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Published: June 19th 2008
With Miranda at Queen of Sheba
Both stranded, she couldn't star her car, I couldn'enter my house..The plan was to stay two nights in Juba, and then to depart to my main destination in this trip: my fieldwork in Pagak, a small locality along the Sudanese-Ethiopian border.
But in this business, things rarely work as they are supposed to. Pagak, on the Upper Nile region is in the middle of the rainy season, and I was told, after three hours waiting at the airport, that the plane was cancelled due to bad weather in the area.
Now, it is not Sudan Airways, or Continental, that was going to take me to Pagak. The carrier to these remote destinations is the Humanitarian Air Services of the World Food Programme, or HAS-WFP. I have the joy of knowing many great people working for WFP, both in Rome and on the field. I like the agency more than others in the UN system because it is focused on its goals and the tasks towards those goals. And definitively, air service is NOT WFP thing.
Service to Pagak only runs once a week; to the capital of Upper Nile, Malakal, twice a week. WFP recently reported that was cutting back frequencies in South Sudan and Darfur due to
a big hole in its budget. Today is June 16, and they had announced they could not guarantee flights beyond June 15. Santo problema, Batman!!
Turns out, it was not raining in Pagak the day my flight was cancelled. WFP said it only to hide the shame of not being able to fly because they did not have fuel.
While waiting at the airport, I met Junko Fujimoto, charming Japanese consultant with the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA). Junko was also on her way to Pagak, where ADRA works registering and resettling former refugees in Ethiopia, now returning to their lands in South Sudan, only to find out that…their lands have already been taken by others. Junko was frustrated, and with reason: this was the second week in a row WFP cancelled the Pagak flight.
WFP personnel offered us that they would try to fly us in two days later (on Saturday). When I arrived to the CARE International office on Friday, I was told the impossible: WFP had sent AN EMAIL at 11:00pm the previous night stating that they had rescheduled the flight for 8:00am THAT morning. Nobody read the email until 10 in the
morning, and since we did not show up, our reserve was cancelled….John Perry, the program director at CARE, summarized the almost ridiculous anecdote with the single phrase I would hear more than once: ‘Welcome to South Sudan’.
With my plane gone and without another one until the following Thursday, there was no choice but to become a Jubian…Since my sister had left already, I took over her room at the Malaria Consortium guest house, a way better alternative to the Star Camp where CARE had found me accommodation. Here I publicly thank Steve, program director at the Consortium, for letting me stay.
My three roommates at the guest house were the perfect introduction to life in Juba. Martin, from Zambia, Kouma (did I say it right?) from Kenya, and half-American, a quarter Irish, a third-Portuguese and an eight Swiss, Mr. Mike Crowley.
Juba, and South Sudan in general, is a weird, and extremely expensive place. This is, as my friend Jacob at CARE defined it, a seller’s market: everything here is imported, and prices are determined rather irrationally. Example: Martin, the Zambian, wanted to buy a generator, which in Zambia, could cost $1,500. Here in Juba, he
was able to find the same generator for $500 (after looking around a lot). For shipping it to Zambia, he was going to be charged $900, almost double the price of the generator. Looking around, he was able to ship it for $200, almost a fifth of what he was originally asked for.
Crazy stories abound: the ‘official’ dollar rate is two Sudanese pounds per US$. In the state of Western Equatoria, the governor sets himself the exchange rate every morning. No, I am not kidding. Beware if the guy had a fight with his wife the night before. A migraine could easily make markets disappear in that area…
Going to the supermarket here is a real adventure, and a liver-test. Businesses are clearly controlled by Hindus and Arabs, and be sure to ask for the price first, since it might change radically in a 10-minute lapse. To give you an idea: a bag of peanuts, 250grams, costs US$20 at JIT…. Vegetables and beef are a luxury here. When I was in Nairobi, ready to travel to Juba, I asked my sister what would she like the most from there. Her immediate answer said it all: CHEESE.
I have met very interesting people here: Miranda, from PSI, Jo and Nabila from UNICEF; Brad and Fatima, UNOPS and soon moving to Nairobi, the Norwegian with the name I will never remember (he!), soon moving to Nicaragua; Ellie, the Sarahs, and many others. Each one has great, and sometimes tragic stories about Juba. Each finds a different way to occupy his/her time.. The cycle house-office-bar-house is not uncommon around here. But hey, it is not uncommon in Washington or Rome either…
But it is the older generation the one with the most fascinating stories. Mr. Crowley, the UNICEF representative in Juba, came for the first time in 1977, directing the Civil Service of the UK, the British equivalent of the Peace Corps. He told us stories of elephants , cheetas, and lions roaming around Juba, and actually, these animals can still be found near the city, in an area that has the potential for a reserve and tourist destination. Maybe someday. Nowadays, soldiers still kill animals to have something to eat. Mr. Crowley also mentioned the times when he used to sleep with a handgun under his bed, and how non-sense it was against AK-47’s…’better change the gun
for an ax’, we laughed…somehow, it was actually funny.
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Stubrucam
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Ah, Juba!
I enjoyed this one as I've been stranded in Juba too. I was down there on work from my home base in Cairo, was booked on a flight back to Cairo but got gazumped by a bigwig from the UN. Juba airport is not somewhere you want to be stranded for any length of time, not quite Changi in terms of facilities!