Frazzle Rock

I’ve been back at work in Rumbek for four days now. FOUR. And already I want to leave. Or throw my computer out the window. Or scream like a crazed lunatic. Or punch something (or someone). All of the above? Why not?

It’s a good thing I took a couple of weeks off. My ten days at home, though short, were so great: weddings, surprise engagements, new babies, walks on the beach, good food and wine. Some time in the sun was just what I needed. I had become a grumpy, short tempered, frazzled Jacqui. I don’t like her. She’s not really me. But she comes out when ‘death by a thousand cuts’ reaches a certain point. And so she had to leave Rumbek to prevent things getting out of hand. 

They had already, to a point, with me yelling at one of our drivers for taking tea when he was supposed to have been dropping me somewhere (and after not loading the car with a whole bunch of items I needed to transport) – I know, who's the crazy lady ... but this particular driver has an attitude problem, is rather lazy, has already caused a serious crash and had the car compounded after driving into the Governor's convoy. Idiota! Possibly should have been fired long ago.... He also just happened to be an idiot at the wrong time. I don’t like being late, and I was becoming increasingly late because of him, and we had to pick up a variety of government people before trying to visit 12 schools in one day as part of preparations for Global Hand Washing Day the following week. Eesh.

This year the Government had wanted to take more of a lead role in the event (ie get more of the praise when really NGOs do all the work and put up most of the funding). Fine with me; it’s what we’re here to do – support them in their activities and build their capacity. But it also meant that they had nominated me to be the chairperson of the organising committee and subsequently do all the running around. So it had made me increasingly flustered, because the people that were supposed to be assisting me were sitting back and watching me do all of it. Anyway, I’ve already decided that next year the Government is running the whole thing. (I could throw in a ‘washing my hands of it’ pun here. Sad, I know!)

The upshot of all of this was that as a result of my yelling at said driver (“it’s just f$*king tea!”), he reported me to his boss, the acting program manager and the representative of the staff association. Fast forward to the afternoon of Global Hand Washing Day (post event, when I could finally relax and look forward to leaving for a holiday) and I’m sitting in front of a panel of no less than 6 Oxfam staff, on trial for my behaviour. Having used the word “f$ck” and unintentionally slagging off the South Sudanese tradition of tea drinking didn’t help my cause either. I got a good talking to, somewhat uncalled for by a number of people that didn’t even need to be there, and while I clearly over-reacted, the driver didn’t really get in trouble. Again.

Death by a thousand cuts really does apply here. Nothing is simple!

Now, a disclaimer before I launch into the rest of this blog entry: I did anticipate what I signed up for when I said yes to coming to work in South Sudan, of all places. So of course I knew that it wouldn't be easy. But every now and then, venting is necessary. And what better place to do it than THE most public place in the world - the Interweb?

Our staff, bless their cotton socks, try their best (well most of them) and do a great job most of the time. But despite as much advising, coaching, training, coaxing, suggesting and demonstrating as I can humanly do, they either refuse to get organised or are not able. The government is worse, with our office in Juba a close second.

Buying anything for work purposes is a drama. No-one wants to take a float of cash to buy stuff for work purposes, because they don’t want to have to account for every last pound of it and they have to get receipts for everything, which are not easy to find in the market, let alone in most shops. Paperwork here just drags you down to the bottom of the ocean. I know why all these processes are there, but they’re just so painful. Procuring anything of any value takes so long it’s like watching paint dry. People can't think far enough ahead to procure things the proper way - by submitting a requisition with Logistics to go and get it for you.

Don’t ever go to the one bank in town (KCB). You’ll be there for hours waiting for your turn at the unmanned counter. You have to know someone in the secret back rooms, who sit around waiting for who they know to summon them.

No-one is ever on time here. I know, Africa time, but it’s another thing that wears you down after a while. Why bother turning up for an agreed 10am meeting until at least 10:30 or 11? We’ve all got nothing better to do.  

The roads are terrible. You need to do yoga regularly to maintain your spine; the roads wear you down if you have to travel any further than an hour. The general public has no road awareness (neither do cows, goats, chickens or dogs). There are people that just walk out in front of your car without a second thought. And lots of drunken soldiers and old men passed out in the middle of road. At night. The roads are shut off during the rainy season as they turn to mud. Trucks get stuck for weeks in the worst spots and the food they are carrying spoils quickly in the searing heat.

We rely on the shoddiest wiring for our compound. There are no qualified electricians to fix anything. The 'qualified' mechanics in town try to rip you off at every opportunity and never use new parts to repair your vehicles; they try to sell you used parts and only do a half-arsed job so that you come back again soon for more.

Everything we use is cheap, Chinese made sh!t – eating and cooking utensils, power boards, water dispensers, sofas, plastic chairs and tables. Even our toilet paper is made there! China, like in the rest of the world, is making a fortune in Africa selling crap products. They all break regularly and take forever to replace. And here in Rumbek, they are extremely expensive! They get imported from Uganda, along with everything else. Including food.

Juba is 728km from Kampala; then whack a couple of hundred kilometres on top of that to get to Rumbek. That’s almost 1000km. While I don’t know if all the imported goods come from the Ugandan capital, it’s still a long way to transport food. Or anything else for that matter. A majority of our fruit comes from Uganda. So do all the products in the market, besides meat and greens. Oh and peanut butter which is made locally from the millions of peanuts around here at this time of year. You can’t buy eggs from South Sudan. No-one has the resources to, or seemingly knows how to, keep chickens, so eggs are transported all that way as well.

A country with such vast, undeveloped countryside with this volume of rainfall and the River Nile flowing through it should be the bread basket of eastern and central Africa. An essay for another time. But at one stage we were enjoying ground nuts from Cuiebet, sugar cane from Rumbek North and guavas from our compound – all in a country that can’t feed itself. How can that possibly be?!

So, coming back to today: my frustrations after four days back here in Rumbek – this funny place that I love, my second home, a place I enjoy most of the time despite being in the middle of nowhere – have already confirmed to me that my time here needs to come to an end. Christmas 2012 in Australia is where it’s at. I need to get out of here, to go and be normal for a while, in a normal place. I might even try to work out what to do with my life. 

Regardless of what I leave behind – actually it’s who I leave behind – I can’t stay here forever. My khawaja buddies who keep me sane; my lovely staff; my basketball buddies; the various people that know me around town; and perhaps my most favourite: the gorgeous, grubby kids that live in the tukul next door that yell “Jacqui! Jacqui! Jacqui!” continually from when they first see me (and sometimes even when in the undignified act of taking a dump on the roadside, hilarious!) until they have run over to me and given me a big hug . And they can see me from a mile away, us white people stick out like sore thumbs around here.

Nope, staying here would be a compromise of my mental health ... or what remains of it. Sorry Rumbek, I love you, but two more months is it.