Dirt and Mangos

I’ve been back in Mundri a week now, and I’m getting used to always being dirty, sweaty, and surrounded by a cloud of bugs. I’ve stopped thinking about my legs as appendages—it’s more accurate to think of them as food for hungry insects. Actually, by not wearing bug spray most of the time, I’m probably doing the most generous act of my time here in Africa by providing food for the hungry. I’m also testing my theory that I’m immune to malaria—so far so good…

And speaking of hungry, I’ve started my garden, which is to say I spent a few hours hacking at grass with my hoe and then raking up all the grass with my rake and realizing that there is STILL a lot of grass I need to hack out, but I now have 25 blisters on my city-girl hands, and muscles I never knew I had (because I really never needed them before) are hurting and suddenly slash-and-burn farming techniques are sounding good to me…And I actually had the thought, “Why am I doing this? Do I really need vegetables? I can get tomatoes and onions in the marketplace. That keeps me in the vitamins. It’s not like I’m growing chocolate or gummy bears or something essential to life.”

Hours or work led to that mashed piece of grass--
seriously, send gummy bears

[NOTE: Somebody send me gummy bears because I’m running out of fruit snacks, which are just gummy bears shaped like fruits to try to help children realize that fruits are good (nice try, suckers!) and also they give you 100% of your daily vitamin C needs. Gummy worms are also acceptable.]

Anyway, it’s bandaid season for me, but that’s why I’m so lucky that my mom keeps my stock of good sticky Indonesian bandaids full at all times. It’s really great to have a mother you can count on (Happy Mother’s Day, Mom—this shout-out equals a card and flowers.)!

Esther knocking mangos out of the tree

Fortunately for my nutrition (otherwise I’d be eating only powerbars left by visitors here that I just realized are mostly expired—or do they taste weird because of fake sugar? Expiration dates are mostly suggestions, right? So is that whole ‘keep in a cool, dry place,’ right? Right? Oh, whatever, you know I'll eat them anyway), I made it back just in time for the end of mango season. When I got in, Repent and Lexon told me, “Too bad, it’s over, there are no more edible mangos on our trees.” While those words were coming out of their mouths, Esther was knocking perfectly edible mangos out of said trees with a long bamboo stick, which just goes to show that women can make things happen that men are too lazy to work on…though I admit that I wasn’t jumping in to help knock mangos down because

            A) we only have one mango stick and

            B) I’m not as tall as everyone else, and you need some height to help the stick reach the best mangos up in the top of the trees.

           C) I do not have good hand-eye coordination. If I were trying to throw a rock at you, I would hit the person next to you, almost inevitably. So if you are sitting around somewhere, minding your own business, and the person next to you gets hit by a rock, start thinking about what it was that you did that made me mad.

Jona and Oguna eating popcorn for the
first time (so they say)-they liked it

But I did redeem myself as a resourceful woman shortly after the mango incident.  I was talking to Baby (his real name is Sylvester, but Bobby is the name everyone calls him. And the correct local pronunciation of ‘Bobby’ sounds like ‘Baby.’ So I just call him that—it makes me feel like Justin Bieber sometimes if I yell it several times in a row), and I had asked him to turn the generator on for me—I can sometimes turn it on, but then sticking in the weird mangled cord to attach to the plug strip is scary.  A few minutes later he came back to me looking for the cord to turn it on—it’s the thing that wraps around a thing you pull to start up the motor. I’m pretty sure that it was taken by the kids who have been hanging out with me over the past few days. It was cute how they were always around, yelling at me to come and play or give them various candies or toys, but now I’m really nervous to change clothes or do other inappropriate things alone in my room, because I suddenly hear giggles and then see a couple of little heads poking up over my window sill, staring at me. I’m assuming it was the kids that stole the cord, because they are the same kids I caught taking stuff out of our trash, and they must be doing that to others because they left some used hypodermic needles outside on my back porch after playing and then had the nerve to come back and ask me to hand them over.  I know kids play with weird things—from about age 6 to age 9 you would never have found me without ten or twenty rubber bands wrapped around my wrists, as they were one of my main sources of childhood entertainment (I can do tricks and twist them into random shapes like stars and bird cages and scissors—shutup, it was awesome. Rubber bands are for cool people).  Also I have a very clear memory of how excited I was when my friend agreed to give me a bendy plastic leg snapped out of some unfortunate Barbie, and how mad I was when I realized I forgot it at her house.  I still remember some of the things I was planning to do with that leg, but you’re already getting creeped out by the fact that I picked up rubber bands off the toxic dirty streets of Indonesia and put them on my hands, so I’ll just leave it and admit to being a strange child (I blame birth order because middle child syndrome is a serious psychological issue. So naturally my sisters should bear some of the blame too. And my Dad, but not Mom because—Mother’s Day). But still, I have a strict policy against giving sharp, used needles to children to play with. They got over it when I gave them a slightly less dangerous toy— balloons I brought from Indonesia last year. But anyway, I’m pretty sure they took that rope thing for the generator to add to their odd collection of toys somewhere. It had a shiny plastic handle on it and was therefore irresistible.

Sweat+dirt+sunburn+crazy kids=I'm back in Mundri!

So Baby comes to me and asks me where the rope thing went. I told him it was outside with the generator. We go back to look with no luck. I realize what its fate probably was and how we will probably never get it back. So naturally, I start thinking about Plan B—where can we find a rope or rope-like thing to wrap around the other thing so that we can start the generator? I offer several suggestions to Baby:

Me: Here, we can cut off some of these ropey things on the mop that is covered with ants and is clearly never used by anyone ever!

Baby: No. They won’t be strong enough.

Me: Here is a hairband thingy I use to keep my bangs out of my eyes when I’m running!

Baby: No. It’s stretchy. It won’t work.

Me: OK—well what are YOUR ideas? Give me something. What can we do?

Baby: Nothing. We can never use the generator again.

At this point I stormed off muttering something about people who quit before they have even tried any of my perfectly good ideas—Baby was still holding my hairband in his hands and staring at it with consternation.

Fortunately, I am not a man who gives up before trying to knock a mango out of the tree to SEE if it has any worms in it because it MIGHT not. I also don’t mind thinking outside of the box. Or in this case, I actually looked in one of the boxes in my room to search for things that might work for wrapping and pulling and turning generators on. I found the bag that my bed/tent came in and it had a handy camping-durable drawstring on it that I easily detached. I brought it to Baby and ignored the ready-stream of reasons why it wouldn’t work and said, “Just TRY it!!!!”

And he did, because he could see that I was beyond reasoning with. And while the little plastic knob that had been used to secure the drawstring around the carry-bag fell off after the first unsuccessful pull, Baby must have been inspired by my creativity and outside-the-box-inside-my-box thinking, and he found a handy woodchip to use as a handle. SUCCESS! And that is why I’m writing this, because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to charge my computer while re-teaching Repent everything I’d taught him in our previous computer classes before I left last year. He is a genius because he actually remembered most of it without my help. I am a mostly useless teacher.

Esther, Baby, and Repent looking at the
new map of South Sudan we just put up

And the moral of this story is that in a country where people keep every disgusting bit of worthless trash that could POSSIBLY be made useful at sometime in the future, and are continuously fishing broken and unsanitary pieces of rubbish out of a careless, Earth-hating foreign girl’s garbage, surely SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE has SOMETHING that can be used to wrap around a thing to pull that thing and start the dang motor. And that someone was my box (tent bag drawstring). And our backyard (woodchip).

So that’s it, South Sudan.  I’m back. I’m sweaty and covered in dirt and bug bites. But it’s all good because I found a few mangos without worms in them. Or Esther did anyway.

P.S. This is a blog, not a letter, but whatever. I saw a hyena the other day, I'm pretty sure.  It was dragging away the dead carcass of a cow from a butcher's stall. Usually there is a group of dogs doing that, but this time there was just one animal, tawny colored face, with lion-type ears. I know it wasn't a lion, but it didn't have those pointy or floppy dog ears, and it was too big to be a cat.  But Repent said, "It couldn't have been a hyena. People are afraid of them, and they would have killed it." I don't know why he thinks he has to ruin my life all the time. I'm teaching him computers--the least he could do is be supportive of my hyena story. 

Anyway, here's proof that I really saw a hyena:

Bloody meat carcasses hanging up and hyena
(CLEARLY that is a hyena--note the rounded ears and ferocious teeth)
dragging off the bones.

Brain Gaps

I am TO Sudanese

The other day I was wearing a thobe and enjoying the smell of my bakhour (Sudanese incense that melts over coals and fills the room with fragrant smoke—don’t try this in places with fire alarms), and I was congratulating myself for my Sudanese-ness. My friends had been joking with me about how I’m not a khawaja anymore, I’m now Sudanese, and it went to my head. I know because I was hanging out with our West Darfur team, telling them that if wouldn’t matter if I broke curfew if I were wearing my thobe, because if I were, no one would know that I wasn’t Sudanese. I was helpfully informed by one of our staff, “Amanda, even if you are wearing a thobe, you are still white. And people will see your white hands.” This was really surprising and disappointing to me.  I mean, just the other day I took one of those online quizzes called “How White are You?” and I got 8 out of 100, which classified me as ‘not white at all.’ This is the same website whose informative quizzes helped to determine that I am Harry Potter (something I’ve suspected for some time now) and that I should be a red-head (which is going to be less possible since I’ve run out of henna I brought from India). Now it seems like these quizzes may not be entirely reflective of reality, and it has shaken the very foundations of my world. But the good news is, my wrists are no longer white because I got sunburnt in the car-ride on the way to Sirba, and even though we did break curfew (it’s the curfew for people who are obviously foreigners--7:00pm, i.e. the time that fun is just starting for all non-foreigner Sudanese), I was not abducted by any angry tribesmen, nor did I crash the car into a donkey or get stuck in the sand.

I had to leave when these
guys were just coming 

So I’m not white, if the characteristics of being white are directly related to being a 6^th grade girl in the 90’s (dancing to the Macarena and debating which boy-band is better, according to the quiz), but I am white if we are trying to hide from local police who enforce curfew and/or hostage-takers.  Wearing a thobe and knowing how to light coals for bakhour doesn’t make me Sudanese anymore than eating rice for breakfast makes me Indonesian or always bringing presents to people who invite me over for dinner makes me Syrian.

What I am is an American who has spent a cumulative two-thirds of her life in Asia and now lives in Africa, and with that comes many strange idiosyncrasies.

Eighth Grade at Deaf School graduation. Hey--Where's Waldo? 

I get annoyed when people tell me the weight of something in kilos and then remember that I’m American and try to translate that into pounds—like I didn’t have Canadian teachers all throughout my elementary school career, EY. But I do measure my morning running distances in miles, though I can tell people the distance I covered in kilometers, just in case they don’t understand. And I’m not the only one who mixes the English and the metric systems—in India everything is in kilos in the stores, but you measure well depth in feet.  So there, World.

Our rainy season family vacations were great!

But the truth is that there is a lot of American common knowledge out there that I’m not aware of (much of it having to do with ways of measuring), just as there is other international common knowledge that I missed out on, probably while I was flying over the international date line losing brain cells or something like that. I’ve been sorting through my brain, trying to find things that I don’t think are normal (which is hard since they ARE normal for me), and I’m pretty sure other third culture kids will relate to this, but even in our little group of identity-confused kids of multi-cultural upbringings, we have different brain gaps, which my bro-in-law likes to call affectionately the “third culture delay.”

Here are some of my brain gaps:

If we’re talking about the weather, I’ll give you the temperature in Fahrenheit if it’s hot and Celsius if it’s cold. (But I did just have to spell check ‘Fahrenheit’ because not only it is less practical when trying to remember the boiling or freezing points, it’s also harder to spell.)

I’ll tell you the length of something in centimeters and use the word ‘gallons’ with misguided confidence. I will admit to having no idea what a ‘quart’ is, but it is a fun word to say. Quart. Quart. Quart.

Wearing the right clothes is the best way to fit in--you can't tell I'm not Yemeni!

I can never remember if I’m supposed to put the day or the month first when writing dates numerically, so I usually just write the whole thing out: 19 February 1984 or February 19^th, 1984 (it’s my birthday—you should also remember this important date. And Hackers: take note that I never use it as my password anywhere because of my confusion with numerical dates. Also, I don’t have that much money, so it wouldn’t be worth your while anyway.).

When riding in cars, I prefer just to go sit in the back so I don’t have to worry about which side of the car the steering wheel is on.  I CAN drive—automatic and manual, but I sometimes forget which side of the road to be on and whether or not traffic rules are enforced. So it’s better just not to let me…

First camel ride a long time ago-my skills were acquired young

I could tell you almost as much about the Danish royal family as I could about the Obamas.

I find cricket and baseball equally boring.

Age 29, wearing a sari I bought at age 15 in Little India in Singapore.
My life came full circle once I finally fulfilled my destiny of living in India.

I can tell you as much about Premier League Football as I can about American Pro Football, which is to say, I know enough not to sound like an idiot in a brief conversation about favorite teams, but that’s about it.  Definitely do not ask me about names of any players who are not married to famous beautiful women.

The longer I stay out of the US, the less I know about famous musicians or the names of anyone who won a Grammy, and if you scroll through my iTunes account you will find that a significant portion of my music has been designated as “Unknown Artist” or “002 ÇáÍÇáÉ Çíå” because my taste in music is broader than my computer's ability to guess what the name of the singer is.

Crashing an Ethiopian wedding in Somaliland
with Kenyan and Sudanese friends.
This is my normal.

I can tell you the capital city of Burkina Faso, but I really don’t know what part of the US Iowa is in, much less if it even has any cities, one of which may have been designated as a capital. I'm only about 80% sure that it is a state. Iowa is a thing, right? It's not just a mispronunciation of Ohio, is it? (I know that the way to pronounce 'Ohio' varies from country to country. In India I heard it called "OH-HEE-Oh.")

A Somali friend in Yemen with more patriotism for my country
than I'll ever be able to muster. She deserves my passport more than I do.

I could fill in these gaps in my knowledge, and sometimes I’ve even tried to do that, but usually I just embrace the imbalance in my life or I try to balance out the imbalance by taking on as many characteristics as possible from countries where I’ve had the privilege to live. It’s OK. Make fun of me at will—people all over the world have been doing it for years. But don’t expect me to listen to boy-bands or dance to the Macarena or join your fantasy football league—whether it’s American-style football or The Rest of the World-style football.

High-school me demonstrating how to balance on the imbalance in one's life
OR
just climbing on a weird totem pole at Pangadaran because climbing things is fun.
(I always climb in flip-flops.)

Tips for Life from Sudan

I know I've used this photo already--
I don't care. It's a good depiction of our friendship

Note 1: Most of these things were said to me in all seriousness, and I only find them funny because I’m a weird foreigner of dubious nationality. My friends know I laugh at them, but they laugh at me too, so now we’re even.

Note 2: The photos of my friends do not correspond with the quotes. Some of those pictured here have no quotes in this post at all. Others have multiples. It doesn't matter--they are all my cool friends.

With that disclaimer, here are some conversation highlights from the past couple of months in Sudan :

• Don’t put lipstick all over your lips, only in the middle so that your mouth will look smaller. Smaller lips are prettier.

• You can use Fenugreek oil to gain weight. You rub it on the places you want to be bigger, like your butt or your thighs—or your chest [pointed look at mine].

• Skinny girls can’t dance—their bodies don’t move.

• Use more eye shadow so that your eyes look bigger.  No, more than that. Still more. Just give it to me and let me do it.

• Rice is for Chinese people and some Egyptians.

• The best place in the US is Losangels and Sandigo. Anywhere you go you can eat in a garden.

 

Friends eat bricks of chocolate
ice cream wrapped in newspaper with you

• Why don’t you have a man? Do you have a boyfriend at least? Why not? You’re pretty. They must be afraid of you. They are afraid to ask you. They think you will say ‘no.’ It’s OK, though. God has chosen a man for you from a long time ago. Hopefully it’s a Sudanese one.

• If you leave Sudan, I will start a protest. I’ll make a sign and march up and down the street.

• Can you see that with your green eyes? (Author’s note: my eyes are blue.)

• Pepsi doesn’t have any sugar in it, only carbonation. (This fact was proven to me by reading the ingredients, none of which are ‘sugar,’ but a lack of knowledge regarding various alternative names for sugar is probably why cookies are in the 'health food section' advertised as ‘rich in glucose,’ and this is thought to be a good thing.  Chemical-sounding ingredients MUST be good for you—magnesium, potassium, riboflavin, etc. I always try to make sure to get my recommended daily intake of glucose.)

And finally, here are ---

People’s Best Guesses as to my nationality (interestingly enough, people rarely guess ‘American’):

            Egyptian

            Lebanese

            Moroccan

            German

            French

            Indian

            Somali

            Chinese  (Maybe they saw me eating rice and drew the obvious conclusion.)

Yeah, I know--but this was me teaching Selma how to use picstich,
it was never meant to be a work of photographic art,
and drawing hearts is hard.

Fast and Furious: Darfur Sand Drift

My preferred method of transportation

I hate driving. I find it very stressful. Maybe this is because it's forever associated with reverse-culture shock for me when I had to get my driver's license the year I went back to the States for college. Everyone else my age had been driving since they were 15, and knew things like 'how to put gas in one's car' and 'why one should never get out of the car when one is going through an automatic car wash.' Also, I failed my driving test the first time I took it. It is the only test of any kind that I ever failed, and the reason I failed was because there was a police car stopped by the side of the road, and I drove AROUND him (it seemed logical to me, having grown up in Indonesia where one avoids police officers and their inexorable avarice at all costs). Apparently, though, I was supposed to stop and wait for him to drive away first instead…who knew? All of you law-abiding American citizens probably… Whatever the reason, I avoid driving whenever possible, and it's usually possible because I live in places with public transportation (It's a thing, America!). Otherwise, I get whoever is with me to drive, whether it's my eight-months-pregnant baby sister or my grandfather who hit a deer twice in a week once and nearly killed us 5 times in a 2 hour drive from Philly to DC. But driving is still a useful skill to have, and it came in handy for me because…

This camel comes with a gun-look under my foot (just in case)

I went for a drive while in Darfur. I can’t get into the details of why this happened for various and sundry reasons that could cause problems for various and sundry peoples, possibly including myself.  Although, if I were the only reason, I’m sure I would not let myself stand in my way of telling a good story—priorities, you know. Anyway, with that confusing disclaimer, I ended up being the one with the car, the keys to the car, and the ability to drive the car. The previous day I’d been given ‘permission’ to take the car to the nearby souq to get food for Friday, when everything was going to be closed except the main marketplace. I was told I could go with the cook if I needed anything. So when another situation came up that required the car, I just went off that previous permission, grabbed the keys, took photos of myself holding said keys to psych myself up, and then hitched up my skirt and awkwardly hauled myself into the truck. It was one of those trucks where there is no moving the seat forward. And we were in one of those driveways where misjudging by a few centimeters can cause you to crash into a drilling machine or some PVC pipes. (You know those kinds of driveways…) I managed to back out successfully, not hitting the donkey cart or sauntering man behind me and only killing the engine once, when I was trying to get the feel of the old rust bucket’s clutch.

I was then directed to drive down a series of sandy, bumpy roads, dodging children, goats, cows (it was almost like being in India again, except there I was riding a bike and I only hit a cow ONCE), horses, donkeys, dogs, sheep, and piles of trash. There was one random stretch of paved road where I got up to 4^th for a while, and that was kind of fun—less bumpy anyway. And it didn’t feel like I was driving at the beach, trying to hold the tires straight in the sand, like it did elsewhere. I also got up to 5^th at another time, but it was an accident, as I meant to go into 3^rd, but didn’t catch it right.  The truck was very upset with me, and I apologized profusely, and stayed mostly in 2^nd after that to make up for it.

That is definitely my nose and open mouth--
thanks passenger for the plethora of photos of me driving.

At one point we were driving through a very narrow marketplace, on a sandy bumpy road, and the person with me noticed my concern, so I said that I was just really worried about hitting someone. This led to an opportunity to learn the difference in the Sudanese word for ‘to crash into someone with one’s car’ versus the Levantine word (which is funny, apparently) for the same unfortunate accident. 

'Concentration' face

'Please don't let me hit that donkey' face

On our journey, we stopped outside a little shop and picked up a couple of passengers. While we were stopped, my truck, parked with the particular reckless abandon of one who just wanted to stop driving and get out of said truck, got pinned in by two annoying little cars. Seriously. One of them was red.  Red cars think they’re better than everyone, but they’re just stupid and bad at parking. Still, we had to leave, and I know there was room to slowly maneuver up and around and back and over to get out, but also there were people around…sitting on the curbs with their feet in the street and sheep meandering around behind me. The stress of this caused me to kill the car 3 times while trying to reverse slowly in the sand. At this point, one of my helpful passengers piped up from the back, “I think you are not a professional driver.” Thanks for the confidence boost, person who can’t drive… But he is not wrong…

'I think I'm going to maybe make it home alive' face
(I took none of these photos but I didn't think they should go to waste)

Here are some photos this not-professional-driver took from behind the wheel (another reason why I should not be trusted with cars, though I never took photos when I was close enough to hit anyone or thing), and others that another helpful passenger took. And some others that happened at other parts of the Darfur trip that are interesting and have nothing to do with anything else in this blog post.

I took this photo while driving--multi-tasking.

I took this photo and also did NOT hit that donkey cart. I'm a genius.

Meat and police escort--this was our manly meat-plate lunch.
I ate a piece of almost-cooked goat meat.
It took me all of lunch time to chew it.

Cute kids helping their families gather water
and staring at the crazy khawaja

Getting water from a hand-dug well

A lady dropped her bucket in the well and this nice guy climbed down to get it for her.
I chronicled the whole thing on my phone while yelling down at him to be careful.
People were very entertained by my concern.

Collecting water for their animals

Another hand-dug well with colorful ladies

Camels keeping each other cool--they are such caring creatures.

We were greeted by enthusiastic horsemen who raced alongside us,
cheering and waving. It was super fun. My job is the best.

The beautiful ladies surrounded me and sang songs. I was only a little terrified. 

My camel-riding friend. We talked about how cool it is to be
people who ride camels and how horses are stupid.

The town meeting. I like these people. I should move here.