at the airport

Juba airport is the most strange place.  Surrounded by portakabins, which are the offices of all the airlines.  The places where you have to go to turn an e-ticket into a boarding pass and to check in your luggage.  More portakabins for some of the officials' offices, and then the departure area consists of tent roofs held up on top of scaffolding poles, strips of rotted hardboard perched on cement blocks on the ground over the bare earth below ... no photographs allowed of course, but it's always possible to take one at a strange angle with your camera hidden in your bag ...

But I jump ahead of myself.

My airport journey started in the Bannastars portakabin (between the Kush Air and the Dream Air portakabins) where I checked in for my flight.  I showed my ticket, I showed my passport - the visa, plus the Registration Stamp on the back page - and I showed my government Travel Authorisation allowing me to go to Yei, and I collected my boarding pass.  My suitcase was weighed and tagged on a portable weighing machine outside.  Then I waited.  & waited some more, standing around trying to catch shade from the already hot sun (at 8am) near the suitcases.

Finally they tell us to go and check in at the departure gate (the tented area above).  But on the way there, foreigners are pulled aside and told to go to another portakabin for another check of our documents.  My turn comes and the man tells me "you need a stamp".  "Where do I get that?"  He motions to his left (where there is a wall) and tells me I get it from the man in the office.  So I leave his 'office' and wander about looking for a different man in a different office .. somehow find him and he eventually gets off the phone then checks my documents.  Obviously satisfied, he affixes a post-it to my passport, writing on it, "To Yei: Approved" and he signs it.  I go back to the first man in an office who stamps the post-it.

Now to the tented check-in area.  People are checking in for a multitude of flights, all on the small airlines that are making money out of the South Sudan tragedy - going to Yei, to Nimule, to Torit, to Pibor - and one international flight to Nairobi.  I stay as close as is decent to the man in front, to prevent anyone from queue-jumping.

But then the man who gave me my boarding pass in the Bannastars office pulls six of us (all foreigners) aside and says we have to go to CID.  We follow him out of the departures area and around the car park and into another set of portakabins.  In an office there I am asked for my travel authorisation, which I produce.  The guy who took us there gets a ticking off - "They have their documents!  Why did you bring them here?"

Now back to the original office where the whole morning started.  We wait.  The departure time of my flight comes and goes.  There is no information, but I realise there is no power in the office, as the fan sits motionless and the sweat drips down all our faces.

Eventually we are called outside to watch the loading of our luggage into the back of a van, and then we walk back to departures.  At one stage a man inspects my passport and takes the post-it note.  I ask if I can't keep it as a souvenir but am told they need to file it with their records.  I cannot imagine the filing system for post-its ... already mine was curling at the edges in the heat.

Through the departures area and we got on a bus, and then finally onto the plane.  I reflect again on what an amazing life I have (and how lucky that none of the people who checked it spotted that the registration stamp in my passport by the Directorate of Nationality, Passports & Immigration describes me as being of US nationality).  Finally, here's a sneaky photo I took (camera inside my bag which was on the ground) of the Ethiopian Airlines check-in desk at the international departures area...

working in South Sudan

After my four weeks in Panama it was nice to be travelling again, especially as it was to Africa - and to a brand new country on my life list.  Indeed quite a new country in other senses, as South Sudan was only born in 2011.  Sadly by 2013 it was embroiled in a civil war.  At the time of independence the humanitarian needs were already massive, with some of the worst health indicators in the world.  Then the civil war made it too dangerous to farm the fields, there was no rain, and parts of the country slid into famine.

With famine, the cattle herders have to travel far with their cattle, and there are skirmishes if the cattle eat farmers' crops, as well as cattle raids as these valuable animals are stolen and anyone defending them is killed.

But the main problem is the confusing set of of conflicts, mostly between the Dinka and Nuer tribal groups but also with other smaller groups and even now between different Dinka groups.  The government controls only part of the country, and everyone in all areas has guns.  There are only two intercity paved roads in the country, and in the rainy season the other roads - red laterite like the one above - become rutted and flooded and often impassable.

So it was an interesting country to visit!!  We have an office in the capital and eight field offices around the southern half of the country - none of which is now accessible by road.  Earlier in the year two field offices were accessible in road convoys with UN support but the last convoy was in May.  I had to go out into the field to see if we were doing what we should be - primarily distributing food to vulnerable groups (the malnourished, the displaced, breast-feeding mothers, etc) - which for the first trip meant a flight on the UN Humanitarian Air Services flight to Rumbek, the second a commercial flight with JetStar to Yei.  The Juba airport experience will get a post all of its own...

It was great to get out of Juba and actually see something of the country.  I will regret for ever that I didn't ask some of the women in Wulu if I could take their photograph, as the tribal scarification on their faces was so beautiful.  But I did take some photos of a 'welcoming committee' of women in another village, where in this close-up shot you can at least see that the woman in the background has undergone the traditional removal of the bottom front teeth.  A painful experience that you never forget, according to one of my colleagues.

Whilst I met plenty of displaced people in the villages - people whose homes had been burnt down by raiders, who'd had to trek for days to find somewhere else to lodge - it was heartening to find in some villages there was a mix of Dinka and Nuer, co-existing quite happily - so there is some hope of peace between the two groups, eventually.

In Yei I was excited (and saddened) to visit a camp for Internally Displaced Persons - no photos there as there were too many children around and we have rules about publishing photographs of children.  But these makeshift homes of displaced people were beside the road in Juba.

Not sure how long they'd been there but some of those I spoke to in the camp in Yei had been there for three years.  Children had been born there and knew nothing else.  I asked about the life - how did they get food (in this camp we were working on early childhood development projects rather than feeding)?  They said they received rice from an aid agency but otherwise had to go and forage in the bush.  Some of them also collected stones in the bush and worked to break them into smaller stones to sell for construction ... impossible, really, to imagine that life.

But even there people were smiling and laughing, the joy that is always there in Africa, whatever the circumstances. 

& here, a typical village - the sort of place they would have fled from before they began their years of displacement: