The Old Old Story Part 2

And so.....

This is sunrise the next day, but pretend it is sunset
to set the mood.

There might have been about 100 of us, trekking through the jungle when gunshots rang out right beside us. We didn’t stop to look if they were firing at us. We all ran for it. I followed Repent, clutching his baby and trying not to lose him in the chaotic crowd splitting off in different directions. Ahead I saw a little boy about 3 years old screaming in terror for his  mother. I turned and asked others if they knew where his mother was, and no one did. Everyone just ran around him while he stood there sobbing. I shifted Halina, grabbed his hand and told him to come with me, “I got you. You’re tough, keep running.” It speaks to his terror of being alone that he took the scary khawaja’s hand.  When we got farther away from the fighting, another lady not carrying a baby took the boy and later that night when we stopped at a compound on the way to our camp, we found people who recognized him and were able to get him back to his family.

By the time we made it to camp, a little clearing with a few raised rocks in it that Repent had known about for some reason, our group had shrunk down to less than 50 and we had run about 4 miles up and down, over rivers, and through a stinging ant bed. The ant bed happened towards the end when it was starting to get dark and we could hear fighting behind us so we were moving fast and not watching our feet. Suddenly we felt stinging biting all over our feet. We took our shoes off and ran, swatting at our legs. But these are ants with little pinchers and they hold on. I didn’t get all of them off until later that night when I was sitting down and able to pull them off. I even found one attached to my shoe the next day.

Men on patrol with bows and arrows

That night we made camp with the help of people’s flashlights—we threw down some sleeping mats and blocked off the path with branches and sticks to make it look like we weren’t back there. Meanwhile groups of young Moru men had organized themselves into patrols—one guy with a gun with several guys with bows and arrows—and they were walking around making sure the refugees hiding in the jungle were OK. The ladies handed out the food and then we ate and went to sleep in a big pile. I slept on a rock and covered up with a piece of cloth that a nice lady named Esther leant me. She walked to her family 30 miles away in another town the next day, but she let me keep the cloth. It was very good to have it because it was freezing that night (not literally) and sleeping on a rock is not comfortable. And I don’t think that I slept much that night either. I mostly lay there, listening to people talk loudly on their cell phones (technology makes it a lot harder for people to hide in the jungle, I think) and the sounds of fighting down in town. I texted people, read ridiculous articles on my phone about how rebel groups hundreds of miles of terrible roads away from us had claimed victory in our town and the boss and I made plans for me to leave the next day.

Waking up and brushing teeth with sticks

I woke up early the next morning, as did everyone, and after a quick drink of water, I said my goodbyes and walked back to town with Repent. At Repent’s house, he packed up a few things, including an old solar panel with a few wires coming off it, which later came in handy to charge his phone battery by tying the wires to the battery with a rubber band.  While we were at his house, the SPLA secretary came by with a patrol group and he told me there was again no way I could get across the river to the airstrip. “The bridge is dangerous, “ he told me, “ And the river is too high to cross anywhere else.”

The road MAF tried
to land on

So I called MAF to let them know, and we started making plans to land on our new road if MAF would give permission. We walked back to our camp to drop off Repent’s solar panel and then we headed towards the road at a town called Janga. Once arriving in Janga, several miles away, we headed to the road to get some specific info about it for MAF—does it slope, are there obstructions on either side, any potholes? Then we had to go get permission from the Commissioner to have a plane land on the road.

On our way to the Commissioner’s house, we ran into Jeffreys and Esther and their families. It was so good to see them, but they had not been as organized as Repent and hadn’t eaten anything in the last 15 hours or so. Jeffreys is diabetic and he was not doing well. Esther’s blind mother was lying on the ground, as she’d hurt herself when she had fallen the day before running to the jungle.  When Vaida and Esther got back with some cassava plants they’d dug up, we all had a little food and Jeffreys perked up right away.

Crossing back over the Mori River to Repent's house

While we were sitting there, MAF called to tell us that they’d been denied permission by their organization to land in the road, thinking that it was too dangerous for their pilots and believing that it would be safer to wait out the fighting until I could get to the airstrip. I was actually kind of relieved to hear this news, as that road was packed with people running from Mundri. Having a plane swoop down and take the last khawaja to safety in the outside world, seemed way too white privilege for me to handle at that moment. Though the reality is that I knew that I’d probably get out soon and that is a direct result of my nationality and privileged position as an INGO worker.

 We went down to meet with the Commissioner anyway. He was obviously very busy talking to a million people meeting in his compound and answering a billion phone calls, but he was gracious to meet with us, and he updated us on the situation. What most people in Mundri believe happened is that when the police, Executive Director, and Commissioner went up to investigate the death of the soldiers on Friday morning, some Dinka soldiers in our garrison from town, went up and ambushed them, either thinking that they weren’t taking the deaths of the Dinka soldiers seriously enough or because they were looking for an excuse to cause trouble, being annoyed about the Dinka cattle that was forced out or maybe there was some other reason. Whatever it was, when the other half of the garrison, mostly Western Equatorians, heard that a Western Equatorian was killed, they got mad and turned on the Dinka soldiers. So basically the commander of the garrison just lost control of his men. They ran wild across Mundri fighting each other. I also heard that 3 trucks full of soldiers from Rumbek (seriously, if the names are throwing you off, find a map of South Sudan—clearly you have internet access if you are reading this) came down to join in the fray, also being angry about their cattle being kicked out. And possibly disgruntled Moru youth joined in. I heard a lot about “disgruntled Moru youth” from military people I spoke with later. Odds are high that there were a few involved, though I haven’t personally met any.

Repent and a gun-toting patrol man

So the Commissioner had called for help, and the SPLA (look that up too) had sent troops from Maridi and Juba to come help. They were close by the time we spoke with the Commissioner. We went back to the jungle to wait it out. When they arrived we heard machine guns, tanks, lots of fighting for several hours. We stayed put until just after sunset when it started to rain, and we ran for cover at the house of a friend of Repent’s. The women and children stayed in one small house and the men in another. The children spread out on the floor, with mothers around them to calm them if they woke up during the night (they did), and Maria (an older lady) and myself shared the twin bed in the corner.

By Sunday morning, Mark had come across the number of the Brigadier General who had come in from Juba the day before. This was thanks to a friend in high places, and not my father in Indonesia, as Mark’s stressed out sleep deprived brain initially thought. I called the Brig Gen the next day, and he jovially told me that everyone could go home—no problem. I joyfully passed on this news to Repent who calmly said, “OK. That’s nice. Let’s sit down and have some tea, and then we will look into going home.”

I said, “The General said it was OK! Let’s definitely go!”

He handed me a cup of tea and pulled out a chair. I sat down to drink it and plan what I would do when I got home.

One of our treks to various places

While sipping our tea, we noticed a family with all their stuff, walk by heading home. And then 45 minutes later, we saw them coming back.

“What’s the news?” someone called out.

“The patrol men sent us back. They said it’s still dangerous in town and people are looting the marketplace.”

I stopped planning what I would do when I got home. Instead, I went with Repent to have church out under a neighbor’s mango tree with all the other nearby refugees. It was a lovely service, and I was the only one who got sunburnt.

Before his phone went dead-
trekking through the teak

The rest of the day was spent entertaining children, which is what I’d been doing the whole time. The other ladies did not need or want me trying to help out with their efficient system of cooking and cleaning, but the children did like me making origami frogs and birds and paper planes and teaching them how to whistle on a piece of grass and how to play various Korean slapping games. That afternoon we went out to get water from the nearby pond to carry back for bathing. Then we sat around and drank ginger coffee and talked about everything happening in Mundri. By this time my phone was permanently off to save the last 10% of the battery for the call to MAF to tell them I was on the way to the airstrip. They were planning to come early the next day, and I was planning to be escorted there by the military (they offered!), but if I didn’t confirm that I was on my way to the airstrip, they weren’t going to send the plane. So my phone was off, and it was a cloudy rainy day so Repent’s little solar charger wasn’t going to work, and I heard later that there were a few people (Mark, Mom) a bit worried about our lack of communication. But we were fine. Others like Damari’s daughter Nadia were not. She had gone back to her house to find that every single thing she owned was stolen from her compound—her clothes (she had what she was wearing when she fled), her cooking utensils, and even her jerrycans for collecting water.

My friend Siti who also lost everything

“Can she buy those things again?” I asked stupidly.

“How? She has no money. She was crying so much on the phone when she called me,” Damari said. (I gave her some of the money I had with me, but if the market was closed, I knew it wouldn’t mean much.)

That night I let the kids watch Despicable Me on the ipad because I didn’t need that battery, and they thought it was great until it started raining and we all ran inside and went to bed.

The next morning Repent and I got up and walked through thigh-high wet grass to the Commissioner’s house where I had arranged to meet the Brig Gen to drive to the airstrip. We got to his house, but he wasn’t there because he’d stayed in town with the military men. There was a group of young men with bows and arrows and guns keeping an eye out. After we had sat for a while and I used some precious battery power to call the General (“Oh yeah, right. I’ll come now), the men came and told us they thought we should leave because it wasn’t safe there anymore. I never found out if anything happened there, but we left quickly, walking down the main road towards town. Repent whispered to me, “Don’t call anyone while we are walking here. People are watching us.” We walked fast and silently towards town. Just as we got to the main road, we saw the General’s car coming towards us. We hopped in, and as we drove and I called MAF to tell them I was on the way, I looked out the window to see the damage to Mundri. The doors of almost every store in the market were ripped off and trash covered the ground where looters had chugged soda and eaten cookies and thrown down the wrappers before carrying the rest off with them.

Neverthirst pump being used by IDPs

Even though I’d thought I was going straight to the airstrip and had informed MAF of that, the driver took me to the Commissioner’s office because I had to talk to him and the Brig Gen and the Commander. We discussed the events of the last few days, speculated on the perpetrators (“Out of control soldiers,” suggested me. “Disgruntled Moru youth,” said the Commander. ), and he told  me how he was ambushed in Lui on his way to Mundri and had to fight his way through. After a quick photo, we finally went to the airstrip escorted by the Red Berets, the most elite force in the SPLA. I felt important. They lined up on either side of the airstrip until the plane landed, picked me up, and I left.

While it was not easy to leave Mundri in an uncertain state, it was the right thing to do, as food and other resources were scare, and I was one of the few people who could actually leave. Also, Repent was going to split his focus on to me from the millions of other people he was responsible for, no matter what I said. He was responsible for his children, his sister’s kids, his brother’s kids, and his cousin had dropped his kids off at Repent’s while he was his father’s funeral in another town. We had a lot of kids with us.

Red beret

People leaving home with their most
important belongings

It seems unfair that I can just hop countries to shop in places where I can buy what I need. Even though I only got out with the clothes on my back and a bag full of electronics, I was able to buy some clothes in Uganda to get me by and many kind and generous people in the US helped me buy lots of other stuff I “needed” for American life once I got back to the US. My friends who lost everything won’t be able to do that, even though the market is slowly opening again.

I love that even though I’ve barely had my new passport a year, the lady in Qatar who checked it said, “Wow. You have used this a lot!” But I hate that I have used it to leave behind people I love in a tough situation.

I am glad that I had the opportunity to be with friends sleeping on rocks and brushing my teeth with sticks and sharing a communal water cup, but I’m also glad to be sleeping by myself in a comfortable bed, having my own toothbrush, and taking hot showers in my sister’s house. I love my nieces and nephews, but I miss my friends in South Sudan too. I’m also glad that whenever I call, I hear that things are improving there, but I know there is a long way to go, and I won’t be useful there for quite some time.

Commissioner James, unwashed white girl,
Brig. Gen Mobil and Commander Okout

My friends haven’t lost hope. They are ready to get things back to normal. They are working hard in their gardens and on their homes. It is not easy, but they are resilient. Still, I hope that one day recovering from war won’t be second nature to them because they won’t be having to constantly recover from war. I want to see development and good things happen in Mundri. Maybe I won’t be a part of that. Maybe I will. They don’t really need me. None of the people I was with lost hope. They trusted the Lord to help them, and they never doubted His sovereignty over everything. And they helped each other and took care of the lonely foreigner and if you want to help them, check out Neverthirst’s website.

This has been very long and not very funny, but if you read it, I guess you wanted to know the story. Thanks to those who called and emailed and posted on Facebook. I appreciate the thoughts and prayers and I hope that even though I’m out now for the time being, you won’t forget about the people of Mundri.

 And now some photos of me entertaining children:

Braiding my very dirty hair

Check-in call time and photo session

Korean slapping games in South Sudan

This photo is from the iPad.
See--I didn't only waste my phone battery!

Movie night

The Old Old Story Part 1

See how pretty Mundri is?

You know when you’ve heard the same joke over and over how it stops being funny? I feel like the story of what happened last week is now boring and old news. I’ve told the story multiple times now to multiple people—even on TV. And I feel like I’m becoming that person that you pity-laugh for (the professor of the extra-boring subject who is barely hanging on until retirement who holds your grade in his gnarled shaking hands).  But people are still asking, even after watching that clip of me on Alabama TV, a beautiful idea of my boss that he gave me an hour’s warning for, the day after I arrived in the US, and had rolled out of bed, bleary-eyed to go shopping. So—no shower, no stage make-up, yes t-shirt… That time I was on TV in China when I accidentally joined the Communist party (a story for another time)-- that time I also had no warning and showed up with dirty hair and comfortable clothes, just planning to hang out with some orphan babies. I think this was probably the last nail in the coffin of my TV career. Even if I have a face for radio, my voice sounds really annoying on recordings too, so that’s not even an option either. That’s also why I don’t have a message on my voice mail. That, and I don’t actually know how to put a message on my voicemail.  And I only have voicemail in the US, so no worries, but let’s just get this over with and get back to the story.

Mundri pizza invented by me, culinary genius:
cassava flour crust with tomato sauce
and whatever else I have to put on it.

The situation in South Sudan right now is -- to quote my old friend Rakesh. – not awesome. Fighting is dragging on and the economy is getting worse and worse. Example: when I first arrived in Mundri two years ago, you could buy 2 eggs for 1 pound. Now it’s 2 eggs for 5 pounds. Not awesome. Especially if you like to bake things and cooking eggs is one of the easiest lazy meals a bachelor can make. I’ve decided I’m a bachelor. Not a bachelorette, because that evokes images of drunken sorority girls in Vegas wearing plastic tiaras and eating inappropriately-shaped cookies. I’ll graduate to old maid in a few years, but for now I’m a bachelor. I have all the characteristics—I clean my house enough to maintain a basic level of hygiene but if there is a pile of clothes on the chair that I pulled off the line and didn’t put away for 2 weeks or a month, no one cares. And if I want to eat gummy bears for dinner, I will (if I’m not in South Sudan). And cooking for one is about whatever I want to eat, and it should be super-easy to fix and super-hard to mess up.

So eggs in Mundri are too expensive and this has set off a chain reaction of banditry, in protest over the price of eggs and various other things. And if you don’t have money or your own, but you do have firearms, then the logical solution to your problems is to ambush cars traveling major roads and steal all their money. The problem with this, is that soon the people who have money will start flying everywhere instead of taking busses, and the people who are available to be robbed are not the people who can afford it.

Trucks stuck in Mundri road

Another complication in the Mundri situation has been the cattle herders. Some Dinka cattle herders have herded their cattle down to Moru lands, allowing them free range to roam across God’s green earth as nature intended. Destined for beef, they think it’s nice to let them enjoy their life as long as it may be. Moru farmers who spend hours and days and months, sweating in the hot sun as they dig out their land to plant their farms all by hand with no machinery, do not think this is awesome. They do not approve of foreign cows destroying their livelihoods. After months (years?) of tension that broke out into several skirmishes where various numbers of cows and people were killed, the government issued a decree that all of those guys should get out. This was a big deal because most of those guys were armed by various military dudes who had paid the young guys to guard their cattle there. But amazingly (or miraculously), the eviction went mostly peacefully. Even the president moved his cows.

It was to this environment of migrating cows and roadside banditry that I returned to from a brief trip to Bahrain to hang out with a lovely friend and her lovely friends. I wrote about this for posterity, and I’ll probably post it later. And yes, I flew.

Some normal life things I did in Mundri in days prior to running to the jungle:

Got mad about this hand pump being always overcrowded

Had this meeting to map out the area and plan
where to drill a new well so that people wouldn't have to wait
in line for 5 hours for water

Hung out with these guys

Learned to crush gravel for biosand filters with friends

Ripped up my legs driving through thorn bushes with Repent

We had a couple of days of hanging around close to home, during which I dug out my garden, planted half of it and conducted many computer lessons. We had a few outside trips to make. On one of those trips, I was admiring how far Repent and I have come in our relationship, when I asked him to pull over because I had to pee. “Yeah,” he said, “All this dagadaga (bumps on the road) is making me need to pee too.” Flashback to two years ago when the conversation went like this, “Repent, can you stop for a minute? I need to do something…” It is convenient to be on those terms with people you run to the jungle with.  And a little ways down the road, when our motorcycle broke down, he trusted me to open up the cover with my pocketknife to see that the chain had broken. Then we dragged it 3 miles into the nearest town, while UN tanks drove past staring and not offering to help….classic UN. A qat chewing guy fixed it up right away—just like we were in Yemen or something. But you know the thing about Moru people? They kindly asked us if we were OK and if our problem was that we had run out of gas. So even though they thought we were stupid, they were still willing to try to help us out with our problem. So you can see how no one expected anything to happen in Mundri the next week.

Carrying bike to Lui

A bottle of water that a truck driver stopped to
give us when he saw us walking (not UN)

UN tanks heading away from Mundri

Qat guy fixing the bike

Thursday night I was calmly watching Arrested Development, cursing the midnight thumping music as usual when suddenly it stopped. It took me a while to notice that everyone else’s lights and music were completely off because I was distracted by the plight of the Bluth family, but I suddenly realized the only sound around was me. I quickly shut my computer and snapped off my battery-powered lantern and got ready for bed in the dark. But the silence was eerie.

I lay stiffly in bed, watching some flashlights flickering outside of my gate, and suddenly remembered the recent violent robberies in the market just on the other side of my fence. While I’d already taken the precaution of hiding the majority of my cash, I was worried about all of the other things that could be stolen from my house, and the fact that I was completely alone there (a fact that usually gives me great joy, but was not so encouraging at that moment). I decided that it would be a night to sleep fully clothed with my passport in hand. My passport is like my security blanket. I need it beside me to help me feel safe. Anyway, I definitely did not sleep that night. I sat in bed tensely listening to all the whispers outside and the gunfire that started up soon after. I planned several foolproof escape plans for running out of my house and compound. Around 4am, something hit my roof with a loud ping that shook my bed. It was something hard and metallic, so I assumed it was a bullet, though I was told the next morning that the fighting was too far away to make that possible. All I know was that my house is not under a tree, a rock couldn’t have fit it that hard or fast, and if a giant bird fell out of the sky, it made a quick recovery because I couldn’t find a body the next day. But after that I decided just to go ahead and text my family and my boss in other time zones who would be awake.  I remember texting, “Maybe I’m crazy, but I feel like something is wrong. I don’t know what. And maybe I’m imagining the gun shots, but something feels off.” Mark immediately started planning my evacuation, but I said, “Just let me see what actually happened. I really might just be crazy.”

The next morning I decided not to go for my usual run up the street in case there was something wrong and a white girl running out of town caused some kind of panic. But when I went out to the morning meeting place until the mango tree in our compound, Repent, Jeffreys, and Lexon were all there.

“So tell me what happened last night,” I said. “I heard the gunshots. I know there was something.”

Jeffreys: Oh it wasn’t anything big. Just two soldiers were shot and one was injured in Okari (a village about 4.5 miles up the street from my house where I was planning to run towards that morning but canceled).

Me: So I can still go to my meeting at my church? (About 3 miles from that location.)

J: Yeah, sure. No problem.

Then, as we sat there talking, we noticed people running our way. Repent also casually mentioned that the market was still closed, a very unusual occurrence for our town. After a series of phone calls to each of the men in our circle we found out that the county Executive Director had been killed when he and our new Commissioner (head of our county appointed 2 weeks prior by our Governor to replace our last Commissioner who resigned in disgrace last year) went up to investigate the previous night’s incident with the police force.  Everyone was quite tense and this point and I was told to call the evacuation plane.

Lexon said, “It’s probably best if you just head out for a bit and we see what happens. Maybe nothing, but also—this is how wars can start.”

So I made the call.  Several. And called in lots of favors to finally get through to someone who would help me. MAF offered to come at 3:30pm that day and take me to Juba. I agreed and went in to pack. Meanwhile, Lexon and Repent went home to check on their kids as bursts of gunfire were heard coming towards the town. Jeffreys came back to sit with me as his wife had returned home and his kids are older.

I wash my dishes in the rain
because I have no kitchen sink.

I had finished packing, and I was washing all my dishes and trying to tidy up my house a bit because I hate coming back to a disgusting house. It’s not hygienic. While I was getting my trash ready to throw in our giant hole, Jeffreys came to my door and told me to grab my bag and move to his house, as it was farther from the main road and gunshots were in the main marketplace area now. “Just lie on the floor when you hear them, “ said Lexon, but I was packing so I ignored him because…common sense.

I went off calmly to throw away my trash while Jeffreys yelled at me to just leave it and come on. I threw it away (I’m a good citizen) and then ran to grab my bag and run off to Jeffreys’s house. At his house we called someone to come pick me up and take me to the airstrip, and while we were waiting for him to come, I made plans for biosand filters and contingency money. After sorting out a few things, I came back and sat under Jeffreys’s mango tree, and while we were talking gunfire started right outside his fence. We ran for cover in their little mud houses, lying on the floor, while Vaida prayed and Jeffreys maintained his deadpan expression unless he was telling Vaida to turn off her phone so that no one knew we were there. Of course, my phone rang about that time with MAF telling me that their plane was almost there. I whispered into the phone that we were hiding and I didn’t think I was going to make it. He offered to hang around until they ran out of fuel, but I told him not to worry about it. The fighting was heading towards the river which separated us from the airstrip and there is only one bridge over the river, which is currently high thanks to rainy season.

Headed to Repent's just before we flattened on
the ground for a bit when gunshots sounded nearby

Once the fighting moved past us about an hour later, we grabbed some stuff (I took my computer bag with all my electronics and passport) and moved further away from the main road to Jeffreys’ nephew’s house. We hung out there and watched the young men gather with their bows and arrows and rusty old guns. I tried to convince Jeffreys to let me go home and grab the satellite phone and an extra battery to charge up my phone, but every time I mentioned it, gunshots would ping out and we never got around to it. So about 45 minutes later when we made our trek towards Repent, I realized that the sat phone would not be coming with us to fulfill its sole purpose of being there for us in an emergency.

We walked towards Repent’s house, except for once when we were being shot at, and we shuffle-ran, sort of hunched over like crazy people. When we got to Repent’s, he was ready. I mean, if you are ever going to be in a crisis, you absolutely want to be with Repent. He was PREPARED. And because he is Repent, he never loses his sense of humor and always finds a reason to smile. At his compound, his beautiful wife Joy and the other neighbor women (the men had weapons and had joined the defender groups) had packed food, water, mats for sleeping, cooking utensils and clothing. They handed out the bundles and passed out the babies and we started walking. I took Repent’s youngest daughter, Halina. Jeffreys stayed with Esther and her elderly blind mother to wait for his wife. They said they would meet us later, but they ended up running to a different part of the jungle. We went down the valley, across the road and then forded the Mori River, clawing our way up the bank on the other side, throwing babies and luggage up to people ahead of us.

Jona and Sylvester (Jeffrey's son and Repent's brother)
walking towards Repent's house

The exodus begins

Repent talking to a patrol guy

Organizing a patrol with bows and arrows

Pre-jungle run selfie with Halina

On the road to camp

Crossing the Mori River

That is the end of Part 1. But you don't have to wait long for Part 2 because I already wrote it. I'm nice like that.

Sneak preview waking up in camp the next day.