The White Skin Condition

These days I’m looking pretty crispy, like someone who spends a lot of time in a tanning salon, trying for that “I just got back from getting skin cancer at the beach” look. Of course at my particular tanning salon, I only get tanned on arms up to the shoulders and legs up to the knees. The rest of me stays paper-white. I’ve been trying to remember to apply sunscreen (yes, really, calm down, Mom) because being permanently sunburnt gets old after a while. Still, I don’t think that sunscreen works that well. I had high hopes for the “Kids Sunscreen SPF 50.” I thought it would work better because kids have sensitive skin and so their sunscreen should work harder, right? But really I bought it because it was the spray kind of sunscreen, which is easiest to apply, and because it was the cheapest thing I could find in the dead of winter in Oklahoma.

Agyila is gingerly touching my white leg

Whether or not it’s because of my failing sunscreen, I’ve had lots of skin-color comments recently. Sometimes I bring up the issue myself by making hilarious jokes that leave my friends rolling with laughter. One such joke I made that solicited fits of hysterical giggles was, “I don’t think I’ll work in my garden until later because if I do it now then I’m going to be burnt red by the sun.” This is probably a situation where cultural humor does not translate. But just as I wasn’t offended when my Scandinavian colleague made fun of my equator-temperature-accustomed body by sarcastically offering me a winter coat from Sweden to protect me from the Arctic AC of the Khartoum office, I was not offended by people laughing at my melatonin deficiency.

In India when it was extra sunny, people were always chasing me around trying to get me to use an umbrella. They were worried I would lose my beautiful pasty pallor. Me, always trying to lose that beautiful pasty pallor because, really, for me, skin cancer is probably inevitable, always refused their kind offers. Not so in South Sudan. When I sit in the sun, people offer me seats in the shade, but nod knowingly when I state my reasons for declining (though usually this is followed by predictions of sun-induced malaria).

            “Yes,” says Repent, “You need to become darker. Then the children won’t be afraid of your creepy white skin and run away from you screaming, and then you won’t look so much like a Jalabi.”

            Me: “What’s a ‘Jalabi’? (I thought it must be some kind of creepy pasty white food like a ‘jelabi’ donut in India. I was wrong.

            Repent: “You know—the Jalabis. The Arab people from the north who came down here and fought us.”

            Not looking like a Jalabi=Suntan motivation.

This kid ran right up to me with open arms. His sister (I
didn't get a good photo of her) came up behind me and
rubbed on my arm a bit, looked at her hand,
looked back at me, and then walked off, having
determined that whatever it was I put on me to become
this color, didn't rub off easily.

The other day I was comparing my tan to Lexon, and I told him I was catching up. He said, “Oh no. This skin is original. You cannot be like me.” Another time when Lexon caught me in the sun, he tried to warn me off because of malaria, but I explained about mosquitos again, so he went for another tactic: “Look, your skin is changing. It is not supposed to be like that. Look how it is red here and white here and brown here. You cannot be like my skin. This is how God made me.” I said, “Well, He made me so my skin will change colors in the sun.”

Another time I was sitting with some ladies outside in the sunshine, and they were trying to pull my sleeves down (I’d tucked them up over my shoulders). They said, “This way your shoulders won’t become red.”

I said, “I don’t want my shoulders to be white while the rest of my arm is red.”

“Why?” They said.

“Because that would be weird.”

“What about your legs? They’re still white?”

“I know. I don’t like that either.”

“What about the rest of your body. It’s white, right?”

At this point I realized the futility of trying to explain the cultural stigma of a various types of tan lines to African women.  I just said, truthfully, “I wish I had skin like yours that is all the same color and doesn’t burn so easily as mine in the sun.”

One of my friends clucked her tongue sympathetically and said, “It is too bad, but if you marry a Moru guy, at least your children can have good skin.” I should definitely take my future children’s skin conditions into consideration when thinking about marriage. I mean, they will get every bad skin gene from me—I'm prone to acne, sunspots, large pores, redness for no apparent reason, bacterial staph infections, ringworm, bug bites…The least I can do is give them a fighting chance by marrying someone with good skin.  

Kids joining me on my morning run
(I turned around and snapped this photo
of them without stopping), which may
or may not have anything to do with me
being white, and more to do with
the fact that it's fun to run in the morning.

So here I am scaring innocent people like Esther, who rushed over in concern after seeing a red spot on my leg. I had to explain to her that it wasn’t the plague, just a weird white skin issue where things that my leg rests against for a while leave their mark for a few minutes.  She gave me a pitying look, which made me feel better, knowing that people around me were starting to understand my personal trials and troubles.

But once again, Baby is the one who tried to offer a possible solution my problem. It started with a little friendly (I think) ribbing between him and Repent. Baby said, “Amanda, you can call Repent a ‘Jenga.’” I didn’t get the joke, but Baby thought it was funny, so he explained that a ‘Jenga’ is a ‘Dinka’ (another tribe here in South Sudan—if you follow the news, which you should, and the news includes information about things not happening in the US, which means not an American news channel, then you might know something about the Dinka).  Repent said, “NO, I’m not! I’m not black enough, I’m not tall enough, I’m not skinny enough, and I don’t like to eat hot peppers.” I volunteered to be Dinka after that last bit about hot peppers because I think that the only way to truly know that your cooking is good is for people to be coughing and sneezing in the next room while you’re frying up the hot peppers. I learned that in Indonesia. But it has come in handy here too because I let Esther, Lexon, and Baby try some food I’d made for myself, sending them running for the water. Afterwards Lexon told me, “Amanda, your cooking is difficult for us to eat. You put too much sheta (hot pepper).” I only put the first bit of that comment on Facebook because I love it, and I always try to cultivate a healthy fear of my cooking—it keeps people from asking me to cook for them, i.e. Lexon and co and anyone else who invites me to a party and expects me to bring a ‘side dish’ (I don’t even know what that is, and I hate parties).

A few cool kids, some of whom find me amusing,
others who find me disturbing

Having written that whole paragraph, I now realize it has nothing to do with Baby solving my white skin problem, but I typed it already so whatever—shortly after the previous-mentioned not-relevant-at-all conversation, Baby was trying to convince me to take him along if we get permission to borrow a car to drive out to a far away village, and he told me that he can help if we get stuck in the mud, which, he said, is clearly not something Repent can do (since he is a big important man) or me either.

“You think I can’t help with mud?” I said.

“No! Because you are white! If you step in the mud, you will become black!”

I'm thinking he might not completely understand the permanence of the white skin condition. If only I could slap on some mud and be instantly changed so as to be less scary to children and less-easily sunburned and less likely to be mistaken for someone's mortal enemy…But I'm pretty sure that's frowned upon-slash-considered seriously offensive by most people, and I'm not a fraternity party-goer nor that blonde chick that put on black-face for Halloween, and I'll just have to stick with the skin that I have, while admiring the skin that I don't have, and continue to apply sunscreen. Lots of it.

A horrible and humiliating bathroom mirror selfie
 that I contorted myself to take that Judy, Megan, and Joanna
can laugh at for years, but I wanted to show you my multi-colored skin.
That is not a shadow from my phone on my shoulder, by the way.
I really do have a very crispy brown shoulder line that looks like I didn't
scrub off well, but I did. And then I'm red because I forgot to put on
sunscreen today when I went to go see the hippos. And then my natural whiteness
is there because I wear shirts in public, except for now I'm at the beach so--swimsuit.

So you don't leave the blog with that image of
my impending skin cancer burned into your brain,
here's me with Repent's niece (I forgot her name!), Gadi and Ruben--
since last post I didn't get to put in a good photo of him.
Can you see the mischief brewing in Ruben's eyes?
Oh, he is up to something.

Working

One thing that I do love about my job is the variety. Of course, having variety also means accepting that there will be days when I sit under the mango tree waiting for people and doing nothing.  Actually, moments sitting under the mango tree waiting for something to happen are one of the few things that are pretty much guaranteed in my South Sudan life, it’s just the amount of time I sit waiting that varies.  Recently, I’ve had some pretty specific jobs to do, so that time has been less, but more annoying when the job is time-sensitive.  This is no longer making sense, so I’ll just say that this week (the week that I wrote this, not the week that I'm posting it) I’ve spent a lot of time on the back of a motorcycle getting sunburnt and drenched (often on the same day), riding around little villages and wearing rubber boots. Naturally, the days that I actually remember to wear the boots are also the days when I don’t need them.

Here’s a photo of me in the work clothes off to track GPS locations of future wells (Want to donate to Neverthirst so that we can actually drill these wells? Great idea. I’m so glad you thought of it. Our website is neverthirstwater.org):

Beautifully centered photo courtesy of Baby

On this particular day, in my pink thrift-store skirt and boots, I rode out with Repent for about 2 hours to a place called Karika, which is actually where his mother lives. I’d met her once in Mundri before where she’d gone for treatment for a sickness that everyone called “malaria” that might not have been (side note: when I first got here, it seemed that everyone had malaria, but the more I hear people talk about malaria, the less sure I am that they actually know what malaria is or how to get it. For example, one day sitting in the sun in the early morning to dry my hair and make myself less white, Lexon gravely informed me that I was going to get malaria. I looked around for mosquitos, but he said, “No. From the sun. When it comes down on your head, you will get malaria.” That week, about 5 other people said the same thing to me at different times, so maybe there is a new strain of sunstroke malaria that is attacking the world. SPF50, people. Just do it. Or get malaria). Repent’s mom greeted me with open arms, calling me her daughter, and then fed me up on mangos, peanuts, and some juice that she made from powder and the really muddy water that she drinks. Yes I drank it, and yes it’s a good thing I was raised in Indonesia, because my stomach is strong and I can drink unfiltered, un-boiled water from a hole in the ground with no long or short-term effects. My stomach is iron-wrought.

Here is a photo of me and Repent’s mom:

Even with sweaty from work (her in the garden, me staying on the motorbike),
we are stunning.

Here is a photo of Repent’s niece and nephew playing Angry Birds on the iPad, which was with us because we needed it for iForm, where we record GPS coordinates and other important information.

EVERYBODY love Angry Birds.

We stopped at Repent’s mother’s house first (it was the location farthest/furthest? away from us), and then we went back along the same road to stop at each village where we needed to get the information. Along the way we were greeted by screams of excitement and terror. Once a group of girls saw me and ran after us screaming and giggling. I felt like the Beatles.  Still, I don’t let the pointing and squealing go to my head. Their excitement isn’t like ‘you’re-so-cool-like-a-celebrity’ excitement, it’s more like if you happen to see a Sasquatch while hiking through the forest—you always knew they were living somewhere in forest, but so few people actually get to see one in person, so it’s exciting. But if my weirdness can bring a little hysterical laughter to a child who was otherwise perfectly fine and enjoying his vacation from school by picking the last mangos off the trees and running around with his friends, then it’s worth it. And it’s a good thing too because I’ve started wearing sunscreen now, so this whiteness is going to stay…mostly. I came back from this trip with a sunburnt knee (just one—the left one) and after working in my garden all day on Saturday, I found that my lower back was sunburnt too from my shirt sliding up when I bent over to build mounds to plant my zucchini in. Now I can imagine what it would be like to get a lower-back tattoo, and I think I’ll skip it. Face tattoos for me, only. I’m thinking—Rainbow Brite star…

Here is a photo of a 4 year old chopping a mango with a massive knife, because kids in South Sudan are badass:

Sisters: you both have 4 year olds--
what are the odds you let them chop their own fruit?

When we were almost at the halfway point on our return journey, it started pouring rain—thunder, lightening, torrents and torrents. We stopped under a tree to apply ponchos. Ponchos are good for almost nothing, but they protected the iPad and kept me a tiny bit warmer than I would have been without it. Still, as the rain dripped down the front, soaking my shirt and as water from the puddles filled up my boots, I was pretty miserable and cold. Repent soldiered on because he is awesome like that. We drove through raging rivers, not knowing what we were driving over, and made it home a little more than an hour later. I changed clothes quickly, but Repent didn’t have any other clothes, and he is too big to borrow mine, so he brought in our little coal stove and sat over that until he dried while we drank tea and ate beans and rice.

I have no photos of the raging river of mud that we drove through, but here’s a photo of what the day looked like BEFORE the apocalyptic flood:

Here is a photo from the morning after, which I took while on my run--running and taking photos is one of my skills:

Besides sitting on the motorcycle, I’ve also been known to sit on tree-trunk benches for hours at a training on sanitation and biosand filters. My butt still hurts. They offered me a chair, but I thought, “I’m tough. If these ladies can sit for hours on this thing, then I can too.” Though, to be fair, a lot of them brought their own chairs from home. Still, I decided to make a point of not being the khawaja in the fancy chair, who eats lunch at the fancy table inside the small house. I sat on the log benches and ate outside on the ground with the other women.

Note the seats in the back (I have a permanent dent in my rear)
in this photo of a kid who cried in terror when he saw my foreign devil features,
but was later won over by my gifts of candy and origami paper animals.

Below is a photo of me outside with the other women that Repent took. It looks like I’m grimacing at nothing, but I think I’m laughing at the lady sitting behind the person in the chair, who has either offered her son to me to marry or is telling me that yes, it’s right that I sit outside with the other ladies because we all have boobs. That is Truth, people.  But maybe I was grimacing because I was trying to force myself to eat all of the beans and rice that I was given, which was a heaping plowl-full (plate/bowl thingy—Marian knows what I’m talking about). It was also steaming hot and really hard to eat with my fingers. The ladies offered me a spoon, but I was committed to taking the pain and doing it right.  Of course, these are ladies that I have watched lift a metal pot off the fire, where it had been sitting for half an hour, with their bare hands. They are truly impressive women.  They ate all their beans and rice and asked for more. They told me I wasn’t strong enough to do that because I’m short and my stomach is too small, but if I practice, I can get there. I was going to defend my stature because, HEY-I WAS TALL IN INDIA! But I guess here I am kind of runty. Even the Commissioner greeted me with, “Oh wonderful, our small girl is back!”

Picnic lunch with the Small Girl

And now—some photos of cool people:

When your gorgeous baby girl falls asleep on your friend's knee,
what does an African mother do?
She puts tiny braids in her hair.
They thought my amusement was funny.
But seriously. I was so impressed.

This is the size pot you need to make lunch (aseeda/ugali) for 40 people.

Isn't Mimi the cutest? She was kind of interested in me too.

During the sermon at church, I noticed a commotion by the door--
it was Repent's youngest son Ruben (not pictured here because he was helping take the photo),
dancing and laughing and pointing at me (his foreigner). I went home with them after church.
Here is a photo of the neighbor girls fixing my hair while two other neighbor kids look on.
Gadi (on the far right) is Repent's older son, and he showed me how to chase hoops around and be cool.

I was afraid that Helena (Repent's youngest daughter) wouldn't remember me,
but she held out her hands to me to hold her, and fell asleep in my arms, when
I carried her home. She kept sleeping on my lap while the kids and I talked.
She snores like a freight train, and it's adorable.

I went to go help Esther's mother shell peanuts for planting in the garden,
and the kids came along to help out,
i.e. eat the peanuts we were shelling while the adults yelled at them.

Here is where I am giving up trying to put in a photo of Ruben, who is cute and hilarious and should be in this post, but even Burundi internet has its limitations. Also, I need a photo of Repent's oldest daughter, Esther, who is beautiful like her mother and so sweet and shy. Next time.

This is Repent's stunningly beautiful wife, Joy.
Her Moru name is Kenyua, which means 'sesame.'
She was named this because her mother gave birth to her in the sesame field,
 where she was working. There is no one tougher than a South Sudanese woman.
She never went to school was was illiterate, but she's going to night classes now to learn.
Repent is helping out around the house, washing clothes and things like that so that she can.
I love their family SO. MUCH.
When I said to Repent, "Whoa! Your wife is gorgeous!",
he said, "I know. She's God's wonderful gift to me."
Sorry for the terrible photo--photography is not one of my skills, you know.

Sleep Deprivation

Sleep is very important to me. I really enjoy the whole concept of it. Even so, I’m not really good at sleeping. I never ever sleep through the night. I get up out of bed to pee in a cup and dump it out the window so I don’t have to walk across the wet grass full of biting bugs with a lantern to get to the outhouse (judge me—I don’t care. At least I’ll be really good at drug tests for when I become a professional athlete…) or to close the windows and cover up all my electronic items so that they don’t get ruined in the rain that will come inside my windows or to chase a mouse around the room or dump a frog out of my window (he kept knocking over my empty water bottles that I’d tried to fill that day with no luck because we had no sun so our well didn’t work).  Every time I get up or down I have to zip and unzip my stupid tent, which was a great idea from my boss after a mouse ate a hole through my mosquito net and ran across my not-sleeping-at-all-anymore body. Still, tent-sleeping is hotter than mosquito nets and I don’t have a sleeping bag and my sheet won’t stay flat, so it always feels like I’m sleeping on plastic bags when I turn over and over (something else I do—nobody should ever want to sleep me). When I move into my new house (maybe it will happen-they’ve been teasing me about it for months now and it’s still no where ready and the construction guys rarely come to work so I don’t know how it can ever be finished because I don’t know anything about ‘fixtures’ or ‘putting on the doors’ but I assume they involve the physical presence of the construction guys), it will have an indoor bathroom (which is probably what I’m most excited about) and I will return to sleeping in a mosquito net bed and risk the rats—if I can figure out how to take the tent down. I blame my parents for not being camping people—I don’t understand tents unless they are made with blankets and clothespins over the couch and piano bench.

I have no photos of bugs in my bedroom,
but this guy was in my kitchen.

I could blame my poor sleeping ability on why I go to bed early, but really it has nothing to do with sleeping. I go to bed around 9:00pm here, and it is not because I was inspired by my mother’s sleeping habits, but because that is the point when I’ve had it with bugs flying in my face, mouth, hair and crawling up and down my arms. I zip my tent almost all the way, then I stick in the bug spray and kill any lingering mosquitos that might be in there. Does this put me at greater risk of contracting cancer from dangerous bug spray chemicals? Probably. But it’s that or malaria or the misery of a night spent swatting at mosquitos buzzing around my ears. Then I get ready for bed, turning out the light at the last minute (the switch is outside of my room, so I have to be ready to switch on my night-vision, which is not awesome, in order to get back into my room and bed). For the few moments in between me getting into my tent and turning off the light, I become the shiniest white thing in the room and all the bugs head for my glistening skin. It is annoying. Once I am zipped in my tent with the lantern or my phone, I can read or do whatever until I actually feel like sleeping. Angry bugs pelt my tent from the outside, trying to get to the beautiful glowing screen of my phone, but I laugh at them. I do, because I’m petty and I like to gloat, even if it’s just about stupid bugs.

So you can see what a ritual my sleeping/not sleeping is. I don’t like it when my sleep (what little I can get) is interrupted by others, human or animal.  The other night I was awake until 4AM listening to the pounding, thumping-in-your-eyeballs beat of the party across the street (the was after I chased the afore-mentioned frog around my room at midnight, finally catching it and throwing it out the window). I lay in bed hating those people and imagining violent ways to end their hilarious fun. You are probably not just realizing it now, but I am not a nice person by nature.

I lay in bed fantasizing about various ways to make the music stop, but they all involved me getting up and out of the tent and putting on (more) clothes and/or owning an automatic weapon, so I never got around to doing any of them. This was after I tried using the Power of my Mind, naturally, but it seems that my Mind Powers were blocked by the thumping beat—my own personal kryptonite. I ended up trying to soothe my anger by venting on Facebook so that people would feel sorry for me and my sad sleepless night. It helped only a little bit. A short in the party-people’s generator would have helped me more.

And now (that ‘now’ only applies if the internet is good enough today for me to post on the blog), there is a praise team from Juba staying behind my house. They sing loud passionate hymns accompanied by drums and gourd-shakers until midnight. They’re supposed to leave in a few days, but I am resigning myself to being sleep-deprived and cranky for the next few days. I prayed that God would send a thunderstorm and rain them out (we had evening thunderstorms every night last week except for the 4am party night), but He’s probably enjoying the enthusiastic praise and less worried about a grumpy foreign girl who is wanting rain purely for the purpose of ruining other people’s fun. I already told you, I am not a nice person.

~~~Here is where I tried to post of video, showing how loud church is here, but it wouldn't work.~~~

Sorry.

My sleep issues don’t make me a morning person, even if I am in bed so early. It’s not that I mind getting up (well, sometimes I do), but I don’t want to talk to anyone. I wake up perfectly content in my solitude, and I don’t want to see anyone else. If you talk to me before I go for a run or do some other type of physical activity (running is best, though), I will hate you. I hate everybody in the morning. I should always be isolated until I kick my endorphins into gear. Yes running does give me black toenails and plantar fasciitis, but when I get back from running 5 or 6 miles, I find that I don’t hate the world after all, and actually people are friends not enemies.  Then I can get on with my morning beauty routine, South Sudan style.

Hanging out with people in a friendly way--
Jona and Oguna think I'm cool and are imitating how I sit.
ok--I don't really have any photos that go with this post...

When I lived in Khartoum, I could get ready at a leisurely pace, choosing clothes and jewelry and scarf and shoes that will be most easily kicked off while sitting at my desk in the office.  At some point I'd take my tinted moisturizer/sunscreen (IT DOES COUNT AS MAKEUP, I AM A GROWN UP!) out of the mini fridge in my room where I left it so that it wouldn't melt all over my sink when I was gone and had turned off the slightly functioning AC.  This way I could show up at the office looking presentable. But in Mundri, my beauty routine is:

•   Maybe take a shower if it was hot last night and the shower water might be warmish.

•   Put on some clothes that don’t smell horrible and only have minimal dirt and mango stains.

•   Apply sunscreen.

•   Again, please remember to apply sunscreen, you stupid white girl who burned the skin off your back while “working” in your “garden.”

•   Attach a new bandaid or two or ten.

•   Get on the motorcycle and let your hair dry in the wind… (though you will regret this later when trying to comb out the tangles)

And now I'll stop complaining/bragging about my life (how many of YOU get to wear mango-stained clothes to work?), and end by updating you on the fact that I didn't get to post this blog earlier, so I can let you know that I decided to just join in. So I brought my shaker and my chair, hopped over the fence and jumped in. Do I know any of the songs? No, but it doesn't matter because I can participate by shaking my shaker. The ladies were really impressed by my shaking skills, and when they told me how good I was, they said it with an air of astonishment. I think maybe they'd heard that stereotype about white people not having any rhythm. But after years of music lessons from Jennie Stillman and having a drummer for a dad, I shake on tempo. But I can't dance and shake at the same time, like everyone else, so I'm not really that impressive...

I don't know if this picture is going to load fully or not, but if it does you're going to think that A) I have never seen a motorcycle before, but then you will realize that can't be right so you will suspect that B) motorcycles in South Sudan are extra-long like a sausage with wheels on either end, but in fact, C) I have really bad hand-eye coordination, as I mentioned in the last post. Also, D) yes, that is a large monkey sitting like a prairie dog by the side of the road and E) that is an accurate depiction of my hair after I use the "dry by air from the motorcycle" method. Repent's hair is very short, and so it doesn't show up in this photo because I am very careful about things like perspective, since my drummer father is also an artist.