The Road to the Horizon

[i-Ladies in Bor South Sudan]

Another story by Enrico, a fellow aidworker in South Sudan, who wrote several short stories on The Road.

Late evening, I step out of our compound with a Ugandan colleague for a last (walking) meeting, when we're approached by a man wearing an military uniform, visibly eager to chat with a Kawagia ("white man" in the local language).

Despite their past bellicose nature, the locals here in Jonglei, South Sudan are usually friendly and discrete. After the usual how-are-you question, he uncommonly ventures a bit further by inquiring for my name and my nationality, and abruptly asks:
- “What’s marriage like in Europe?”
- “I beg your pardon?”, I say doubtfully.
- “I mean, do you pay the brides by cow or by cash?”, he specifies.
- “Well, neither of the two.”, I respond casually to hide my amusement
- “So what’s the advantage for the owner of the girl then?”, he replies with a big smile and looks at me as if I’m coming from outer space. He chuckles and as he walks away he turns to my colleague and says:
- “Hey, black brother, you’d better tell your friend how it works!” still smiling and mulling over the funniest thing that ever happened to him.

Picture courtesy Ulrik Pedersen

[i-Bor South Sudan]

Enrico, a fellow aidworker in South Sudan, wrote several short stories on The Road.

He just told me this story:

I was waiting for a convoy to come back from Panyagor to Bor town, the capital city of Jonglei State in South Sudan. The convoy comprising of two 4x4 Landcruisers arrived at the compound. One of the vehicles was badly damaged.
I approached one of the drivers and asked him how the journey was.
- “Very bad”, the driver replied.
- “What happened?”, I asked.
- “A python capsized my vehicle”, the driver continued in half English.
- “How big could it have been?”
- “Very big, indeed”, he concluded and entered his tent.

In French, they say "Les excuses sont faits pour s'en servir"... If you want to find an excuse for something, you can always find one.

Picture courtesy Ulrik Pedersen

link[i-link]A story from my friend Enrico, who works in Bor, South Sudan:

I was leaving the UN compound heading to the office. The security guard who had just opened the gate for me, asked me for a lift into town since his shift was over. He hopped in.
Even though the drive took just 10 minutes, but I felt obliged to keep a bit of a conversation going.

Me: “Have you received any security training?”
The guard: “Yes!”
Me: “Can you give me an example?”
The guard: “How to switch on the security lights”
…
Me: “What would you do if you saw a thief in our compound?”
The guard: It’s like when you hunt a wild animal: stalking and attacking”
Me: “What if he’s armed?”
The guard: “I’m not allowed to use a gun myself, it’s against the rules, but I have the stick I use to kill the snakes at night!”

Read more stories from Enrico about life in Sudan.

Picture courtesy Ulrik Pedersen

In most parts of the world, people have learned how to curb the forces of nature. However, there are still places where this has not taken place yet.

link[i-link]Recently, I was invited by the Government of the State in South Sudan I work in. The Governor reminded everybody that a good administration should always follow a bottom-up approach and that consultations should take place in the “bomas”, the small grass root communities, first. Then, in the counties and finally, at the state level where the final consolidation is done.

After pausing for an instant, he looked around the table and noticed that the commissioner, the ministers and the general directors were all from the capital city.

The governor then said “Well, there are always exceptions and our State is one of those. Due to the floods caused by the heavy rains, large parts of the country are still isolated and everyone has problems travelling to and from the capital. This is why WE are using a top-down approach.”

Story by Enrico Pausill, edited by “E” and Peter Casier
Picture courtesy Ulrik Pedersen


Continue reading The Road to the Horizon's Ebook, jump to the Reader's Digest of The Road.

In a number of posts I wrote about finding the right balance between our work and private life. This is a challenge in a "normal" office job, but certainly when working in the field, with your family thousands of miles away.

In this post, Enrico writes about "one of those days" where one questions if the right balance will ever be found...
Enrico, the floor is yours:

Finding the right balance in life is so difficult to achieve that some people choose it as their sole undertaking. A common mistake made by many though is to think that the perfect balance is an absolute concept. However, some large organizations are sensitive enough to give their employees the opportunity to experience this concept first hand.
Working in a remote location in South Sudan, today was “one of those days” when you think something is seriously wrong.

Here is the deal: I am in charge of a humanitarian operation that covers an area in South Sudan, which is five times the size of Denmark. The country is amazingly challenging with little or no infrastructure and lots of insecurity.
Luckily things only turn real bad during the rainy season. Unfortunately, the rainy season lasts an average of 8 months a year.
The very few roads are impassable. The airstrips turn unland-able and the country becomes one big swamp. It gets so bad, that a long sunny spell is what most South Sudanese pray for and what can make the difference between life and death for those waiting for food aid and other relief items. The floods destroy harvests and paralyse the little commerce that shyly emerges during the dry season. The conditions are so bad that some areas become impenetrable islands where its unfortunate residents might take weeks before they can move out, and this happens to humanitarian workers too.

Here is a rainy season’s day in Bor, South Sudan:

link[i-link]You start your day taking a radio call from one of your food monitors out in the field, informing you the airstrip where we were to pick her up, was not landable and that she’d run out of food supplies and water.
Another staff member calls in via the radio, asking for a tractor to rescue his vehicle which had got bogged down 100 Km from their final destination. While organizing help for the teams in the field, one of your staff kindly reminds you he hasn’t been paid for the past two months -quite common in a place where banks do not exist-.
His gentle reminder is accompanied by the stern annoyance of your security guards, who are still waiting for their new contract and never miss an opportunity to remind you they were good at shooting before the South Sudan peace treaty was signed.
Your life immediately becomes second priority when a kind man tells you that we only have five drums of fuel left to run the vehicles and generators, without which your operation will stop.
Which reminds you, you should really start working on finally getting your admin, finance and human resources assistants recruited !

Ten minutes later, a director general from one of the nearby ministries is at your door asking for tents so he can relocate his flood-affected family to higher grounds. While still keeping a smile and dealing with some of these adversities, you are suddenly reminded of the urgent need to go to the bath room. The nearest latrine is two kilometres from your office, though.
“Never mind”, you think, “Lunch time is in a few hours, I will go then.” Meanwhile you stay away from the river water that you’ve found in the office water dispenser. *%$$£ !

This is about the time, you hear shooting in the vicinity of the office, and as the UN security area coordinator, responsible for the security of all UN staff, you are compelled to do something.

By 11 am, you fake a big smile, and remember that your landlord wants to kick you out of your current premises. And the governor wants to turn your best warehouse into a prison. Meetings to be held! Just as you realize there is no vehicle to go for lunch (and to the latrine!), you remember it’s Friday and your weekly sitreps are due.

While you try to forget the urgency of nature’s call, you are reminded by Email to do a bit of planning for the next food distribution, and you are trying darned hard to figure out how on earth you’re going to recruit 40 people.

Before you know it, you realise it’s already 6 pm and mosquitoes will soon start looking for you. Then again, you remind yourself you are a humanitarian worker and that suffering is part of the job. So shrug and look one more time at your in-box trying to figure out which of the last 50 unread message deserves your attention.
Three of them catch your attention as they carry a red exclamation mark indicating a priority message. You open them up and they read:

1. “The time for submission for the peer support focal point is due today”. You think this would be ideal work for your HR assistant. If only you just had one..
2. “the deadline for the UN Module on Prevention of Harassment, Sexual Harassment and Abuse of Authority in the Workplace is due by the end of the month and is mandatory for all staff.” You are glad that somebody reminds you of those important topics that often get overlooked by operational people. But then you remember that 60% of your staff is always in the field, distributing food in remote locations where only radio connectivity is available. Another 20% only speaks the local dialect, which unfortunately is not included in the five United Nations official languages of the “harassment module”. And the remaining 10% of your staff, is stuck in the mud of the rainy season somewhere waiting for you to pull them out.
3. “Next year’s budget submissions are due tomorrow.” You know that you’ll never make it and without this you are doomed.

From Enrico in South Sudan.

During my security briefing in Khartoum prior to my deployment into South Sudan, I’m reminded that international staff are not supposed to drive and therefore no local driving licence is required: “Local drivers speak the local language, they know the local driving customs and the terrain, they know where to run for help if need be.”, they said. “Fair enough, something less to worry about”, I thought.

link[i-link]A few days later, when I arrive in my new Southern Sudan duty station, I receive a warm welcome from one of our local drivers. For the rest of the week, I end up being the only driver in the office. No news of the nice chap that picked me up from the airstrip. All the other drivers are on field missions.
I assume the policy “always to use a driver” was more of a “generic guideline”.
“Maybe I should start thinking of a driving licence, just for emergencies”, I think.

It is a thought that recurs when one of the young drivers comes back from his walk-about. I ask him why he’d disappeared for a week without permission.
- “Nothing special”, he tells me, “A chap wanted to marry my younger sister, but couldn’t afford the dowry of 35 cows we’d negotiated. So he decided to kidnap my sister. My family and I chased them up. We –euh—“renegotiated” (and he had a big smile on his face as he said this) the dowry and they’ll soon be married,” he concludes, nodding with a satisfied smile.
- “So, do you have more unmarried sisters?”, I ask.
- “Three more”, he says. It makes me think “I really need to get me a driving licence, before he starts chasing yet another future brother-in-law of his!”

The next time I got to the regional capital, Juba, I fill in the forms to apply for a local driving license.
- “Not a problem, sir!”, says our Juba head driver, “You only need to pass an eye test!”
He takes me to a place which looks no-where like a hospital or a place where they practice medicine... He explains this is where eye tests are carried out. A middle aged lady takes me to an empty room. Our head driver and the lady exchange a few words in the local language, she fills in a form, stamps it and gives me the receipt.
- “Let’s go, sir!” The head driver announces abruptly.
- “How about my eye test?”, I protest.
- “It’s all done, sir! She looked into your eyes and didn’t see anything wrong.”

A few days later, I am the proud owner of a Sudanese driver’s license. Life is good.

Picture courtesy Ulrik Pedersen

Enrico sent me another story from the deep field:

As a Master’s student I often wondered about the possible applications of the theory of relativity. Fifteen years later, while sitting at my desk as the recently appointed head of our office in South Sudan, I had my revelation.
link[i-link]A young man came to me with a request for salary advance at the end of another day in the ‘deep field’: a day full of nuisances and challenges The form bore two signatures, which gave me a bit of reassurance that the request had gone through an initial screening process. I asked him for his name and what he did for WFP. The answer didn’t come immediately. I repeated my question for a second time and after one or two seconds of hesitation he uttered a few words in Dinka, the local language.
Being Italian, I had no difficulty in using my body language to make him understand to come back with an interpreter. So he did and I got his name and function. Which did not seem to match those on the form. So I asked the translator, one of the two signatories, why the name on the form was not the same name provided by the young man.
- “Well, because that’s his brother’s name”, the interpreter replied.
- “And where is his brother?” I queried.
- “He diseased a couple of months ago!”, he said.
- “This is not a family position”, I growled, “WFP only employs people through a selection process and based on competencies and relevant work experience.” “How was he hired?”, I enquired, still annoyed.
- “Well, he inherited his brother’s family so he took his brother’s job to maintain them.”
He certainly had a point, and I was about to mellow, but asked one more question:
- “What type of contract have you been given, my son?”
Without hesitation the interpreter offered the answer:
- “None!”
I closed my laptop and called it a day.

Picture courtesy Ulrik Pedersen

You know one of my colleagues, Enrico, from a number of posts I published before. He recently moved from Rome, Italy to Bor, South Sudan.

Bor[i-Bor]He just sent me some interesting stuff he wrote about working in remote locations. And when we talk about Bor, we talk real remote locations. Something which we, in the humanitarian world, call the "deep field". How deep is the field? Endless it seems. And the deeper we go, the more basic our needs become.

Here is Enrico:

Just before leaving for Bor, I met a colleague who’d just come back from a field mission. “Where to?” I said, “Khartoum”, he replied.

link[i-link]Khartoum, an as-if family duty station, is considered by the UN an adverse place, bad enough to make you earn the famous hardship-reassignment notch. Khartoum, with its international airport, renowned university and air-conditioned houses and shops, was indeed considered a daunting destination by most HQ colleagues waiting for their reassignment. For me, Khartoum was just the first of the two transit points on the way to my final destination, and the frontier to civilization.

Once reached Khartoum, the prospective had rapidly changed. Colleagues based in Khartoum felt privileged to be there and looked down upon their unfortunate colleagues who’d been chosen for Juba, my second and final transit point (or so I thought), and its sub-offices. A colleague from Khartoum confessed me that he jokingly used “a mission to Bor” as a powerful threat with his staff: “how bad could Bor be,” I wondered? My many previous missions with WFP also gave me the certainty that Khartoum wasn’t that bad, after all … especially for the teetotallers.

Juba[i-Juba]The flight to Juba was pleasant and without surprises, thanks to the excellent services provided by United Nations Humanitarian Air Service. Juba, the capital of South Sudan and one of the three coordination centres of the WFP’s operations, had more of the familiar field looks: a poorly developed place, with lots of challenges, but a place where the bare necessities could still be satisfied. Half of my colleagues were still living in tents, office space was provided by air-conditioned containers, no local infrastructure, rough hygienic conditions and volatile security situation, but all types of food, drinks and a bit of night life were available. In my first few days in Juba, I however felt that that was the level of isolation and hardship that I was ready to tolerate.

At the mention of the word Bor, most colleagues in Juba squirmed, compassionate enough not to unveil the final surprise, but kind enough to give me some indispensable clues that would help me to be prepared for what was yet to be revealed.

Despite all, I was quite anxious to go to Bor and still a bit of optimistic that something was going to be good. Well, my optimism was soon to be betrayed.

When I reached Bor, I felt that that was the end of the known world, the very deep field. The office, located on the West bank of the White Nile, and the compound did not comply with any of WFP’s policies and procedures while food, sanitation and basic living conditions were a mere mirage. I really felt depressed.
Within 24 hours, I, however, discovered a new world. Bor, was the capital city of Jonglei state, the vastest of the ten South Sudan states: 5 times the size of Denmark.

Bor had its own governor, ministers and parliament; the Police; a local market, where a few basic items could be bought (these excluded fruit, vegetables and cleaning material); a would-be all-weather airstrip; and a hospital run by MSF.

link[i-link]Still all this wasn’t enough to brighten my spirits, until I spoke to one of our field monitors. She was about to go on one of her usual food distribution missions with 90 Kg of luggage. “What are you carrying,” I asked. “A tent, cloths, gum boots, water, basic food for 30 days, charcoal and a few other indispensable items,” she replied. “Why food for 30 days if you are going on a 3-day mission, and what are you doing with the gum boots” I replicated. “Well, during the rainy seasons the areas where we operate gets flooded, so sometimes the plane cannot land for weeks and the gum boots are essential to walk in swampy areas, although sometimes they level reach more than 1 metre.” What I had not immediately spotted during our conversation was that she had not been supplied with a satellite phone, a GPS, and an HF radio, and that her tent had holes.

After all, Bor isn’t that deep!

I always thought of South Sudan as very dry. Apparently not so. Bor seems to be green and lush. For six months per year, during the rainy season, it is cut off from the world.

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