while sitting in the front:
not easy. But I pretending to be taking photos.
I think I fooled everyone.

Side note: when you work in places like I do, you become less sensitive to talking about topics like this. If you are sensitive, you might want to skip this post, but I’ll try to use as many euphemisms as I can come up with (and I’ve had a lot of practice, so I’m pretty good at it), and hopefully you’ll be fine. But still, this post is not about sixth grade me, and it’s also not about diarrhea.

As I was squatted down, leaning against a tree, with dead dry grass poking me in places that grass should never be found, I had two thoughts. The first was “WHY didn’t I just take a sick day today?” and the second was “This is where most people in this area have to go every time they need to do this, and since these people are drinking water from a mudhole, they are probably in this situation a lot.” This was not the first time I’ve had that thought, but it’s always more real to me when I’m squatting in the bushes.  And I always feel thankful again for my bathroom—be it ever so humble, it’s attached to my house, and I love it. No more being accosted by drunk guys at the outhouse. No more putting on rubber boots before trekking through knee high grass potentially hiding a deadly snake on the walk to the outhouse. But definitely haunted by plenty of lizards, mosquitos, crickets, spiders, and an occasional cockroach. I still love it. Do you love your bathroom as much as you should?

Guava leaf tea--natural
remedy for diarrhea,
thanks Mom and Internet.

 Neverthirst is not constructing bathrooms in South Sudan. Maybe someday we will be at that point. We are still currently at the point of dealing with clean water. I usually think this is the right thing to focus on because—you need clean water to drink for survival. But did you know that clean water by itself only takes care of about 30% of all water-borne/water-related diseases? I heard that statistic somewhere, and I don’t currently have the internet on to check its veracity, but it’s possible that it is at least close to accurate.  Hand-washing and good sanitation techniques take care of most of the rest of the diseases, and probably that hand sanitizer gel stuff gets everything else. I haven’t confirmed that, but Westerners love that stuff like it is the mother of their children.   My friend and colleague here has recently tried to get me to use it on all of my cuts so they won’t get infected and give me another staph infection.

I don’t really have a point here. I’m not trying to make you feel guilty for what you have—that isn’t going to change the reality of what people don’t have here. And it also won’t change their situation for you to realize the blessing of what you have and be thankful for it (but I think you should do that anyway). And frankly, your life might not ultimately be that much better than the lives of my friends in South Sudan. In fact, it is possible that your life could be worse.  Having a lot of great stuff doesn’t make you happier than everyone else or we would never hear about anti-depressants and suicides in Hollywood. 

I guess I just wanted to share some stories with you and let you think about them. Because these are real people who have situations in their lives that are hard. I’m going to tell you a few of their difficulties, but also remember that these are real people who are more than just the sum of their hardships, just as you are more than the sum of yours.

So here is my friend Edward. He is a village elder in Kyara (pronounced ‘Chara’). He’s blind. During our meeting about drilling a hand pump in his village, he said, “It is so difficult for us to have water, that I don’t want to wash my clothes often. You see these clothes that I’m wearing [they were full of holes]? I have nice clothes! I do, but I don’t want to wear them because then I couldn’t wash them because we don’t have enough water.” Note: my life is a million times easier than his life, but our pump was broken, and for a long time I was trying to conserve the water in our tank, so I dispensed with many watery tasks because I just didn’t want to waste water on trivial things. So I get where he is coming from. His situation was worse, so he prioritized even more.

Edward

Below somewhere is a photo of my new friend Lajanti. I was following up on an application for water. I noticed a hand pump about a mile away. (The location where we were was on a small hill so we could see all around, where the other pumps were.) I thought, “This situation doesn’t seem too bad.” But Rejoice, the woman living in the home where we were visiting said, “The well has a low yield." [Repent confirmed this, as it is the pump that is drilled outside of his church.] "We can pump for a while, but then we have to wait for the water to come back. Also, there are so many people using the pump that you have to wait in line for an hour or more sometimes. For me, if I want water, I have to get up at five." [It’s still pitch black at 5:00am in South Sudan, and there are no streetlights or other lights at all—it’s great for stargazing, but not so much for doing anything in the wee hours of the morning.] "Then I can go down to the pump and fill up my jerrycans. If I don’t go then, I won’t be able to get water for my family. I just won’t. People start queuing up as soon as it’s light and I won’t be able to sit there and wait until my turn.”

While I was at Rejoice’s house, I saw Lajanti coming by. I saw she had two jerrycans with her, so I knew that she was going down to get water. I decided to talk to her to hear about her water situation. I wanted to know what her opinion of the pump there was because sometimes people will tell you completely different things. Lajanti said, “Oh, I don’t live here. I live way back up there in the forest.”

Lajanti

 “How long does it take you to get here?” I asked.

Laughter from both Rejoice and Lajanti. “Oh, a long time,” she said.

“A very long time!” said Rejoice. “It’s so far, she will have to stop and rest sometimes on the way. Maybe it will take about two hours to get here.”

“So you have two jerrycans,” I point out obviously, “Do you carry them both on your head?”

“No,” says Lajanti. “We can’t do that. I bring my jerrycans to Rejoice’s house. Then I leave one here. I go down to the hand-pump and fill up one jerrycan. I bring it back here to leave with Rejoice where it will be safe. Then I go down to fill up the other jerrycan. Then I take one jerrycan home with me. Then I come back here and get the other jerrycan.”

“Do you do this every day?” I asked.

“Pretty much every day, “ she said. “We don’t have any pumps where I live.”

“So you use only 2 jerrycans of water for your family each day?”

“Oh no. I use only one. The other is for my blind neighbor who can’t get down to the pump to get water. I just want to help him out.”

Readers: Lajanti is a hero. A genuine superhero, who manages to wear her underwear under her clothes and doesn’t need a cape flapping around behind her. (Though she would probably find it very convenient to have super-strength and/or super-speed.) Repent and I are looking into how we can find a way to get water in her area, but it’s not so easy. We don’t have our drilling team back in town until December. Meanwhile, Lajanti never even asked me if I would drill in her area. She just told me her story very simply and honestly. That’s her life. It’s hard, but she is quick to smile and laugh and help out her neighbors. She can’t imagine a life of cars, electricity, supermarkets and washing machines.

I did not take this photo of Samiha, so don't blame me
for the thumb at the top, but I still love this moment.

And meanwhile, away up north in Khartoum, a feminist moment in honor of Women's Day: at a meeting with a potential national partner requesting a funding partnership, a beautiful kickass Sudanese girl spoke up about her work in women’s empowerment in the area. “The men [from her organization] would call me often and say, ‘Are you in the office?’ and I would say, ‘Yes, I’m working.’ And they would say, ‘Where did you get the funds to do your work?’ and I would say, ‘Who is going to give me funds? You are the ones who hired me and the only ones I could get money from anyway.  If you haven’t given me money, then I don’t have any. But just because I don’t have any funds, does not mean that is going to stop me from doing my work.’” And this is what she said to other women she recruited to help her in her work, “We can’t sit around and wait for foreigners to come help us! This is our country and our people, and we need to help each other out!” And she is awesome, and then when the other guy said with typical male condescension, “See how even women can help this organization!” I had to think about rose petals and flying gummy bears to stop myself from yelling, “WHAT?! She is not ‘helping’—she is the ONLY ONE DOING ANYTHING.” Fortunately, thoughts of rose petals and levitating candy are notoriously helpful to people who need to find the strength to keep up the silent ‘nod and smile.’ And fortunately, she is not alone in actively caring for her people and her country regardless of foreign funding. Another good friend of mine is constantly scheming ways to help disabled people here, helping those with new cochlear implants learn how to function in a hearing world and teaching Arabic sign language to university students interested in working with the deaf. “Why don’t you start a school for children with disabilities in your hometown?” I asked Samiha the other day.  “Oh yeah, I already did that. Five blind students just finished high school this last year.” The power of one hard-working woman...

There’s not really a purpose to this post.  And the problem with writing purposelessly is that it is hard to know how to end. I’m not asking you to donate money, though you can if you want: neverthirstwater.org or ias-intl.org (for Sudan), but I thought these stories were important. These people are important. It’s important for us as human being denizens of Planet Earth to care about each other and not live in total ignorance of others and their joys and difficulties and differences.  I think it’s important because I believe each person has been created in the image of God, and that He loves us and wants us to know each other. He doesn’t discriminate or differentiate between us, and one of the first ever recorded statements propounding human equality is in the Bible: There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring according to the promise.” (Galatians 3:28-29). And while this world isn’t perfect and it isn’t going to last forever, God does genuinely care about what happens to us in this world. He cares that we have what we need, and He cares that WE care that others have what THEY need too, though, like I said before, the things that we think we need in our fancy “developed” nations may not be the same things people in other places think they need. Anyway, Lajanti knows this, and she’s helping her blind neighbor get water and my friend Samiha in Khartoum knows this. And I’m sure there are plenty of people all around the world who also know this and help others in various ways, and I know some of them, but I’m really trying to end this post somehow someday, so I’m not going to write them all down. You feel free to write their stories on YOUR blogs though.  And then send me the link so I can read them too, but make sure to do that before next week when I go back to the South and no internet.

Mundri sunrise--this is why you run with your phone.