I thought it about time I put pen to paper, it has been a while and there is much to process. I begun writing this post from Nairobi from a layover hotel as I travelled back to the UK to clinch my apartment deal and celebrate my 38th birthday. It is hard to believe that 6.5 weeks have gone by since I forced myself back on a plane to South Sudan after 3.5 months languishing in London. It had been 7 years since I had spent so long at home. The return was not as bad as I expected it to be given I was so full of nerves. Even in Nairobi waiting for the flight to Juba, I almost didn't get on the plane.
Juba was exactly how I left it, accept even poorer and more insecure. After being told resolutely that I must move back onto the UN base, I decided to take the bull by the horns and force a refurbishment through of my shipping container. With much gentle prodding, Bob the Builder (Robert) and I got there four weeks later. I also have a new tukul area outside, a tukul is a hut with a reed covered roof and open sides. I just need to furnish the space now, although come the hot season, I am only likely to be able to sit out there on weekend mornings. Mum's words were, it is hardly a hardship posting, after seeing the pictures, but I challenge her to try it. That said, it is not Malakal or Bentiu, or places in the North where you often have to cold bucket showers and the toilets are infested by insects. Back in London I will take great pleasure in being able to open an internet page straight away and to brush my teeth with the tap water.
South Sudan and the situation here has indeed deteriorated since I last left in June. I was fortunate to have been out of the country when the intense fighting in Juba took place between 7 and 11 July. I got an e-mail to tell me to stay where I was on the 9th of July and it was a whole 3.5 months before I moved back. People had thought I had left for good. Although the situation remains calm in Juba, the same cannot be said for the rest of the country, particularly the region around the capital. Juba is in Central Equatoria and is flanked by Western and Eastern Equatoria, collectively they are known as Greater Equatoria or just the Equatorias. Western Equatoria has seen a lot of violence and displacement and right now the town of Yei in the South West is under siege by Government forces. People are fleeing across the Southern border to Uganda. South Sudan, now with a refugee population outside of it borders of more than 1.1 million people, has the largest refugee population in the world, second only to Syria. Within the country over 1.6 million people are internally displaced and are what is known in the humanitarian world as IDPs (internally displaced persons). Figures vary slightly, but in a Security Council meeting last week it was stated that 4.8 million, almost half the population, are in dire need of food aid.
The Government has no money; its income is but a small fraction of what it was at independence in 2011. Civil servants have not been paid for months and this is leading to increasing insecurity and criminality. UN staff and INGO workers are therefore legitimate targets. Rife with rumour, the smallest incident can be blown out of proportion and could provide the spark necessary for a full scale return to civil war. The Secretary-General’s Special Advisor on Genocide is warning that all the ingredients are there for the commencement of ethnic cleansing.
The prognosis is bleak and the general feeling is that it will only be a matter of time before the international community is pulling out again. When I left in June I had expected to be back in two weeks and packed accordingly. This time I took no chances and brought all the items with me, mostly electrical related, that I would not want to lose. Honestly, most things are replaceable, but things like hard drives and some of your favourite clothes are not. The thing I struggle with a little is that I don’t see the environment and situation described above. Since being back I have been mostly confined to the bubble that is the UN Base, next to the airport in Juba. One gets out of bed every morning in the newly refitted container, walks the short five-minute walk to the office and your day is interspersed with coffee breaks and the occasional meeting in town for which you organise a driver. You go to the gym, watch TV programmes and at the weekend I often find myself at some pool at one of the nicer hotels where you sit around with expats and drink expensive drinks and think nothing of spending in one sitting what would be equivalent to two month’s salary for some people. There is of course one price for expats and another for locals. When I go to the supermarket, none of which take credit cards (you cannot use credit cards in South Sudan bar the international supermarket in our compound), you must take wads of cash, especially if your $100 dollars was changed into 25 SSP notes.
However, generally, driving around Juba it does feel different and more repressed. Our curfew of 7pm means that we don’t leave the base during the week after office hours. I understand that the streets are also generally deserted by later in the evening as this is when killings and abductions are occurring. Middle of the night gunfire is a common occurrence. Fortunately, it only seems to wake my colleagues up! I did get a better sense of the insecurity when I went on my first field trip on Monday with what is known as Force Protection. This is where we travel in a long convoy with heavily armed peacekeepers at the front and rear. It was the Nepalese who had the job of escorting us to a demolition site 50 kilometres outside of Juba where we destroyed a whole load of ammunition and I took a lot of photos! Again, as we drove along in our armoured jeep and waved to the kids on the side of the road that would come running up to the greet us, you felt so detached, looking out into a foreign world. It was so hard to visualise all of the atrocities that have been occurring, the place looked peaceful, people were getting on with the lives. Yet the convoy passed a burnt out truck on the right on the way up, it came to light later that only a few days earlier two soldiers had been burnt alive in it and three others had been shot dead. There were a noticeable amount of checkpoints and each time we stopped I was wondering why, considering whether any of our SSAFE training would need to be put into practice. On the way home a whole group of soldiers passed us, some with rocket propelled grenade launchers resting on their shoulders, this was one of the weapons our technical teams had just destroyed.
What has struck me recently is how little people know about each other's cultures. You really feel this moving between a highly underdeveloped country and a highly developed one, but even in Nairobi I was struck by the contrast. I was chatting to an African claiming asylum in the United States. He assumed that he would know he had reached the final stages of his asylum application because he would be interviewed by white people. He had this impression because the final stage would be his security interview, which would be conducted by FBI officials, and he assumed the interviewers would need to be white. I explained that the FBI employed people of many different races and he seemed generally surprised/ pleased. I secretly wondered if he harbours an ambition to work for the FBI one day if his application succeeds. Then with the cultural ignorance on the European foot, yesterday morning an English couple were getting so impatient at the lateness of the airport shuttle bus. When the manager said “it is just over there and pointed” the husband started getting mad and wanted to know why they hadn’t driven over and parked up outside the reception and what good was it to be parked over there when we needed to leave. I had to quietly explain later in the bus that the manager had actually meant the bus was nearly here and just around the corner, but that this vocab or detail had been omitted, or was not known.
Now back in the UK, I am glad to be reaching for a jacket and strolling freely around outside in the chilly wind, popping into shops and not having to plan one's travel through cars and taxis. Debate continues over Brexit and Trump's election, whether the housing market will crash and if the pound will remain weak. It's hard to imagine South Sudan coming back onto the radar here again unless, and I hate to say it, things become very violent again. Hopefully things will get better slowly and quietly, I think that is the best we can hope for.
