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It is 8pm and dark already. Tomorrow, I’m supposed to fly to the border.. but am I?
Justin is driving the CARE mobile like crazy. It is clear he does not know well how to drive it.
‘Justin, please, stop!’
He barely stops the car in time. In front of us, the SPLA soldier is shouting and pointing a rifle on us.
The whole thing started last night when Justin, logistics officer at CARE, realizes that I had been 8 days in Juba, and he had never ask for my passport and travel permits to register me with the local police at the airport.
Five in the afternoon the day before leaving , I ask: ‘Justin, gotta go, where is my passport?’
Justin went pale (and he is not precisely white). ‘Please forgive me, I will recover it.’
I decided to go with him, just to be sure that I would have the passport in hand as soon as possible.
Justin drove, nervously, to four different houses in two different (and extremely poor, even for Juba standards) neighborhoods. He only said that we were looking for ‘the airport guy’.
We finally found the
Typical Nuer scars
I found this pic online because it shows with clarity the scars, all adults in Pagak have the same marks. airport guy, but he didn’t come with us. Instead, we picked up another guy in the fourth house, and headed to the airport…
I didn’t understand anything, until the soldier, rifle in hand, approached the car: the guy we picked up was another soldier, who came down the car and hugged the gentleman that five seconds ago was pointing at us.
Nobody, except the military, can enter the airport after sunset. Our passenger went to the airport, and following the instructions of ‘the airport guy’, brought me the never more appreciated passport.
This made for a great story for my expat friends at Central Pub, where we met for a few farewell Tuskers.
Next stop: Pagak.
………………………
Reaching the border was a whole adventure. The World Food Program (WFP) does not operate direct flights to the little town of Pagak. Instead, I took a first plane with some ten development workers from different organizations to a small ‘town’ (basically, an airstrip and UN compounds) called Rumbek, and from there, a miniature Cessna flight took me and a government official to the final destination.
Recall from the ‘Welcome to Juba’ entry that only one
Estrenando las botas de goma..
...mis mejores amigas en Pagak... WFP flight goes to Pagak every week, and that no flight has arrived here in a while, due to the weather (or WFP’s lack of gas). This might explain why coming off the plane, I was surrounded by no less than twenty people, adults and children. And I mean surrounded, very close. No one was smiling. I admit it, felt kind of uncomfortable. But mostly because of the scars, the scars almost everyone had…
The Nuer is an ancient tribe that has inhabited what today are Eastern South Sudan and Western Ethiopia since…forever. As their traditional enemies, the Dinka, they are historically nomads and semi-nomads, dedicated to pastoralism, and have been characterized for being very combative and territorial.
Imagine that you are a Nuer taking your cattle for water in a stream, and you find another guy there. How do you know he is friend or foe? The Nuer did not find a better way than scarring circles around their heads (their natural enemies, the Dinkas, used to scar themselves with vertical lines in the forehead). They do it on kids as a ritual that symbolizes the achievement of manhood.
Only a few years ago, the practice
of marking the Nuer boys was abolished. Not everybody was happy about it, but the argument was that the reason for the marks did not existed anymore. Nuers, Dinkas and other tribes are now citizens of one country, Southern Sudan, and such practices were already unnecessary, the Customary Law stipulates.
But all Nuer adults born in rural areas have these scars. I was still surprised for all those faces looking at me, when a guy came waiving a notebook, speaking English, and, not very politely, asking me what was I doing in Pagak.
‘I’m with CARE’, I said.
‘Nobody told us’, he replied.
A gentleman, who would later turn to be my friend Mading, came rushing, and explained everything to James, the angry Nuer questioning me first, and whose face I was to see a lot around here.
This is how the Pagak adventure started.
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