Strange guests at night

It’s confirmed. There is a family (quite a large one) of crickets which decided to settle and reproduce in my room, just between the door and the wall. It’s been almost a week that every single night, I am waken up (normally around 3-4 am) by a very loud ‘beep beep’ that comes from an unidentified spot in the darkness. So every single night of the this week (including the last one) I wake up, try to grab my flash light in the complete dark and spend about 10-15 minutes to localize the noisy damned beast and hunt it. Last night I decided to commit a killing. And as the cricket was hiding in the little gap between the door and the floor I decided to kill it by suffocation, using the very powerful insect killer spray that I found at the local market. And I came to the conclusion that the guests are a family because a moment ago I just spotted some newborns trying to climb up the wall. Funny that in the list of all the trouble-causing animals I might have encountered in Sudan nobody advised me to include crickets…


(guess what is in the lizard's mouth??)

The first real storm of the year was also an occasion to check out the power of nature at this latitude. In a few hours switching from over 40C of burning heat to scary thunders which tore the sky apart and let an unbelievable quantity of water completely flood the dry red soil. To make things even worse, a kind of tornado hit Rumbek and heavily damaged our compound. The roof of our canteen was blown 30 meters away and the fence unrooted (see pics). The only happy ones were the kids attending the nuns' school facing our house (those ones who kindly offered us mangos for Easter) who had a great excuse to leave the classroom and start a huge mango-picking competition running barefoot in the water as fruits were falling like crazy due to the heavy wind.

Happy Easter from Rumbek!
Although today's meal wasn't really a 'festive' one (the usual rice and beans, so that we don't loose the habit) we could enjoy some ripe mangos that some very clever kids picked for us straight from the huge mango tree in front of our houses ...

Both sides of the fence
This second week in Rumbek started bringing up some interesting (at least for me) questions. We’ve started socializing with the (small) international community of Rumbek. Mainly staff of the UNMIS (UN Mission in Sudan), mostly soldiers coming from all over the places and the World Food Program that has here in Rumbek one of its sub-offices for South Sudan. There is not really much of a cultural life going on here and that is why normally the few dozens of expats can choose one of the 3-4 international compounds that fit in the western definition of ‘bars’. Which is not even too bad, considering the part of the world we are in. It is true that in most of these bars the cocktail list is still pretty limited (one of the reasons being that South Sudan seems to lack ANY kind of fresh fruit besides mangos!) but generally speaking you can enjoy a cold drink and sip it on some confortable chairs and – most importantly – in the shadow. Which is not bad afterall. However yesterday I started feeling a bit weird when, just on our way back from town of Yirol (about 80 kilometers south east of Rumbek, 2,5 hour of a very bumpy jeep ride), after all the dust and heat we had been absorbing during the day, we decided to stop by one of the above mentioned western-style compounds for an iced drink before heading home for a quick shower and dinner. Not sure whether it was for all I had seen in the morning in the leprosy/tbc/aids dispensaries we visited, or for that bunch of kids I had been playing with outside of the Yirol hospital, or for the long lines of women standing with their empty gericans and waiting hours before filling them at the well, under a sun that in only 5 minutes was drying up my brain. In any case, whatever the reason was, when I entered one of these compounds yesterday, I felt weird looking at the bunch of noisy white men so seriously involved in their beer games around the swimming pool (see first picture), looking quite stupid while dancing with a glass on the top of their head, trying not to make it fall. And I must admit I felt even weirder when I noticed a bunch of local kids climbing up a tree (see second picture) and try to look out for this amusing scene that was taking place on the other side of the electric wired fence. What will these kids think of those ‘kawagias’ [that’s how white men are called here – I am told that is the Arabic word for ‘merchant’] running half naked and dancing with a glass of beer over their head is a question that leaves me speechless and depressed.