Shopping in Rumbek







Yesterday I went with my Italian friend Carlotta to check out, for the first time properly, Rumbek’s market. It was a very entertaining experience, with some scary moments such as when we passed by the butchers’ sector (take a careful look at the above pics to understand why). But the funny thing was that after more than 2 months I finally realized that many products I totally ignored are for sale here, although for incredibly expensive prices. Who would have said, for instance, that a pineapple here in the very hearth of Africa can cost 9 USD/piece, as much as in Tokyo’s fanciest department stores. Instead this seems to be the case here in South Sudan, where the land is incredibly fertile (I know it through first hand experience, as in the past two weeks in the school garden we have planted a whole bunch of yummy vegetables) but where nobody still plants anything (and here we could discuss the reasons for this but I won’t go into this now).

Something very impressive which deserves a few words is the unique currency system adopted here in South Sudan. Currently the Government of Sudan is replacing the old Sudanese currency, the dinar, with the new Sudanese Pound - as the dinar was seen as part of the 'arabisation' process imposed by the Kharthoum government. This would not seem such a complicated issue, if the predecessor of the dinar - the 'old' pound wasn't still being used, creating confusion between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ pound. In Rumbek the local government has been trying to get rid of the old pounds with many actions, including replacing the old banknotes with new ones and then setting the old ones on a huge fire in the main square of the city. Except that some people owning some of the old pounds keep showing up and sometimes this creates fights. But this is just one part of the story. In some areas of South Sudan, like the Lakes State (of which Rumbek is the capital) shops commonly accept Kenyan Shillings and US Dollars (provided that their date of issue is from 2003 on – I never understood why) and in some border areas even Ugandan Shillings. It is not difficult to imagine how complicated it is for local sellers to list prices in 3 currencies and for the customer to carry 3 different currencies in the wallet and trying not to be ripped off too much by the arbitrary exchange rates. Anyway, for those of you who are interested to read more about this you can find here an article published by Reuters some weeks ago.

Back to 'city' life...



I am sitting in the shadow of the huge mango tree which I face every morning when I step out of my room. It’s a very quiet Sunday, even more quiet than usual as my fellow Italian colleagues this weekend are not here. I am back to Rumbek after the past 3 weeks spent in the middle of the forest and strangely enough I have this feeling of being back to the ‘city’ – although I am not so sure Rumbek can be called such. I am thinking of these past 3 weeks and the ‘full emptiness’ of living far from the noise and from everything. Somehow I feel aware of the priviledge of starting and ending the day with the sun light, of waking up at 6,30 every morning and going to bed dead tired at 10 pm and to have the moon as the only light around me (besides the one of my Mac, obviously...), of going in the garden and pick the vegetables to cook dinner with, of not caring at all for the clothes to wear. I like recalling that strange and overwhelming sensation of walking alone across the endless field facing the camp and feeling a tiny part fallen almost by chance in totally new world.

This morning, while I was ordering some papers in my suitcase, I came across my return ticket to Nairobi-Paris-Rome. I've rationally realized that in nearly 2 weeks I will leave Rumbek and will refind Paris first, then Rome and Napoli. I wonder what of this place I will bring with me in Europe and above all in which mood will I return to Sudan in July. Here many thoughts and worries seem so distant and small that sometimes I'd wish to forget they even exist. In a way returning to Europe feels like being ‘charmed’ and falling again for many small things and feelings that here are missing. But at the same time there is also bit of fear of leaving this sort of timeless world in which I ended up almost by accident and to which sometimes it feels impossibile to belong.

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.

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.