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.