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.