Blogging out of the bush



I am back to this blog after quite a long pause. I regret not being able to write more although I guess every now and then it’s good to take some time for looking, hearing, and trying to ‘digest’ everything (or most of it) before sharing it.

I have been for the past two weeks literally in the middle of nowhere, Bar Gel, a bunch of tukuls located 60 km North-West of Rumbek on the way to Wau. A remote piece of land that most of the international organizations and NGOs ignore and that even the UN peacekeepers seem not to consider during their patrols. People here call it the ‘bush’ although the environment is more the one of savannah-like vegetation, which as we go more into the rain season will become a huge swamp. In this remote area, one of the most severely stricken by the long war, several Italian organizations, together with the Diocese or Rumbek and (in a way) the Italian Government have taken on a huge challenge. Creating a vocational training center in the middle of the bush, a place where young people could get skills to become carpenters, masons, farmers, mechanics. These days in most areas of South Sudan there is a total lack of skilled workforce and, even for the simplest jobs, companies have to bring in workers from the neighbouring countries, above all Kenya and Uganda.

But what am I doing here these days? I have been asked to take care of the compound of the school on which I am working while the logistician is on holidays in Kenya for 3 weeks (to be more precise he is on R&R, ‘rest and restore’ as they call it in humanitarian jargon). So for the past 10 days I have been dealing with many for me ‘unusual’ tasks, ranging from overseeing the builders’ work, making sure the gardener plant the right vegetables according the moon phasis, learning to drive a 4 wheel drive car in the bush, cooking for 5-6 people twice a day everyday, buying 15 drums of gasoline for operating the machineries, etc.

I can see myself exactly one year ago wandering in suit and tie the streets of Tokyo and enjoying all the priviledges of being a World Bank staff in mission to Japan. I see myself now, and I try to understand what (and if at all) has changed inside my brain. I look around myself these days searching for some clues that could help me answer this question. But there is nothing really that can help relate myself of now with myself of one year ago. Paris and the World Bank days are light years away from here and I feel quite mixed up when I think about it. In a way it feels like looking at a beautiful postcard, although since I left Paris last December it also felt it as the only city I could have settled in.

While this afternoon I was lost in these very thoughts I recalled to my mind some lines of Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities’ (great book by the way), when Kublai Kan – to whom Marco Polo has been telling stories about the incredible cities he has just visited – asks the Venetian traveller whether he travels ‘with the head turned behind him’. And Marco Polo answers that in his travels what he searches for is always in front of him, and even when he has the past in front of him it’s a past which changes as he moves forward in his journey. Because a traveller’s past changes according to the itinerary he chooses in the future. And what I find absolutely fascinating in what Marco Polo/Calvino says is that, as he gets to a completely new place the traveller refinds pieces of himself belonging to a past he doesn’t own and remember anymore.
(…)

The generator [the machine that produces electrical power from fuel] has just been switched off and I am left in complete darkness and in a creepy silence broken by an infinite variety of sounds from the millions of creatures inhabiting the forest surrounding me. I am sitting on my bed contemplating the most stunning, starriest sky I’ve ever seen. Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert is playing as a soundtrack and from my window I can see a stripe of the Milky Way and it’s an absolutely breathtaking view I had never seen before coming to Africa. I am again thinking of Calvino’s book and now I try to imagine in which piece of my remote past I could find the faces of kids which always surround me here, the immense power of this nature, and the peace that this non-peaceful and remote part of the world is mysteriously able to release.