the transubstantiator

Day in the Life

2010-02-24T03:36:00.001-06:00

So, a typical day in the life of a monitoring and evaluation consultant in Sudan (that'd be me):

Woke up around 6:30 am in my tukul, a mud or stone hut with a thatched roof of grass, on the Norwegian Church Aid compound. We're paying about $25 a night with full board. The mattress and pillow are super-firm, quite uncomfortable by western standards but lucky compared to those who live here. The mosquito net makes the room look cloudy and dream-like, especially as the sun is just beginning to peek through the little circle in the wall that is my window, projecting a porthole of light against my webbed enclosure.

I take a bucket shower in the stall next to the latrine, and I have to breathe through my mouth so as not to gag on the fumes. Although most of my colleagues like to take their showers at night seeing as we're all dusty and sweaty by the end of the day, I can't bear the hot water, which has been cooking all day in the 110 degree heat. It's much cooler in the morning. I've made taking a bucket shower an art form, establishing an efficient but comprehensive routine that I find quite satisfying.

After dressing and meticulously readying my backpack for the day, I head to the mess and have tea and fried flat bread with jam. I get ready a little early so that I can sit and read in the quiet of the morning without anybody around, although it's really not that quiet as roosters crow and goats bleat a farm-like racket. My colleagues Tom and Cosmas show up and then the land cruiser arrives around 7:30 am to take us to the Education Resource Center in Kauda. This is the home base of the program I'm evaluating.

In the office we quickly check our email (VSAT) and ready the documents we need for the day. This day were visiting two schools about 40 km outside of town. It'll take us about 3 and a half hours to get there. The terrain here is desert mountains and extremely rocky. There are no roads so we follow primitive dirt tracks through terraced gardens and stone tukuls perched precariously on mountainsides, rocking back and forth as the truck navigates boulders and ruts and river beds. No one seems to know when these terraces were built, etched along most of the mountain sides, but some guess at least 10 generations ago.

This area, Nuba Mountains, has been in the middle of a civil war since the early 80's and is starved for services and attention by the state. Access to education and health services is very low to nil, infant and maternal mortality is very high and access to clean water is only just improving in the town centers. There is a huge refugee population from this area, and many of have recently returned from camps in Khartoum, Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia after 15 years in exile. Most are very loyal to southern Sudan even though this area will likely be part of the north. Conflict between Arab pastoralists and African agro-pastoralists over water and land has a long history and the north used the former as militias just as they use the Janjaweed in Darfur. Arab slavers devastated this area in the 19th and early 20th century.

Most of the schools around here are made up of maybe 4 or 5 semi-permanent grass shelters or a few stone huts. A few classes meet under trees; the children sit on long benches provided by UNICEF and UNICEF has made it impossible not to know that these benches were "PROVIDED BY UNICEF," as it is stamped on everything they make. The lower grades typically have between 40 and 80 students per class, but dwindle to between 5 and 20 by class 6. The teachers have between 4th and 8th grade educations, but luckily many have attended intensive teacher training in Kauda provided by other NGO's. The language of instruction here is English, as it is in the south, whereas it's Arabic in the north. Language of instruction was a big source of the 25 year-long civil war between north and south, as the north attempted to impose an Arab-Muslim identity on the entire country.

Pupils, many of whom walk an hour to school, are then sent another hour or two to fetch water for the school at a borehole that is crowded with people and animals a few miles away. We passed a few on our way here; an endless line of jerry-cans snakes it's way out from the pump in lieu of a human cue. Interrupting the desert drab are a dazzle of colorful sheets and clothes draped over bushes and trees as some do their laundry here.

After greeting the headmaster and teachers, and formal introductions, we conduct classroom observations. Because of the shortage of books, we mostly see teachers copy text from their books onto the board and students then copy it into their notebooks. This is the dominant pedagogy in most classrooms around here. Their English, learned mostly in refugee camp schools (a part of my dissertation topic), is not so great. Since the state doesn't pay these teachers, they are forced to collect school fees from families, about $15 per year per kid. The teachers make about $60 per month, but they're lucky if they get that; most families have a hard time paying the fees.

We then conduct focus group discussions with teachers and then with the PTA if there is one. We're evaluating a project that trains teachers, parents, and other community members to deliver health messages to students and their families concerning disease prevention, hygiene, and nutrition. They also dispense de-worming drugs and Vitamin A (because they don't eat vegetables here). Lack of access to water is a big barrier, but most so far report that children are much healthier and are spending more time in school as a result. The project is also suppose to increase teacher quality but this part of the project has much less impact for a million reasons.

After another bumpy 30-minute ride, we arrive at the second school and do the whole thing over; we spend about 2-3 hours at each school. This time though, the pupils have prepared a song for us and they line up in the courtyard and sing. We then are invited to give short speeches and I tell them how I never had to worry about having books or water or food at school, and how much I admire their perseverance. I tell them that they will be the generation of Sudanese leaders that will make sure their own children will have schools like I had. It is unlikely this will come true.

At this point, it's about 3:30 in the afternoon and we hadn't eaten anything since 7 am except water and soda and a small banana. Although we are eager to get home, the teaching staff insists we stay for a bite and literally grab out hands and pull us. We follow them to the teachers compound (these schools are so remote that most teachers live in a teachers compound adjacent to the school. These compounds are not nice.), where they serve us bread and goat stew, and glasses of orange Tang.

We arrive back to the office just before 8; my body is aching from being thrown about in the back of the land cruiser, and my head is pounding. I slam a bottle of cool water I steal from their cooler and begin typing my notes. By 9 we head back to the compound. We're paid by the day, and indeed they get their money's worth.

There is dinner waiting for us. I am ravished and eat a giant plate of rice, goat stew broth (the goat here is fried super tough and I don't feel like taking the hour or so of tooth picking to remove it from my teeth) and chopped tomatoes with a little bit of chile paste and lime. As I nestle into one of the ubiquitous plastic chairs one finds all over the continent, the Nubian security guards wander over and sit with us. I grab the remote and find Olympic highlights. Tonight is ice dancing and the women's skeleton. The guards find ice dancing the most hilarious thing they've ever seen and hoot the hardest when the couple is sitting together after their routine awaiting their scores, with their big emotions and over-done make-up. I laugh along with them and it all seems utterly preposterous. During skeleton, the guards yell and tisk each time an athlete jumps onto her sled. The Olympics suddenly seem like a circus, and my stomach hurts from laughing.

By about 11 I can't keep my eyes open and so I relinquish control of the remote and wobble back to my tukul where I brush my teeth with bottled water and slip under the mosquito net. The mattress is hot. I pick up my book and read a few pages. As I'm falling asleep, I hope to myself that my children are thinking about me, worry about one of my dissertation committee members who is being difficult, and fantasize that a curvy, poet Jewess has sent me a love letter.

Great Expellations

2009-03-22T03:38:00.003-05:00

Things got quite chaotic in north Sudan around March 4th when about 16 of the biggest NGO's, including Save the Children-US for whom I was working, were expelled from the region in response the the International Criminal Court indictment of the President, al-Bashir, for war crimes in Darfur. It got quite nasty as Sudanese security forces occupied the offices of the NGO's, seized assets like computers, cell phones, vehicles, bank accounts... and then gave them 48 hours to get all ex-pats out of the country. For some, including us, this was impossible: we employ over 50 ex-pats who live in the field and had no way of gathering their shit and getting to Khartoum in that time; and nearly 3000 nationals, some of whom have working for Save for over 25 years (Save has been in Sudan for 30), who are now unemployed.

The security forces came to the guest house where I was living and treated us like criminals. We weren't allowed to leave the building until they searched our belongings and deleted our computers and treated our every move and utterance with contempt. There were moments when things almost reduced to punching. They wouldn't let our Country Director go to the hospital for a much needed appointment. I had already heard stories about them taking people's personal property if they decided it had something to do with Darfur: laptops, cell phones, hard disc and flash drives, cameras, even iPods! So I hid all my valuables inside my window air conditioner!

They demanded to confiscate everyone's laptops but our CD negotiated a deal whereby they would search through the computers in our presence. So they did a search for "Darfur" and "Save the Children" and then deleted anything that came up. I managed to back everything up so I told them to delete away. They even went through all my personal photos, remarking how beautiful my children were!

During this whole "occupation" people at first were very on edge often shouting at each other as the security guys were literally thugs who who seemed to enjoy flexing their power. I had brought a huge, huge bag of lollipops with me from the states to take to schools, so I brought it down from my room and gave them out. The thugs gleefully took huge handfuls and then suddenly all was quiet: everyone had a lollipop in their mouth!

They were like big babies!

Most of the ex-pat staff managed to make it to Khartoum and I must say it was an honor and a pleasure to have met them. The night before people began to depart for their home countries...Ethiopia, Kenya, Burundi, Guinea, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Pakistan, India, Canada, the US...we all gathered at a restaurant in Khartoum and the devastation of what was happening began to sink in. It was like being at a funeral: where all these people who are aware of each other, like a family spread out across the globe connected by stories and email, finally meet each other in person, but under unfortunate circumstances. It's was almost too much to think about what the impact will be on the people of Darfur and Nuba Mountains in the absence of these organizations. Notwithstanding the criticism international NGO's and their staffs endure, it was clear that many people are going suffer severely in their absence.

Instead, individual and sometimes hilarious stories about their experiences were shared as all their hard work and commitments lay there like a white elephant lying in a coffin in the middle of the long dinner table. Peter told the story of how a Janjaweed militia carjacked a Save the Children land cruiser and all the personal belongings of the staff inside. So the next day, he went and found the hijackers in their camp and negotiated the return of the stolen items in exchange for being allowed to access food aid: they were starving too. From then on Peter was the liason between Janjaweed and Darfurian; he was even invited to proceed over Janjaweed weddings.

Another told of how she crouched under her bed in El Geneina, West Darfur while a robbery took place in the building next to her, most likely by Chadian rebels who targeted NGO worker compounds to steal computers, cell phones, and vehicles. She heard shots and upon fearing the worst realized it was the Sudanese police firing in the air in front of her building, warning the rebels of their arrival: the police and rebels were in cahoots...

~~~

Anyway, Save was now helping the ex-pats to get out of Sudan. I went to Mombasa, Kenya; I spent four absolutely fabulous days on the beach in a cheap little cottage, swimming and snorkeling and being lazy. The irony...

Now I am in the deepest bush in southern Sudan, in a village called Luonyaker (lawn-yuh-care), accent on the last, about 100km northeast of Wau. It's almost impossible to do anything between 11am and 5pm it's so hot. It's the latter part of the dry season but it's relatively green, tons of trees and grass...and snakes and scorpions.

Got here by the seat of my pants: I ran out of cash getting myself to Juba from Nairobi (no ATM's in Sudan and cash-only transactions). Juba is a large crazy shit-hole of a place, the capital of the South, and probably one of the most expensive cities on earth. A modest meal costs $50 and a tent costs $150 a night!! So I ended up meeting this French pilot at a bar and I bought him drinks with the rest of my cash in exchange for him smuggling me on his 15-seater plane to Wau; he happened to be flying there the next day. We got very drunk and he let me sleep on the floor of this tiny room built into the corner of a shipping container dropped seemingly willy-nilly behind a hotel. Luckilly, I always have my therma-rest and sleeping bag.

I managed to send an SMS about my impending arrival to the one sat-phone in Luonyaker and the message miraculously got to one of the teachers I would be working with. He and some NGO co-workers picked me up at the Wau air strip, not before meeting a nurse and a paramedic on the plane on their way from Slovakia: turns out they live less than 50 miles from where my grandmother and great-grandparents grew up!

After spending most of the afternoon gathering supplies in Wau, we headed east and then north along a packed dirt road at good pace. But after 45 minutes the road gave out to a winding bumpy track cut through by dry creek and river beds and hidden in many places by bushes and tall thatches of grass. After an hour and a half of crawling, we finally made it to town and the sun had already hidden itself under the horizon while a merciful breeze soothed my dusty frame.

I am now living in a tiny stucco hut in the World Vision compound in Luonyaker, a large international NGO known for their emphatic Christian proselytizing alongside their water, school, and road construction projects. They have a loose relationship with the school who invited me here in the first place. I start teacher training for this and a few other government schools here on Monday. School starts on April 6th.

I walked into the market yesterday to practice my Dinka and all the children would point at me yelling Kuwaja! Kuwaja! which means white person in Arabic. Then they were shocked to hear me use the few words of Dinka I knew and the adults would come out and laugh and laugh and teach me more. Or they would hold out their palms asking for money. I ducked into a tukul, the circular hut made from mud and a thatch roof spiraling up to a sharp point which dot the landscape here, to buy a soda. I sat with some teenagers and older men lounging inside and practiced more Dinka and they practiced their English which was quite good: it's the standard language of instruction in south Sudan. I plan to visit the market daily so they get used to me.

No cell phone reception here, but the Internet in the compound is decent...can skype.

I am hoping to be done with all my data collecting for my research by July so I can come home soon; I am getting quite home sick.

Blink

2009-02-15T00:48:00.002-06:00

The hazy white orb blinked and
just for a split second the pupil-less
eye could not see the brightly
colored muslin of orange and green
drift like a sail along the narrow
passages of mud and straw and reach
out to the water gaucho, plunge her
midnight skin into the terrible truth.
The droplets soaked into the
miles of muted ocher which melted away
to reveal a borderless world.

Minarets of watermelon noticed
too and yawned their scarlet flesh
gnashed their brown bits of teeth
and dribbled their sugar into
fields of limbs and ash and cracked earth.
The crutches returned to the donors
the roofs of grass spiraled again
there was enough for the maize
and the camels, bending down into the
messy rose colored wind to
breastfeed the infants of tyranny.

Hip hop rhythms of monotone Semitic
tongues shorted the bullhorns and
unwrapped themselves from the necks
of warriors and in that split-second blink
sang an aria whose gospel revealed
the many faces of truth, unshaven mugs
inhaling the oxygen of kindness
exhaling the carbon of generosity
catalyzing the uranium of anger
into the helium of peace.

But when the eye opened again and could
see possibility, all contracted in fear and
went about their melancholy business, only
trading brief glances of affection for each
other but under the table they played
a passionate game of footsie.

Mud and Dust

2009-02-12T03:36:00.005-06:00

The dust settled over Khartoum like a thick fog. I am still picking dust out of my ears.

My travel permit to Darfur was denied by the government again, the second time in a week my travel has been restricted, and so my boss offered to take me out for a sympathy coffee. As we emerged from the office, the sky was a blur of yellow haze and the sun struggled to burn through it, a bright white orb sinking into an smoggy mire. But this was no smog; it was dust, invisible and tactile.

We drove over to the banks of the Nile and sat in an outdoor café with a nicely groomed courtyard framed by cashew trees. As our coffees arrived, so did the wind. I wondered if a haboob was imminent, the famed dust storm of Sudan. These however arrive on a perfectly clear day like an orange wall of dust and sand. The streets would be deserted. I thus felt reassured by a few groups of people who lingered on the patio while the staff continued to hustle around in their silk vests balancing trays of tea, coffee, and hot dog pizza.

Yes, hot dog pizza; an American ex-pat’s wet nightmare. But I digress…

Almost immediately, I could feel a thin film of dust wrap itself around my arms and face. In close range the dust in the air was invisible and my eyes were unbothered. Surprisingly, it felt good; a combination of dead sea spa treatment and the feeling I get after three days of backpacking when I become one with the dirt, and all inhibitions associated with clean civilized living melt away.

We were both happy to be out of the office, so despite the wind and dust, we lingered, talking about the slings and arrows of humanitarian worker life and the difficult ethical terrain in which they operate. From the unreality of a manicured garden on the Nile or a graduate school classroom, humanitarian and development aid is an easy target, often shot through with accusations of imperialism or colonialism dressed in contemporary clothes; or how the world de-politicizes the role of international balances of power in exacerbating and even creating humanitarian disasters in the first place while aid organizations focus only on the country’s (or culture’s) internal problems, treating symptoms and ignoring the disease; or how the delivery of aid creates dependence on aid; or how international organizations and their donors manipulate the provision of food and services like health clinics or schools to move so-called aid dependant people from one crappy place to another and back; or the way aid and development organizations use the failure of their own programs to justify more aid and development.

Yet it remains that people are suffering for reasons preventable and seemingly solvable. Maybe asking people what they want, “participatory development” it’s called, might be the answer. But where does one begin to answer this question if all you have is the shirt on your back. So we create participatory structures to help people articulate their needs, like say, Parent-Teacher Associations…OK fine, a little American style, but hey it kinda works until you attend a PTA meeting only to find out that the religious leaders and opinionated men are the one’s running the show. So then we start talking about women’s participation and while we’re at it, girls access to schooling, which means we not only need the will of parents to send their girls to school, but we’ll need a separate and private latrine with “locally appropriate” menstruation aids. See we’re being sensitive to local ways of doing things!

But then we find that many kids can hardly learn because they’re hungry, so we start a school feeding program and then HIV/AIDS education because a third of the adults are infected or dead, and oh, there all these AIDS orphans so we’ll build a dorm at the school, and the classrooms need to be handicap accessible because, after all there was a war and there are (US made) land mines all over the place, and we’ve got some missing limbs and so we can’t spend the money on teacher salaries so they’ll show up because that’s the government’s job, yes the same government that took all those limbs from your kids, but we need ramps! Well actually it’s this really well meaning donor that wants ramps and they can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want them too. See schools can be the center of solving everyone’s problems, and the community can participate!

So we’ll help you administer all this aid money and do it the local way except that you have to make financial reports the way the Office of Management and Budget wants it and oh you have to conduct quarterly evaluations because we need to know if this is working and you need Land Rovers to get around because there’s no roads and satellite phones because there’s no cell towers and so you need to find people with finance degrees, and management experience, IT expertise, and security expertise, and you’ll need to hire consultants from western countries to write the grants and do the evaluations the way the western donors like it and ultimately, we’ll teach you how to participate OUR WAY...hey wait…where’s the local women?

The alternatives, however, tend a little too close toward a kind of cultural relativism. The reasoning used to justify a more “culturally sensitive” or “participatory” approach to aid is not far from the same reasoning that can be used to deny antiretroviral drugs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS to communities in Africa because “those people” prefer their shamans or medicine men. This line of reasoning would have us face female genital mutilation and look the other way so as to accept multiple value systems in our world. It justifies neutrality in the face of genocide. It romanticizes subsistence economies, turns the world into a museum, and invents imaginary pasts.

Gandhi, I think, once remarked that if we remain neutral in the fight between the hawk and the mouse, we are by default on the side of the hawk. Are we to be so sensitive about doing no harm that we end up doing no good?

So we flail around looking for the middle ground, and most professional humanitarian aid workers worth their salt know this and carry on. It seems to come down to two things, in my humble and relatively inexperienced opinion: 1. Doing nothing is ultimately worse than doing something because we are seduced by our capacity to learn from our mistakes and do better, and 2. A willing workforce; there are plenty of people who love the life of the humanitarian aid or international development professional as well as the life of those who scrutinize their impact.

As one who aspires mostly to the latter while, for the time being, supporting myself doing the former, I can tell you, do-gooders we are not; the ground is muddy.

Literally.

Just the other day, I supervised a team of data collectors visiting three schools in the Mayo IDP camp just outside Khartoum; the camp is literally a city of mud. Pits of dry dirt and sand are dug, filled with water, and stirred with large hoes. Globs of the resulting mud are scooped out of the pits, poured into molds formed by whatever is around; sticks, metal sheets, bottles, crates…and left in the sun to dry. The bricks are stacked between tall tree branches gathered miles away; they poke out in all directions forming the walls and roof, a rebar forest, and used as the reinforcement to construct huts of about 6 x 6 meters. Finally they are frosted on all sides by mud and straw around a brightly colored steel door. Some are wrapped in burlap. On average, two adults and six children live in one of these houses.

200,000 people live in Mayo; 16,000 households of mud.

The effect is a city of mud huts and narrow avenues of dirt as far as the eye can see broken by thin lines of electrical wire and television antenna; nary a tree, a bush, nor a patch of grass. Interrupting the monotonous brown cubes are brightly colored and textured wraps of muslin drifting across the sandy pathway; they hide a Dinka woman who hustles a gaggle of children to school dressed in their home sewn green and blue school uniforms. She’s probably lived this camp for 17 years, the average length of time an IDP or refugee lives encamped in exile.

On another lane, donkeys pulling long narrow tanks of water siphoned from a nearby black and white checkered water tower hee-haw as their riders spank the leathery haunches with canes. These water gauchos announce their arrival and wares through crackling loudspeakers attached to the carts. The monotone raps of Arabic rise and crescendo as they pass then fade into the labyrinth of mud.

The schools are constructed of mud and straw as well. In the mid-west of America, we have snow-days; here they have rain days. They are very few like our snow days, but when it rains, the walls soften, the structures lean, and the streets become impassable. One school we visited boasted a huge courtyard with both a church and a mosque. The teachers were proud of this, not a common thing in the north. Unfortunately, more common is the fact that at this school, there are 800 students and 7 teachers.

In one of the mud huts, the head teacher sat at his desk going through numbers with one of the surveyors. There is no electricity here, and of the nearly 200 schools I’ll be surveying across northern Sudan, not a single one will. All the names of the children are hand written in Arabic. Next to his record book were boxes of chalk, neatly arranged by color. A stack of rulers and triangles sat on another corner. Behind the chalk were five plastic flexible canes, about two feet long and a half-inch in diameter. I took one in my hands and whipped it around. I then whipped it across my forearm and pain shot upward into my chest. Most of the teachers carry these canes, and the crowds of children part like the red sea as they approach. Many of the parents will not consider them effective teachers if they do not carry the canes, a teacher tells me. How else to control and shush 125 students crowded into your classroom?

This teacher is from Unity State in the south. The long narrow scarring on his forehead gives his Dinka heritage away. He’s been living in the camp 13 years. He was educated in the camp as well, a high school diploma and three weeks of teacher training. I ask if he will ever go back. He says it’s unlikely. His compatriots think he is a northern spy. I looked down at the red line on my forearm, now rising into a welt. Why did I hit myself so hard?

Here on the Nile, the sun has finally relented and given up, surrendering to the dusty dark. There is dust in my ears, up my nose, under my finger nails, in my hair. The red cane line remains on my arm. I am supporting a project to make these canes obsolete, along with many other “improvements” to these schools. It seems so common sense; corporal punishment should be banned. Thinking back to my own classrooms, with at-risk kids, dangerous gang members, adjudicated and disinterested, I had an impact without the threat of force and pain. But I also had 20 kids in my class. I had computers and books and videos and art supplies. I no doubt would be lost in the Mayo school, surly no more effective than the mud and dust upon which the hopes and dreams of these children rest.

Banjos in war zones

2009-02-02T07:01:00.002-06:00

I brought my banjo to Sudan.

Actually, I temporarily swapped with a friend my very nice '89 Bart Reiter Grand Concert model for a Deering Goodtime open back; a very nice banjo for a very reasonable price (note to all you blokes just discovering your inner banjo). The great thing about the Goodtime is that you can detach the neck quite easily, which is what I did; I then stuck the neck and the pot in my duffel bag and reassembled it here in Khartoum.

Until last night, I'd been playing it by myself in my room, imagining that others staying in the guest house might float into the room on the sweet melodies, inquiring about the exotic sound wafting through their suites. I even stuck to modal tunings so it might resemble some of the local drone-like sufi chanting. But no audiences could I muster.

So, with a little bit of courage mustered after a long day of writing lesson plans, I grabbed the Goodtime and headed downstairs and out into the open air foyer of my building. Sitting there was Yusef, the doorman, smoking his Benson & Hedges Specials and listening to his ancient radio stuck, as far I've been able to tell over the last few days, on the same station (I've heard him roaming the dial to no avail) proffering emphatic lectures of screeching static.

Yusef is in his early forties with a deep raspy voice and a wide, if a bit droopy frame. But when he starts talking, his face flattens into an endearing smile as he asks how I am in a high pitched, gentle voice that exudes politeness. He would be a captive, if non-threatening audience.

Starry-eyed and excited for my first concert in Sudan, I pranced up next to him and said Ahlan, Yusef. He turned and, seeing the banjo in my hand, jerked forward like a hiccup, fumbled with his radio, and turned it off. What's this? he asked.

I told him and asked if I could play something for him. He made a nervous smile and nodded slowly. So I played the drony-ist version of Shady Grove I knew (I did not sing).

When I stopped he was not smiling. I shoved the banjo toward him, offering for him to hold it, and he took it hesitantly. In his hands, he laughed and held it as if it were the ugliest infant he'd ever seen. After plucking it once, he shoved it back and so I offered to play again. At this moment there seemed to be something lost in translation and so, thinking it polite and clever, I asked pointing, Banjo or Radio?

He chuckled for only a split second whereupon he emphatically said Radio!

I was crestfallen but I didn't show it. As I thanked him, he turned the radio back on, and a blast of peircing static serenaded my exit from the stage.

I thought maybe, just maybe, I could end wars, bring peace and brotherhood to the land from whence the banjo came, or at least bring a smile to a few people living in some of the harshest conditions on earth, with a little bit 'o clawhammer. This is going to be harder than I thought.

Sudanese Breakfast

2009-01-22T08:12:00.002-06:00

Each morning, around ten thirty, I go downstairs in the Save office and have futoor, or breakfast, with a few of the men. The women do theirs in another room. It has little to do with descrimination, someone says, it's just that the women chat so much they never end up eating anything.

It consists of small round loaves of bread, a lentil or fava bean stew sprinkled with feta cheese and olive oil, a salad of chopped tomatoes and parsley, and a very spicy sauce made from peanuts and chilies. There are no plates or silver wear. Keeping one's left hand out of the way, a piece of bread is deftly torn away with only the right hand and dunked in any combination of the foods described above. After a few times now, I've gotten good at using each finger as if it were a hand of its own, pressing with one, shaping with another, scooping with another, folding and so on, so that what arrives at my face is a little package, no longer dripping all over the place or rolling down my chin.

Thie first time I tried this I swear I looked like a happy 6 month old sitting at a hight chair eating oatmeal for the first time. Now, I'm talkin' politics with the big boys.

Souq

2009-01-20T05:55:00.011-06:00

You need a permit to take pictures in Sudan, so no pics yet, but soon; so says the permit bureaucracy. No alcohol in the north, so no stories of debaucherous NGO soirees soothing the sores of work with the poorest of the poor.

Khartoum is considered one of the safest cities in Africa, as long as us whities stay away from mass demonstrations against US or Zionist plots, which typically take place near the government buildings. I'm staying at the Save the Children-US guest house, a three story concrete cube with the occasional flourish...a little patio here, a little mosaic there...quite typical of the Middle East. I zigg-zagged through the nearby souq al merkaaz the other day, a chaotic and very loud flea and vegetable market. Despite the sensory overload, I felt quite safe and people were quite helpful. I bought a huge bag of tomatoes to make some tomato sauce (no canned sauce or even canned tomatoes, only paste in the supermarkets), along with a few eggplant, parsley, potatoes, garlic, limes, and mangoes. Every other vendor has a bull horn or ghetto blaster set to 10, hawking their goods or rockin' out to the latest in desert trance chanting.

I sat down at a makeshift tea cafe. It seemed to have staked out a sliver of sandy sidewalk with dusty plastic chairs and a table outfitted with Dr. Jekyl's pantry. The tea lady, draped in multi colored muslin, stole a burning ignot from beneath her kettle and dropped it into an insense bowl. The sandalwood wafted through the air just barely cutting through the stench of the fried fish vender about two meters away (I'm going metric). I saw her fill a small glass almost halfway with sugar, drop in a few springs of mint and leaves of bright red hibiscus and fill the rest with hot tea. It was so sweet, I was ready to run a marathon by the time I was finished. Children came up to me every now and then with hands out as I sat there sipping. I smiled at them and, taking my little soapy container from my bag, blew bubbles into their palms.

The abundance of fresh food here in the capital city stands in stark contrast with the constant threat of starvation in the periphery of Sudan. Sudan is becoming one of Africa's biggest food exporters becasue of massive investment from Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia to develop millions of uncultivated arable land; these countries have little of their own. Meanwhile, millions of Sudanese go hungry every day. Before you get too uppity about this sorry state of affairs, remember that this is not endemic to Sudan; take a walk in the slum of the most expensive western city or the emergency room of the public hospital and you'll see the same thing. I have to look in the mirror before I can get too critical. The scope of the problem here, however, is astonishing. The lines of race and religion also stand in deep relief against the inauguration of America's first African-American grand-poobah.

The tonal scale of the Sudanese people is really long, from the very light-Turkish to the milk-chocolate Ethiopian to the darkest of the dark Dinka. And that's just the thing: the wars here pitting Muslim against Christian or Animist (North-South), African against Arab (Darfur), farmer against pastoralist (Dinka-Messeriya), have little to do with actual color of the skin because everyone here is black and each group boasts all shades. After all, the word Sudan derives from the Arabic word "sauod" which is one of many words meaning "black." The fact of the matter is that the wars are over resources...oil, grazing land, water...yet the conflicts get dressed up in the clothes of race and religion. It doesn't help that there are lot of weapons around.

Made a big pot of tomato sauce, some fried eggplant, and a salad last night. Made pasta with garlic and lime the night before. Getting into a routine, which is comforting. I'm eager to get out into the field though. I've just finished the whole proposal to survey nearly 100 schools and will present it to the Save leadership on Thursday.

I cried last night while eating my fried eggplant; CNN ran the entirety of MLK's 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial. So amazing...it's nice feel proud to be an American again.

Babes Delight

2009-01-18T05:29:00.003-06:00

Thika, Kenya

Coffee and Khartoum

2009-01-15T04:32:00.019-06:00

Jacinta's farm near Thika, Kenya

On Thursday morning, the day of my departure to Khartoum, I went out to Jacinta's small scale coffee farm with Zach and Peter. Zach runs the tailoring business started by his father.

I love coffee and I drink a fair amount of it, but never been up close to its source and processing. We drove about 15 minutes west of Thika past the only school for the blind in east Africa and the oldest bridge in Kenya, a scrappy and unadorned iron platform covered and re-covered with concrete built by the Italians around 1900 (I think) for passage over Chania Falls. At a huge macadamia nut farm, we turned onto a winding, dirt road; it curved around steep hills and narrow valleys supporting mostly maize and coffee farms. Cutting through the thick red dust riled up by the truck in front of us, we rolled about 4 miles until we eased onto a narrow grass drive lined on both sides by a tall fence festooned with vines and crowned by avocado trees. A wire gate led into the farm.

In addition to coffee, the are avocado, mango, and macadamia nut trees, as well as maize, sweet potato, and bean fields. Maina runs the place; he must be about 18 years old. His father ran it before him. About a month ago, bandits broke into the farm, tied Maina up, and carried off the entire winter harvest, nearly $7000 worth of coffee and much much more worth in sweat. This small agrarian utopia belies the desperation surrounding it.

Avocado

Mango

There are actually two coffee harvests; the next one is around June I think. I've captured the process in pictures:

1. The coffee is hand picked. The trick is to pick the mature, red beans before they turn a charcoal black.

Zach and the Coffee Field

De-podded, unhusked

2. The beans are collected in sacks and sorted.

3. They are then poured into a simple machine that extracts the beans from the pods and desposits them into a shallow well.

Zach and Peter

4. The well is filled with water, and the beans pour through a drain into a long narrow well, the bottom of which slopes downward. This causes the fresh beans to sort themselves from largest at the upper part of the well to smallest at the bottom.

5. The beans are then wrapped in burlap in size groups and dried on racks in the sun for a week.

6. Once dry, they are dehusked and sorted again by size and shape. The largest and perfectly round beans yield the famed Kenya AA grade. The smaller and broken beans: Nescafe.

They are then bagged and sold to the local coffee cooperative for less than a dollar per pound for the AA grade. It's very difficult to get around the coops, or start your own (you'll need a polictician in your pocket or your pocket in a politician). The beans are then sold to roasters and retailers mostly in Europe and North America like Starbucks. Think about this the next time you buy those nice, smelly, greasy little beans from the market for $10 per pound. It's the middlemen who make most of the money. Buy Fair Trade!

Back in Thika, I wrapped up a few things I got for Tobey and Bella at the Maasai market in Nairobi to send airmail. Then Mike, Scola and I headed for the airport. We stopped at the very fancy Junction Mall in the Lavington neighborhood of Nairobi where they did some errands and where I met my colleague Leela for lunch. She runs a project called Lion Guardians near Amboseli in the south near the Tanzanian border that trains Maasai murrans, or warriors, to help conserve the local lion population. Normally, young Maasai boys become murrans by killing a lion. But as the lion habitat has shrunk drastically over the last few decades, the lion population, which supports the Maasai through tourism, has shrunk as well. So instead of killing them, through Lion Guardians they learn to capture, tag, and track the lions via GPS technology.

This is often called conservation co-management. Originally, the Government of Kenya attempted to preserve animal habitats by setting aside parklands where hunting was forbidden. But this only angered the Maasai who started killing more lions in response. Leela's project has been so successfull, they are expanding to multiple locations. You can learn more about it, and donate money if you can, here:

http://lionguardians.wildlifedirect.org/

We made it to the airport with plenty of tme for me to get through all the long lines. There was supposed to be a few Save the Children staff traveling on the same flight, but the desription I was given didn't seem to match anyone sitting in the gate. Traveling to Sudan made me feel less inclined to draw attention to myself so I resisted belting out my Tarzan call.

Of course, the person from Save who was supposed to meet me in Khartoum to help me through immigration wasn't there. Great! The immigration dude who dressed in a baby blue jump suit adorned with millitary pins and a think leather belt sinched up so high it looked he was enduring a major wedgie, just sort of stared at me. He wanted $165. I had $25.

While I was digging through my bag to put in a different SIM card for my cell phone that might work in Sudan, jump suit man called Joseph. Joseph is the savior of the night. A representative from Kenya Airways, he is the problem guy, like the Harvey Keitel character from Pulp Fiction. He's a Kenyan, seemed to be in his late twenties, but clearly is in with the KRT bureaucrats. As he high fived everyone in the office and shot the shit with some broken Arabic, English and French, laughs all around and some dinner plans, he turned to me, and in a concerned but confident voice that seemed to channel Cary Grant, said, "What seems to be the problem?"

After explaining, wads of bills emerged from pockets, cell phone calculators beeped, licked fingers propelled through the wads, suspicious stares were exchanged and then suddenly, I had my papers. Now I owed Joseph 165 bucks. Luckily, my SIM card worked, called the Save office, who sent the guy who was supposed to help me back to the airport. Apparently, they thought I had a different kind of visa which did not necessitate the involvement of jump suit man.

Before meeting the Save driver, I was diverted to the luggage check area, where a very large woman pulled the detached neck of my banjo out of my bag. She held it up and waved it at a bunch of other jump suit guys lounging at the luggage desk about 10 meters away. One of them shrugged, whereupon she turned and handed me the neck, looked at me unimpressed, and walked away. I stood there for a moment, banjo neck in hand, my underwear splayed out accross a table, Joseph the fixer staring at me with arms crossed while the last bead of deordorant ran down my torso, I asked, "ATM?"

For those of you itching to come to Sudan anytime soon, take note: ain't no ATM's in Sudan.

Luckily, the Save driver had some crisp $100's. After profusely thanking Joseph in every language I could think of, except Hebrew of course, I got in the back of the van. There, on the seat, was a booklet titled, "Sudan-Pre-Departure Information." Nice timing. On page 10, it read: "Be sure to have $165 when entering Sudan with a counter visa." On page 11 it read: There are no ATM's in Sudan. Bring crisp $100's."

Separated at Birth?

2009-01-12T06:33:00.005-06:00

The other night, John told me I look like Chuck Norris. I chuckled. Today, not one, not two, nor even three, but four Kenyans so far have yelled, "Hey, Chuck Norris!" at me. I'm thinking about yelling back, "Hey, Barak Obama!"

Nairobi

2009-01-12T02:58:00.004-06:00

Saturday, January 10th

I arrived in Nairobi three and a half hours late; a passenger did not show up for the flight but his luggage did. So, as a security issue, the airline had to empty the entire cargo hold of the plane to find and remove the offending luggage. This put me in at 1am and, bless their hearts, Shiku and Mike were still there to pick me up. Thank goodness for Africa time. They are two of seven brothers and sisters of Wangari, my Kenyan colleague at Madison.

It was really nice to emerge into the warm Nairobi night after leaving the icy Iowa winter. We drove out to their house in Thika where mama Jacinta and another brother, John, was waiting with chicken stew and rice. We ate and talked and watched CNN until 3:30 am.

I woke up at 8 and used John’s cell to call Jok, who runs the school in south Sudan where I’ll be working starting in mid March, but he was already at the airport getting ready to return to the states. I had intended to meet with him before his departure, but cest la vie. He gave me the name of one of the teachers who is in Nairobi. Hopefully, I’ll meet with him before I head to Sudan. John then showed me his album of old family photos. In it were some pictures of one of my professors and another colleague from their trip a few years ago. Thika is Badger territory!

Shiku made bangers and eggs and I was eating when I met Gideon, Mike’s 3^rd grade son. I brought yoyo’s for him and his older sister, and so I gave him one along with a hacky sac and some bubbles. He had the yoyo, the fancy butterfly kind, figured out in about 30 minutes.

After breakfast, John and I walked about three blocks over to the Thika town center where he and his brothers have a hardware store (a very narrow outfit mostly full of aluminum pipes and pipe fittings), a tailoring shop (specializing in suits and uniforms), and a restaurant (serving hot dogs, chicken, and chips called Pazuri, which means “good place” in Swahili), all right next to each other along the main drag. It’s the same building where they were all born and grew up. Indians settled in the area in the early 1920’s and built the original town center buildings with columned storefronts facing the main road and living areas in the back. Africans moved in after independence. Most Thikans have since moved into houses and rent out the backs of the buildings to other business. Many of the original building are being knocked down and replaced by multi-level “malls.”

I met Mike in the restaurant and we drove into Nairobi where I got a SIM card for my phone and bought a plane ticket to Khartoum. I go on Wednesday, the 14^th.

We then had goat Nyama Choma (Kenyan bar-b-que) at the Klub House, a popular nighttime destination clad in Safari-style lodge construction with a disco and car wash. I drank my first Tusker since the summer of 2007, and it tasted great, even though it is the Kenyan PBR.

I fell asleep on our way back to Thika. We stopped at the Blue Post Hotel, a beautiful spot nestled between the Thika and Chania rivers, each boasting a dramatic waterfall supplying Thika’s water supply. Despite the water treatment plant, the water is not potable for non-locals: it’s full of Typhoid. It was quite hot, and so the swirling pools at the bottom of the falls were enticing, until Mike revealed that they are full of hippos, crocs, and snakes. This is pretty much the case for most of east Africa’s water sources. Mike says this is why Africans are terrible swimmers.

Not helping matters is a two year drought being endured in Kenya; the government is on the verge of announcing emergency measures to avoid a severe famine. The lack of water has caused many of the animals to migrate closer to their sources, thus the preponderance of hippos at the Blue Post.

That night, I had beef stew and chips with the family: back row, left to right, are Rachel, Mike’s wife; Mike; Peter, a cousin; and Jon. Front row, left to right, are Shiku; Jacinta; and Lydia. Lydia is Mike’s 11 year-old daughter. She wants to be a vet, and is already quite adept at yoyo.

After dinner, Mike, Jon, Peter, and I headed to the Metro, a open café and bar where there was some live, local Kikuyu music. Peter, Jon and I dance a few songs, and after two Tuskers, I am ready for a long sleep.

Sunday, January 11^th

After breakfast, I head into town and work at an Internet café, then lunch with Mike, Lydia, and Gideon at Pazuri. We all walk around the town afterward, dodging in and out of markets and alleyways. Then we take a drive out to the Del Monte plantation.

This is likely where your pineapple comes from. It’s the largest fruit plantation in Africa and one of the largest in the world. It covers nearly 7000 square kilometers and employs 50,000 people, many of whom live on the plantation. Del Monte signed a 300 year lease for the land from the Kenyan government in 1900. So, 200 more years to go.

After 1992, when the union was able to negotiate a decent contract for the Del Monte workers, including much, much better wages, (the corporate concessions were helped by mechanization: in the process, Del Monte laid off 30,000 people). Del Monte also allocated small plots of land for the workers to cultivate on their own. Most grow coffee, maize, or graze cattle, which supplements their income. I haven’t confirmed this, but I believe Del Monte is now owned by a consortium of Saudi businessmen.

I had no idea how pineapples grew. Apparently, if you cut off the green crown on top and stick it in the ground, it’ll grow a pineapple twice a year given the right conditions. Del Monte replants them every three years because the fruit gets smaller every year, but also sweeter, due to less water content. The local pineapple farmers sell the smaller, sweeter kind.

Right now, the leaves are a gray-brown due to the drought, although Del Monte operates two dams and has large, albeit dwindling, water reserves. Many of the workers fish in these sources, but again, they’re full of hippos. These hippos are actively protected by Del Monte; because they roam up to 5 kilometers away from their water holes at night, and are extremely dangerous to humans, they make for great security guards.

Driving around the dusty plantation roads, passing workers on their bikes with fishing poles attached to their backs, I notice swarms of sparrows dipping in and out of the fields, and resting in hordes along the power lines. With their long narrow beaks, they dine on pineapple nectar. Lydia and Gideon are passed out in the back seat.

Upon our return to the house, I type on my laptop while Mike watches National Geographic. At dinner, I talk with mama Jacinta about coffee. She owns some land nearby where she grows it. A few weeks ago, nearly 7000 kilos of husked, dried beans ready for market were stolen in the middle of the night; a lot of money and hard work down the tubes. These days, she gets about $1.50 per pound. I tell her I pay $10 per pound at my local coop. Another reason to buy fair-trade. I think I’m going to skip the coop and send her the $10 per pound instead.

Where the chilly winds don't blow

2008-09-26T14:44:00.004-05:00

Haven't posted in over a year. So, here we go again:

I'm off to Sudan sometime in the next two weeks. Just waiting for the visa. I'll be working for Save the Children from October to December conducting a comprehensive baseline survey of about 200 schools located in North and West Darfur, Khartoum, Red Sea, North Kordofan, South Kordofan, Blue Nile, Abyei, and Upper Nile. These are dangerous places. I am quite confident in Save's ability to keep me safe. They've been working there for 20 years. I'll be based in Khartoum. These schools serve around 115,000 children.

In March I'll return to South Sudan where I'll conduct a school-based ethnography in small village about 60K northeast of Wau.

I did not plan to go to Sudan. I tried to get back to Kakuma, but none of my grant applications bore fruit. So I sprayed my CV out into the ether. It was back in late June; I was at the public swimming pool peeling wet smim trunks off my five year old son when a senior project coordinator at the Save the Children-US office in Khartoum called.

Now I'll be gone from him and his big sister for 7 of the next 11 months. This is painful to think about. I fight guilt daily. But I am convinced this what I am meant to be doing. I hope my children will take an interest in other cultures, travel, and following their dreams. Maybe this is narcissistic. I've been accused of being a "do gooder," a fashionable pejorative aimed at the humanitarian worker set for being part of the neo-imperialistic dimentions of aid work, and it's baggage of moral clarity. I've been quite critical of it too, but from my comfy ivory armchair in Madison. So now I'll see for myself, assuming I don't melt.

The average daily high in Khartoum in October is around 105 F.

Massai Mara Tent

2007-08-07T23:57:00.001-05:00

Turkana Dork

2007-07-03T06:59:00.000-05:00

Last Saturday, after the Kakuma community meeting, Jacob, a Turkana and one of the WFP security guards, took me to some family friends of his in town. The kids dressed me up in some of the crafts the women make.

I've discovered a new hybrid: Turkana Dork.

Fashoda

2007-07-03T06:29:00.000-05:00

Friday

I shared a bed with Drew Barrymore.

It turns out she stayed in the very same room as mine at the WFP compound during her visit to Kakuma a few weeks ago. She is an active supporter of the World Food Program. It also seems appropriate here to mention that the sole primary boarding school for girls here in Kakuma is called the Angelina Jolie Primary School. She provided the money for the school that serves girls who would otherwise be denied an education by their families and probably married off at very early age.

Yup: Drew, Angelina and me. I frame the opening shot through my fingers and draft the pitch: Charlie’s Angels meets Constant Gardener…

I met Beatrice again this morning and hopped the Landcruiser bus to Fashoda Primary School. There I joined Anteneh, the LWF Director of Schools, and a group of QuASO’s (Quality Assurance Standards Officers) on a school inspection. He and this group of former teachers and headmasters are observing and interviewing teachers, analyzing syllabi and lesson plans, going through administrative records and reviewing the grounds. Anteneh has been in the camp for 13 years. He married and had children here.

The school buildings at Fashoda are similar to those at Napata, but in this case, four buildings surround a rectangular court yard within which a small play area is enclosed by stones. Children play soccer in this area during breaks with what amounts to a hacky sack the size of a dodge ball. Most play barefoot. The age range who attend here is large, maybe between 8 and15 or 16 years old, given the variable access to schooling over the years both in their home countries and in the camp. A pre-school is nearby and the familiar shouts of 3, 4, 5 and 6 year-olds at play mix with those of older boys. Although 30% of primary school enrollment in Kakuma are girls, a big improvement over the last few years, there are almost no girls at Fashoda.

We sit in a standard 7 (seventh grade) math class and a young teacher is hurrying through a geometry lesson. The class size is reasonable, with about 25 students, although later I find out that more than 400 students are absent, which appears to be around average. The total enrollment is just over 1000. Apparently, attendance improves around exam time.

Later, we observe a “Faith & Work” class which is part of the Kenyan Christian education program. The teacher is reviewing the concept of the neighbor, reminding the students that this does not refer to a physical relationship, the “next door” kind, but rather a spiritual one in which anyone in need no matter who they are is a neighbor. The students politely repeat what he writes on the black board. “When the boss is not there, who is watching you? God.”

A group of Turkana women have brought large stacks of firewood on their backs. They sit together weaving each other’s hair, waiting to be paid.

In the shade, next one of the classroom buildings, Anteneh and I sit with the math teacher for his review. He must be around 20 years old. He is untrained and has yet to go through any sort of induction or orientation to teaching in Primary school. He’s already been teaching here for two years. This reflects LWF’s desperation for teachers and dwindling budget for training, hiring many as soon as they finish secondary school. There were a few classes that had no teachers at all. Anteneh explains that while some have returned to Sudan, he believes that more leave for NGO jobs in the camp that require less work and pay more. Here, as everywhere, teacher pay is a clutch issue.

Fumbling with multiple sheets of carbon flapping in the breeze, Anteneh slides them in between duplicates of the teacher evaluation form and begins providing oral feedback to the math teacher. He occasionally pauses to write next to each item on the form. Child-centered teaching, knowledge of subject matter, preparation, and professional documents such as lesson plans, are the elements of the evaluation. This teacher, lacking formal training and clearly overwhelmed, receives a compassionate but stern mouthful from Anteneh.

The Faith & Work teacher, who’s formal training was very apparent during our observation, is next. He explains right from the start that he has just taken over his classes from a previous teacher who recently returned to Sudan. Already severely behind in the syllabus, he was doing all he could to catch up.

We then meet the other QuASO’s in a storage room and each gives a report on their findings. The group of 8 men represent a mix of nationalities and ages. About half are in or near their 50’s and most have lived in the camp for 10 years or more. One them is the designated secretary for this meeting and the others crane their necks over the his notebook as they argue over wording. Cell phones ring, teachers request assistance, students have crises, members of the team excuse themselves and return, it’s all feeling very familiar, except for the fact that it’s hot and steamy and the dirt and dust has, among other things, made my push button pen stuck.

In the final stage of the inspection, we gather in the main office with the entire staff and faculty. There are fourteen teachers, including the head teacher. Doing the math in my head, that makes roughly a 70:1 teacher-pupil ratio when all are in attendance. The QuASO team members give their reports, detailing aspects of the school that meet their standards and those that need improvement. The lead teacher takes notes while the rest sit quietly. Despite the severe challenges this faculty faces, and this goes for the staff at Napata Secondary as well, they are able to accomplish quite a lot with very little. Resilience and perseverance are not characteristics of the few here; they are the everyday tools of existence.

All formal meetings in Kakuma begin and end with a prayer. This is how the Fashoda inspection concludes. By the this time, the students have returned home, most walk or bike, and we head across the empty courtyard toward the gate where a Landcruiser awaits us. We zig zag through the camp, dropping a few of the team off at their homes. Anteneh and one of the team, Omar from Somalia, and I have lunch at Franco’s. Omar’s children and grandchildren live in Boise, Idaho, having been resettled there shortly after arriving in Kakuma. He and his wife have been trying to join them ever since. He knows six languages and is a trained teacher and former university instructor. He says he has been told by US immigration that these characteristics, uncommon for a Somali refugee, are suspicious.

We head back to the LWF compound and I barely catch a group of FilmAid staff and students on their way to a screening. Two young refugees, each in their early 20’s, are preparing to present a pair of student made videos to a group of school girls, mostly Turkana, at the St. Asisi boarding school in town. They have been part of FilmAid’s Participatory Video Project (PVP) since it began about six years ago.

The girls arrive in the meeting hall, in blue skirts and white button-down blouses, and sit in rows in front of the black board and television set. The two young FilmAid presenters shock me as they come alive before the group. Charismatic and engaging, they lead the group through a compelling program. After introductions to the staff and PVP, they present the first video which is about polygamy, a common tradition among many of the communities in and around the camp.

Written, acted, filmed and edited by young refugees, it tells the story of a child caught in the middle of a jealous confrontation between two wives. Returning home one day drunk from consuming Chana, a locally brewed gin, the girl’s biological mother is thrown out of the house by her father, leaving her in a Cinderella situation. In this case, however, the constant barking of orders to clean, cook and serve by her remaining “mother” drives the girl ultimately to suicide.

The second video addresses the issue of HIV/AIDS infection and stigma. A young man’s friends reject him once they learn he is HIV positive. They refuse to touch him; one even subjects himself to a comical showering of scrubbing and brushing after accidentally shaking his friend’s hand. A health counselor meets with the group and educates them about HIV transmission and implores them to have compassion for their friend. This one has a happy ending. After each screening, the two FilmAid students lead the group through a discussion of the issues raised, educating them as various misconceptions and disagreements arise within the group of schoolgirls.

Video is truly a powerful tool on many levels. As the cost and portability of capture and editing equipment make it more viable for those with the least resources and in the most remote places, I believe it has the potential to benefit people socially, economically, and politically. I hope also to explore its usefulness as tool for high quality participatory and action-oriented research. Aside from developing a reproducible methodology, perhaps the biggest challenge will be raising the funds to purchase, and subsequently maintain, the equipment. Maybe Drew could help out. After all, we did share a bed.

Saturday

There was a party last night for two IRC staff who are leaving Kakuma after 10 years of service. I joined a few WFP staff and “crashed” the party. There was barbequed goat, dancing, and warm beer. I stayed out too late.

In the morning, dozing under the mosquito net, Abebe pounded on my door. It’s around 8 am. “Get ready right now,” he shouts, “we’re going to a meeting.” I jumped in the shower and meet him, 15 minutes later, in front of the WFP offices.

As we drove through the camp, bouncing between ditches and pools of mud, honking at groups of refugees protruding into the road, I’m fighting a bit of a hangover. Abebe explains that once a month, the leaders of all the NGO’s in the camp gather to hear the concerns and issues of the refugee community. Each ethnicity, such as Somali Bantu, Sudanese Nuer, Ethiopian Dinka, etc., represented in the camp elects a community leadership who act as liaisons between their people and the NGO’s. They are present at these meetings as well as at primary functions of the camp including the food, water and firewood distribution centers, refugee registration offices, and health clinics. They also are the main conduits through which information is communicated to refugees.

About 15 NGO staff sit in the front of the hall, mostly representing the main sectors and functions administered by UNHCR, WFP, IRC, and LWF: security, food & water, shelter, registration, repatriation, health, and education. The community leaders have submitted their concerns and proposed solutions in advance and these have been entered into a spreadsheet and printed for distribution at the meeting. I estimate there are about 60-70 refugees in attendance. I take about 20 pages of notes.

Back in the WFP compound, I begin transcribing. After lunch, the heat approaching 100, I crawl back to my room and fall asleep.

Sunday

I mostly write and read today. In the evening, just before dinner, the sky grows black with storm clouds and suddenly, it is pouring. The metal roof of the mess hall is deafening in the downpour. Rivers of brown rain water cut through the sandy grounds of the compound.

As it subsides, a few staff and I watch Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s the second one with the octopus face guy. Walking back to my room, the frogs burp an opera of love and longing.

Monday

I leave Kakuma today.

But before I pack up, I drive around the camp with Abebe and visit two food distribution centers. The refugees line up, separated by gender, and weave through a series of fenced corridors like cattle. Holding out their bags, they are given scoops of wheat flour, soy meal, yellow split peas, maize meal and cooking oil, the number depending on the size of their family. The distribution staff, all refugees, carry large sacs of the commodities from the storage barn to the lines. Covered head-to-toe in flour, they look like ghosts.

I make the WFP staff a few CD’s before I leave: Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, The Ethiopians, Gecko Turner, Amadou & Mariam, and Mulatu Atstaqe. A few of them are interested in attending graduate school in the US in international development studies so I send out a few links. They along with all the other NGO staffs have been amazingly open and accommodating. I’ve learned a great deal in the course of a week. I have more information I know what to do with.

The ride back to Loki is a bit uneasy as the river beds, completely dry when I arrived, are now flooded. Many larger trucks have gotten stuck or are waiting for them to subside. The stranded drivers have taken shelter from the sun underneath their vehicles, and their legs poke out from underneath them. Our convoy wades through the clay colored rivers and I am dropped off at the airport.

Waiting for the plane under a tin shelter, it begins to pour again, the pooling under our feet. I think of the Turkana women’s sorghum and thank the heavens for its tears.

Taking a cab from the Nairobi Airport back to Leah’s, I ask the driver to stop at a pizza place. Like a good American, I’ve been craving pizza.

Napata

2007-06-29T09:54:00.001-05:00

Thursday

Really fantastic morning.

I meet Beatrice, the pre-school and feeding program coordinator for LWF at their compound just a few hundred feet from the WFP gate around 8:20 am. We boarded a Landcruiser with a bunch of students and staff and headed into the camp on our way to Napata Secondary School.

The school is comprised of three, long and narrow, single story, mud and brick buildings each with two classrooms and a small storage area in between. The roof is constructed of exposed wood rafters and metal sheeting. There is an administrative building with three small offices and a small kitchen building. The termites have eaten away at the wooden window frames so there are empty rectangles cut into the sides. There is no electricity.

About 900 students currently attend Napata; about 100 have left since January: some have repatriated to Sudan; some have resettled in the US, Australia, or the UK; some, who through remittances from relatives abroad, have transferred to boarding schools in Kenya. There are roughly 2,500 students in three secondary schools in Kakuma, of which only 200 are girls. LWF also runs a number of primary schools accommodating over 18,000 pupils and a few pre-schools with about 3,700 children. Although Kenya was the first, and currently only, country in Africa to offer free, universal primary education, the primary schools in Kakuma are not considered state schools and thus must depend on donors.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Kakuma schools use the Kenyan national curriculum, the core of which includes English, Swahili, math, and science. There is also social studies and a Christian or Islamic religious class. They administer the battery of exams used throughout Kenya to determine eligibility for primary school and secondary school. Over 5000 primary students in Kakuma qualified for secondary school. Yet, there are less than 500 spots available each year and these seem to be decreasing as the UNHCR and donors turn their attention to Sudan.

This year, the UNHCR did not allow any new 3 year olds to be admitted to their pre-school program, despite a large demand. Next year and every year will be the same, each year one class less. Although this policy is designed to address projected repatriation and decrease education's power as a so-called "pull factor," it appears that it is mostly educated men who are returning without registering with the UNHCR, leaving the majority of households in Kakuma lead by women. Meanwhile, the children will have fewer and fewer opportunities for an education even though their numbers reamain constant. Many feel this is comprimising the UNHCR's commitment to making repatraition voluntary.

Many of the teachers in Kakuma secondary schools are Kenyans contracted by LWF to teach the subjects that require the most training like English and the sciences. The rest are refugees who receive training from LWF, although funding for training has now all but disappeared. According to the school director, there is one textbook for every five students. At the time of my visit, students were taking their science exams. I peeked into the science building where long, narrow, concrete lab tables stretched perpendicularly to the length of the classroom. The tables were designed for four students, but there were at least 12 at each. Most students had their own tray of test tubes and beakers and were intently mixing, pouring, heating, and studying the exam booklet.

According to the Kakuma education coordinator for LWF, many Sudanese teachers return home because there are jobs for them. Others have told me that while some repatriate, most of them are leaving for jobs with NGO's in the camp that pay more and are less work. Many of the Kenyan teachers do not stay for very long, opting for better paying jobs in better conditions as they come available elsewhere in the country. One of the Sudanese teachers told me the following story:

In South Sudan, this teacher was active in a Pentecostal church that received food and relief supplies from Europe during the civil war. As people streamed to the church, the Khartoum government accused the church staff of attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity. The pastor and others were killed by the northern army and the rest were jailed, including my storyteller.

He managed to escape prison, fleeing to the southern Sudanese rebel group, the SPLA. Suspecting he was northern spy, he was jailed again, this time by his own compatriots. He found himself in a cell with many young boys who were being trained to be soldiers. Speaking to them about fleeing to Kenya, he tried to convince them that getting an education was better than fighting, which did not endear him to his captors. Later he found out his wife was forced to marry an SPLA rebel commander.

Following his eventual release, he returned to his home village where he attempted to cultivate sesame to sell for income. Setting his field aflame to clear it if brush, the fire grew out of control and proceeded to burn the forest abutting his field. It turned out that two small rebel villages had grown up in this forest since the church incident. The villages burned down and he found himself fleeing once more.

This time he fled to Uganda. In a refugee camp there, he earned his high school diploma and returned to Sudan to try and get a job as a teacher, suspecting SPLA spies were following him all along. The fighting between north and south intensified and, realizing he could trust neither side, fled once more. Now in Kakuma, he feels he cannot return despite the fragile peace. He feels his role now is to educate young Sudanese in Kakuma, many of whom may return after earning their diploma to rebuild.

~

After touring the school, I am asked if I would like to address a Form 4 (12th grade) class. The staff assured me I wouldn’t be taking time away from their studies. I was handed a box of chalk and suddenly I was confronted by a classroom full (about 60 students) of young refugees.

Roughly between the ages of 16 and 25, these young Africans, mostly from Sudan, but a few from Somalia, Burundi, and Ethiopia, were truly wonderful. I drew a map of the US and gave them a sort of geographical biography. I then opened the floor to questions. The students were amazingly intelligent, well informed of international politics, and very curious about the American education system and the African Diaspora in the US. Barak Obama was of particular interest for obvious reasons and most seemed quite surprised to hear how well he was doing. I was in the class for nearly an hour. It was ambrosia, being back in front of a high school class, the future of Africa taking everything this scraggly haired white man said with a little grain of salt.

After taking a picture with a few of them outside the classroom, the journalism club surrounded me with bikes under a tree. Happily imprisoned, I continued to address many of the same curiosities, but this time a few of them proceeded to school me on Sudanese and Burundian politics. As the sun slowly shifted westward, a student now and then would gently nudge me back into the shadow of the tree. How absolutely cosmopolitan they were in the midst of utter modesty. Two of them gave me their email addresses. Beatrice came to fetch me around 1:15, just before school ended.

The FilmAid Participatory Video Project I had indended to observe around 3 pm was postponed until tomorrow, so my afternoon was thankfully mellow. I worked in the office, transcribing my notes and writing in my diary. I drank three Tuskers at a local pub later that night. Sitting outside under a tree on deck chairs, my WFP hosts shared war stories and favorite pick-up lines while failed American sitcoms insinuated themselves on the TV across the patio. Asking directions to the restroom, everyone pointed to a bush a few meters away.

Kakuma

2007-06-27T12:31:00.000-05:00

Monday

I take a matatu and a city bus, known as a “City Hoppa” and get myself to Jomo Kenyatta airport around 11:45 am. I am carrying a new laptop for Abebe, the Kakuma sub-office director for the World Food Program (WFP), the bag of hacky sacks, bubbles and candy, along with a few clothes, my computer, mosquito net, and toiletries, all stuffed into a medium size alpine pack (yes, I’m carrying two computers). It’s pretty compact but quite heavy. I also have my fanny pack with camera, industrial strength bug spray and sun block, hat, sunglasses, notebooks, and official documents. I’m ready for the wild.

Along the way, I try and find shoelaces to buy without success, despite the preponderance of shoe stores: the laces on my boots are coming apart. I might be entering the wild, shoeless…

As the City Hoppa enters the airport, we all file out of the bus, are searched, and file back onto the bus to make our way through the airport. Most of the people are going to jobs at the freight terminals as I seem to be the only one bogged down with luggage. I meet Charles from FilmAid at the gate. He is accompanied by (a different) Andrew, the new international program director for FilmAid, just beginning to visit their programs in Kenya and Tanzania. He’s an American from NYC. We board the East Africa Safari Express flight and it’s an uneventful hour-long ride to Lokichoggio, roughly 20 miles from the South Sudan boarder and about an hour north of Kakuma.

I am surprised to find the terrain amazingly green and mountainous with wide stretches of flat valley, quite beautiful in fact. It’s the rainy season and about 95 degrees, dry and breezy. Believe it or not, it’s winter. Heat like this is much easier to take when there is no humidity. It turns out the green is quite fleeting; in three or four days, the green will give way to brown without more rain.

Loki is basically town of NGO compounds, built by the UN about 20 years ago next to a small Turkana village. Humanitarian aid to southern Sudan during it’s civil war was coordinated here and now they provide logistics for Kakuma and Darfur as well. Until a peace agreement with the Khartoum government in 2005 was signed establishing South Sudan as a semi-autonomous region, it was one of the longest running civil wars in the world.

The FilmAid Land cruiser is there at the Loki airport to pick us up along with vehicles from WFP, International Rescue Committee, UNHCR, LWF, and the Kenyan military. The vehicles are escorted by the military in a convoy along the road to Kakuma. The lush beauty of the countryside belies the danger that lurks within it; armed cattle rustlers and bandits constantly threaten the Turkana shepards and their flocks of goats, cows, and donkeys. Car-jackings and robberies are common for unaccompanied vehicles. Not a place to get a flat.

We get to Kakuma, passing small Turkana villages dotted with small, round, thatched huts made of braches and mud, some accessorized with blue tarps and plastic grocery sacs over top. In between the villages, men and boys tended flocks of goats and cattle, and the women, adorned only with skirts and brightly colored, beaded rings covering their entire neck-line, walked along the roadside balancing 5 gallon water jugs on their heads or cultivating small plots of sorghum. The guard at the WFP gate has the key to my room.

For those of you who had images of me toiling in sub-standard living conditions, sweating my buns off as the mosquitoes and camel spiders eat me alive, may your fears (or hopes) be quelled: the WFP staff residence area resembles the small bungalows one might see in Boca, just with less-tasteful interior décor. The camel spiders and scorpions seem to have entirely disappeared about two years ago according to Ken, a Tanzanian film producer and FilmAid videographer who has worked in the camp for five years.

I make my way along a beautifully manicured, tree-lined, concrete path to my white, stucco bungalow, the roof a UN blue. Stepping over a masses of sleepy, brown-black beetles congregating along the edge of the portico steps, who incidentally, after a brief flight and collision against the florescent tube of light over the doorway fall to the ground with the sound of a stone upon their backs, unable to turn themselves, the wind or death the only determinants of their fate, I enter the room: the maid has done a bang-up job.

That’s right: the maid. Those of you who know this part of Africa know well that anyone who has even the most meager means employs a servant, so this may not be surprising. The WFP staff residence in Kakuma is nonetheless, as most of the people I’ve talked to so far acknowledge, the Plaza Hotel of refugee camp compounds. My bed will be changed and laundry done daily. Lucky me.

Arguments about NGO institutional culture and the degree to which staff, most of whom work extremely hard in very challenging conditions, deserve nice living conditions in the midst of extreme poverty aside, the camp itself is calm but tense. It is split into three main sections, each with distinct national or ethnic communities. Families live in small mud-brick houses with tin roofs, roughly 7 by 12 feet. Others are constructed of tin and wood with small porches constructed of tree branches. The narrow dirt streets are lined with stalks of thorns broken only by houses, business stalls, and an occasional trellised entryway into a small garden. These areas are surrounded by wide open spaces of brush and red earth eroded into small canyons, sometimes impassable after it has rained. Schools, the hospital, and feeding centers are usually located in these areas.

During the day, people walk or bike along paths and dirt roads (the only tarmac is the road to Loki) on their way to different parts of the camp to trade, buy goods, go to the church or mosque, school or hospital. One cannot roam the camp after 6 pm alone or you risk a mugging or worse. This goes for refugee and NGO staff alike, the latter of whom are mostly African, and more likely Kenyan. The UN, which includes WFP, goes so far as to not allow any of their staff outside the compounds after 6 pm. At 7:30 pm, I accompany the FilmAid staff to an outdoor screening in the camp.

Mounted to the side of a large truck sitting in the middle of a dirt clearing was a large, theater size movie screen. About 75 adult refugees stood in a ring around the screen with about twice that many children sitting in front of them. The mood among the refugees is pretty jolly. The staff and I eat cabbage, chapatti, and mutton behind the truck in the blare of the generator.

The road getting here was astonishingly rough, many times nearly getting stuck in the mud or rolling off an escarpment. We passed through the center of the Ethiopian part of the camp, a narrow stretch of undulating, cratered, dirt road lined on either side by tin, wood, and dirt shanties. This generally describes most of the more populated sections of the camp. The generator powered lights from within the stalls revealed restaurants, fruit and vegetable stands, grocery stores, wood and tin sellers, music shops, and cyber cafes, just to name a few. Although I’ve read and heard plenty about how Kakuma resembles a small city, I am still utterly, utterly astonished.

The usual film programming was provided: first a few cartoons, then a film made in the camp in 2005 about sexual harassment and how to report it, and finally a feature film, in all about two and a half hours or so. This night, a Ugandan feature film in English from 1991 was shown whose theme was teen pregnancy. Film selection and production is driven by a council of refugees representing all the different nationalities in the camp, including Sudanese, who make up nearly 65% of the population in Kakuma, as well Somali, Ethiopian, Ugandan, Congolese, and others from the Great Lakes region. Ken comments that the crowds are dwindling because increasing numbers of Sudanese are repatriating. John, a young outreach coordinator and Turkana who just finished his undergraduate studies in Social Work (a rare feat for a Turkana, who, as the host community, are far, far worse off than the refugees in terms of access to food, shelter, education, and health services), comments that it’s hard to get Somalis to attend because they often object to the subject matter of the films.

FilmAid is the only NGO allowed to be operating in the camp after 6 pm and attempts to keep the UNHCR, in charge of security, informed of their night time screenings. Snaking our way through the narrow and bumpy passages of the camp to drop off some of the young volunteers at their houses, we encounter locked gates between the different sections of the camp, generally organized by nationality. Apparently, there have been violent raids by groups of bandits from one nationality on another and then reprisal raids. This prompted the UNHCR to construct gates between the sections that are locked after 6 pm. We waited over an hour to finally reach by handset the community member entrusted to unlock the gate to the Congolese section. At least we weren’t an ambulance.

Tuesday

Today, I had the best Ethiopian food ever.

I woke at 7:15 am, took a cool shower and had coffee in the staff mess hall. They have satellite TV, so a few WFP staff and I caught up on the latest soccer, rugby, and cricket news.

I finally met Abebe in person after exchanging emails and calls for nearly two months. He’s nothing short of amazing. I am once again in good hands. Abebe is Ethiopian and lives in Geneva when not working in the camp, which seems hardly ever. He was thrilled with the laptop I brought him which he intends to give to his wife, an economist for a Swiss bank in Geneva, just before she gives birth in a few months. He explained that computers are too expensive in Europe and too cheap (as in construction) in Dubai, through which he flies to Geneva.

In his office, he spent about 30 minutes describing the history and basic functioning of the camp to me. We then drove over to the UNHCR compound and I met with the senior operations officer, Mohammad Arif. I told him that I was interested in learning as much as I could about education, media, and repatriation and he proceeded to ensure that I meet with everyone he could think of. He had his community service coordinator join us and she arranged for me to be present tomorrow while a large busload of Sudanese begin the journey back to Sudan.

We then drove over to the LWF compound. The staff was in an all day training, but the education officer and program coordinator came out to meet with me briefly. They arranged to meet me for a longer period the next day and to visit their high schools and youth culture programs. We came back to the WFP compound and Abebe set me up in an empty office with an Internet connection to use during the week (The Internet is not working right now). Can my luck get any better? Yes: It does at Franco’s.

It’s already been recommended to me by Lavendah at the LWF Nairobi office. Abebe bursts into my office and announces we’re going to the place where he has lunch every day. Franco’s Hotel Kakuma Island is in the center of the Ethiopian section of the camp, and although it’s constructed of tin and wood scraps, the ambiance is magical. Low concrete stalls carved into the shapes of waves are lined with burgundy pillows. The floor is of orange dirt and stones like the narrow road outside. Abebe greets the staff and we sit at a table under a wide section of fiberglass skylight. We both order lemon Krest. Fortuitously, Ankeleh, the LWF education director in Kakuma and also an Ethiopian, calls Abebe and joins us for lunch.

The waiter arrives with a wide plastic bucket and a jug of water. As he makes his way around the table, we rub our hands over the bucket as he pours the water. Our hands drip-dry into the dirt, and we begin to talk American and Ethiopian politics. Both explain many Africans believe that Americans are not yet ready to elect a woman or black to the Presidency, Barak and Hilary notwithstanding. Expressing a more hopeful viewpoint, I explain that although they’re probably right all things considered, the fact of George W. Bush has made people more willing to consider just about anybody halfway lucid, and thus has ironically made it more possible than ever before (let’s not forget a Hispanic is running too). Ankeleh explains that Ethiopian politics, no matter who is elected, is always about pleasing the Americans. While we dip our hands into the large plate of meats, vegetables and flat bread, we manage to talk about Cesar Chavez, his “Bush is the devil” comment at the UN, Castro, Iraq, and Ethiopian Jews.

Ankeleh will allow me to accompany him while he conducts inspections of the schools on Wednesday. I take picture of Abebe outside Franco’s and two Turkana hanging around outside jump into the photo and demand payment.

Wednesday

I met Zablon around 7:30 am and we drove over to the departure center, a few miles from the WFP compound. We’re late: as we near the center, we pass the convoy already on it’s way. Kenyan military and UNHCR vehicles escort a single bus full of Sudanese and a truck full of their belongings on their way to Loki and then on to the border.

Repatriation is a very complex issue and pretty sticky for the UNHCR; I’ve gathered somewhat contradictory if not incomplete information so far. Donors and member states consider repatriation an indicator of success, often tying it directly to resources and political support, so there is a lot of pressure to convince refugees to voluntarily go home, even when the conditions there may be worse than in the camp. All of the NGO staff with whom I’ve spoken so far, including Arif, agree this is the case for the Sudanese in Kakuma. There is, after all, peace in southern Sudan after 20 years of fighting.

One can imagine, however, what 20 years of civil war will do to a region’s infrastructure and human resources. I’ve interviewed a few people who have been to South Sudan in the last few months and it sounds nothing short of bleek. Pock marked with land mines, there are very few schools and medical resources and no roads. The repatriation buses are constantly getting stuck, forcing the returnees to walk for miles. Housing and food are still tough to come by. Despite this, Sudanese continue to repatriate, but the total numbers are unclear. The UNHCR’s numbers are modest, around 6000 so far this year, but scores more have left without the UNHCR’s assistance.

By going through the UN, a family surrenders their ration card and other benefits in exchange for blankets, water jugs and other survival items, as well as formal identification papers which would allow them to access benefits from NGO’s in Sudan, buy land, obtain licenses, enroll in school, etc. The problem is that it has taken many months after registering with UN to finally go home, causing a considerable amount of bureaucratic frustration among the refugees. The security situation was still quite tentative when the repatriation effort began, causing fits and starts. Furthermore, South Sudanese state institutions are not yet functioning so most can’t take advantage of these benefits. Instead, the men simply go on their own to check out the situation. This way they don’t have to give up their benefits. Many return after finding that conditions in the camp are considerably better, or they stay, find jobs and send money back to camp. Many will sell their ration card for a hefty price which provides enough money to live on for while in Sudan.

The schools in Kakuma are considered by many, including the UNHCR, to be a “pull factor;” that which draws people to the camp, even if they have little reason (as defined by the UN) for asylum. Food and health care pull factors as well. These things used to be called “human rights.”

Because of this, donor support is dwindling for schools in the camp in favor of supporting the development of schools and other infrastructure in South Sudan to compete with the pull factors in the camp. Many teachers have returned to Sudan causing a faculty shortage. Not surprisingly, enrollments are now being limited in Kakuma schools, some schools have closed in anticipation of repatriation even though the schools were full putting additional stress on those remaining, and a successful teacher training program ended after only one year.

Perhaps more interestingly, and which gets closer to the heart of my research, is that the young Sudanese who have essentially grown up in the camp are finding themselves alienated from Sudanese culture, which is far less Westernized than that they experience in Kakuma. The South Sudanese government has yet to complete a state curriculum so the schools they attend in Kakuma use the Kenyan curriculum and learn Swahili and English. They watch TV and movies from Kenya and the US and listen to hip hop. They are used to western fashion and, notwithstanding the relative poverty of the camp, are used to the humanitarian support and commerce available in Kakuma. Some will say they have become deeply dependent on it.

Abebe told me that one increasing issue in the camp is the issue of “bride price.” Many Sudanese men who have repatriated or been resettled in other countries like the US, including the so-called “lost boys,” return to the camp to purchase wives. Apparently, these men consider the women who remained in Sudan “backwards,” and desire wives cultured and educated (including in proper health and sanitation) in the camp. Families in the camp are aware of increasing competition for their daughters and engage in risky negotiation between the competing suitors to get the best price. Fighting often breaks out between the suitors and the potential bride often gets beaten.

Returnees experience a lot of resentment from those who stayed in Sudan to fight the war. There are accused of returning with an education to take away jobs. The tripartite agreement between the Khartoum government of Sudan, Kenya and the UNHCR allows for the recognition of school diplomas obtained in Kakuma anywhere in Sudan. As the southern region begins to rebuild, there are increasing job opportunities for those who have a minimum high school education. Many young people, as a result, want to stay in Kakuma until they finish high school. I hope to eventually untangle, and as we say in academia, unpack, all of the contradictions and assumptions associated with this predicament. I’ll need to spend a lot of time with young people and their families, and in the schools here. Perhaps I’ll visit South Sudan too. But not this time.

Later in the morning, I accompany Rachel, a WFP staff on a program monitoring mission. The Food for Assets (FFA) program targets the local Turkana population and assists them in developing modern farming techniques to cultivate sorghum. Sorghum has a very short planting to harvest period, well suited to the very hot and short growing season here, and the seeds are eaten or ground to make porridge or flour. The Government of Kenya administers the program and contracts WFP to monitor the progress.

We drive through the actual town of Kakuma, bustling with Turkana people in varying combinations of traditional and western dress and, a few miles later, meet two of the FFA staff, both Turkana, in the middle of a roughly 200 acre stretch of land abutting a small village. The people have built a series of trapezoidal dikes that catch water flowing into the field from the mountains during the rainy season, allowing it to settle and seep into the soil. About 150 women spread across this tract of land are hoeing the damp fields and planting seeds. A few fields have already been planted, small seedlings peeking up out of the cracked land. But most are covered with weeds. We walk along the dikes talking to Turkana women. Rachel explains that they are quite late in planting as it had been raining regularly over the last month, and without more rain, the seedlings will wither in the heat before they mature.

She explains to me that while rainfall in the region has actually increased, it is occurring earlier in the season, foiling local farming knowledge. They are simply not used to planting this early. Global warming…

I ask Wilson, our WFP driver, about the traditional roles of men and women in Turkana culture. Wilson grew up in Kakuma. His parents were Turkana pastoralists and due to school fees and moving around so much, he was unable to finish high school. He plans to return to school soon and attend a university. He wants to go into human resources. He tells me Turkana men and boys of a certain age typically sheppard the flocks of goats, cows and donkeys. But most of the time, he says, they sit under trees waiting to eat.

The women do just about everything (else); farming, fetching water, housecraft, childcare, food preparation, with a little help from the children. I fleetingly consider becoming a Turkana man.

The traditional Turkana diet consists of meat, milk, and blood, which is in sharp contrast to my lunch in the WFP mess: rice, beans, and cooked carrots.

Dancing

2007-06-24T05:35:00.000-05:00

Friday

"It is both foolish and hazardous not to dance in Africa." --Dan Eldon

Taking Dan's advice, I danced at the Carnivore tonight. It was "old school" night and the ostrich meatballs got me tapping my feet. Leah and I met a friend of hers, Grace, there. Grace is a producer for Kenya National Television and knew cameraman Hos Maina very well; he was killed along with Dan in 1993 in Somalia. Grace is starting a video production training project for 3 - 15 year olds (yes 3) in a rough part of Nairobi.

My friend Danny would be very dissappointed to learn that the Kenyan government has greatly curtailed the trade in game meat. The Carnivore now rarely has the selection of exotic flesh it once had. I felt mixed about this, both very curous to try gazelle and aligator, and happy to know there's one more of each now still walking the bush. I think about the scene in the Muppet Movie where Kermit, confronted by a restaurant specializing in frog's legs, shouts, "Think about all those frogs with crutches!"

Saturday

I took the wrong matatu from Thika Road and ended up where, yes, that's right, the dangerous part of town. At least that's what everyone kept saying as they double checked to see if I was truely alright. The River Road district is indeed tense, but amazingly lively, crowded, and loud with music and bickering. I turned to the Kenyan woman next to me on the bus and said, "Uh, this is not where I though I was going," coping a brave smile to go with the worry lines on my forehead. Taking pity on the stupid muzungu, she walked me to the center of town talking about her six children. I gave her two bottles of bubbles (Jennifer's idea) and made my way to see Gabriel's colleague, Ester the travel agent, to buy my ticket to Kakuma.

After seeing Ester, I took a taxi out to Westlands and met Mike Eldon who took me to the DEPOT (Dan Eldon Place Of Tommorow) to observe a team building program for the Nairobi employees of UUNet, an up and comming broadband company now owned by Verizon. Really intersting people, the DEPOT staff as well as the UUNet folks, all Kenyans, all really positive about the future. I wakled through a re-creation of Dan's bedroom and was reduced to tears. I was there all afternoon. My family and I feel extremely lucky to feel a part of the Eldon family.

Mike drove me back to the Globe Roundabout, site of the Masai market, and I caught (the correct) matatu back to Thika Road. It was dark by then and, feeling a little squeemish about walking the mile to Leah's house, caught a motorcycle taxi.

As the cool wind blew the day's dust off my face, clutching to the driver as we ski jumped speed bumps, I felt more alive then ever.

Nairobi

2007-06-22T05:48:00.001-05:00

Cyber cafes are all over the place in Nairobi but it's been hard to find one with computers fast enough to access my blog. I am now sitting in the famed Windsor Golf Club and Hotel, an extremely posh, lush and beautiful club for the monied set. And they have fast computers. I'm here because Leah, the woman who has graciously let me stay in her house just off Thika Road northeast of the city, is the club accountant. It's only about two miles from her house so I walked here. Her family have been amazing and so helpful in orienting me to Nairobi. I feel quite lucky to have befriended Wangari in Madison: Leah is Wangari's boyfreind's sister. Small fucking world!

Nonetheless, the last four days in Nairobi have been nothing short of crazy, if not wildly productive.

Tuesday:

I arrived at about 11 pm after barely making my connecting flight in Brussles. The plane was delayed two hours in Chicago (surprise!) and had to sprint from one seven hour flight to the next. So much for an appetizing Flemish layover...

Amazingly, all my luggage made it. Leah and her sister Margaret and brother Gabriel picked me up and we went and had chicken and chips in an all night place downtown. The we drove to Leah's and after spending too much time figuring out how the mosquito net worked (I'm an idiot) crashed hard.

Wednesday:

Gabriel is the star today. He basically held my hand all day.

We walked about a mile to Thika road where we caught a matatu to the center of Nairobi. For the non- Africanist set, this is basically an irreverently decorated minivan over stuffed with commuters that careen down roads in constant states of near disaster. But they're safer than it sounds, heh. We first found a cyber cafe and I wrote Jennifer to tell her I was fine. Then I got some cash and bought a cell phone. I went to a sort of all purpose office/copy store and made copies of all relevant travel and financial documents (should have done that before I left, heh.)

Then we went to the government Ministry of Immigration to get formal permission to travel to Kakuma and was told to come back the next morning. After all, it was World Refugee Day. I bought Gabriel lunch at the KK Restaurant nearby and had deep fried gizzards and chapati.

Leah eventually picked us up with her two daughters in tow: Olivia, 15, was on her way back to boarding school, shy and smiling, aspiring international human rights lawyer; and Joy, 8, who got out of school early because she was sick, was showing no signs of sickness whatsoever and told me I looked like a movie star. I haven't worn my sunglasses since. She's a non-stop talker and charmer who is teaching me Swahili in the stern school-marm style. Asante sana Joy!

We careened (apparently most Kenyans, even fancy accountants, don't drive, they careen) southeast out of the city down the highway that eventually leads to Mount Kilimanjaro. While squeezed behind Gabriel's seat, who is very tall, dust and diesel smoke flying everywhere, swerving (not slowing down) around pond-size potholes, darting pedestrians, and untethered matatus, the Christian Afro-pop blared from the radio as we passed tin paneled slums and crowded markets lining the shoulder. The Catholic school Olivia attended was gated and idyllic and she was excited to see her friends.

The drive back was the same, Joy chatting the whole way, until we got to the Nakumatt, Kenya's supermarket. This one was in a mall, and low and behold, I saw my first white people! Figures. What is it about fucking malls? They're like white people magnets!

Then we drove Joy to the doctor's office where it turns out she had tonsilitis.

It's about 9 pm by now (yes, many doc's offices are open 24 hours). Cutting back through traffic that would make NYC seem like a little village, we went home and I made baked ziti without an oven for everyone. Don't ask... I brought Joy a big tub of colored markers from Target and she drew me a picture of a mermaid.

Wednesday:

I caught a matatu all by myself!!

Although this one dropped me off in a totally different place. I befreinded a very disgruntled, bespecled, and well dressed gentleman (although everyone is well dressed in Nairobi except me) who claimed to have been deceived by the driver as to the drop off point and he showed me how to get back to the Ministry of Immigration. Upon calling the office to say I had arrived, they told me to come back tomorow. I calmly reminded the secretary that this is what she said yesterday and that I was leaving for Kakuma the next day. She then sent me to a totally different building a few blocks away. To make a very long story short, it took me four visits to this office and two meetings with a very kind and regal bureaucrat to get my papers. The security guard and I were on a first name basis by then. Most were surprised it took just two days. I think it's becasue I look like a movie star.

I met Charles from FilmAid International for lunch at Cafe 21 on Kenyatta Ave in the midst of the Immigration dance and had a great talk about media and refugees and I forgot not to eat the lettuce and tomato on my cheeseburger. I didn't get sick.

After obtaining my papers from the Immigration office around 3 pm, I caught a taxi out to Lavington, one of the nicer suburbs, to meet with the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) about visiting their schools in Kakuma. I met with Lavendah, who was as charming as her name, and we had a great conversation about refugees and education and she is going help me meet with some teachers and visit some classrooms. Unfortunately, the LWF plane I had intended to take the next day to Kakuma was full. So I booked a flight on Monday and sat in the LWF conference room and made calls.

I caught a bus back into town. The traffic was so horrendous, I kept seeing the same people walking along side the road all the way into town. The diesel smoke was thick as blankets and I didn't even notice it had gotten dark. Leah and her Windsor Club co-workers happended to be in a meeting downtown and picked me up. Waiting for them on a street corner, I finally talked to Jennifer on the cell for the first time since Monday and her voice was like a breath of fresh air.

We drove to the Widsor Club, had two big Tuskers and some pizza, and went home where I watched The Pelican Brief with Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts. It kinda sucked but I was comatose by then it really didn't matter.

Friday:

I slep late and then walked to the Windsor for a decent computer and no running around the city.

My First Sojourn to Africa

2007-06-17T21:45:00.000-05:00

17 June 2007

Well, I leave tomorrow: it's 10:00 pm and I have yet to pack.

OK, I do have all my stuff laid out across the attic floor. I just need to stuff it all in a small alpine pack (for my clothes and toiletries and mosquito net), a medium size duffel bag to be filled with stuff I plan to leave in Kenya (such as 50 hacky sacks, 20 tiny little containers of bubbles, a giant bag of lollipops and Jolly Ranchers, and a bunch of mystery packages I agreed to deliver for various acquaintances and friends, whereupon I plan to return with it full of gifts and mementos), and my briefcase.

So the plan, which I fully expect to change, is to spend three nights in Nairobi while getting permission from the government of Kenya to enter the Kakuma refugee camp which is in the northwest near the boarder with South Sudan. I also hope to meet with folks from the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) who run most of the schools there, FilmAid International, and the UNHCR.

And maybe eat Gazelle at the famed Carnivore restaurant before heading off to Kakuma on Friday, the 22nd. Not sure how I'm getting there yet, but I am hoping there is room on an LWF flight.

Are you a neonomad?

2007-05-30T22:00:00.001-05:00

Do you have a place of origin? A place bound by geography or history or lore; a single, dominant ethnoscape that formed your soul? Maybe this is a different place than where you are now. Has this new place crept into your biochemistry, and now you're a mutt. Or perhaps you're in between or in transition or incognito; a Tuareg of liminal spaces. Should we throw out the old monikers and just call ourselves Earthlings?

Maybe you surf across time and space from your armchair and drape yourself in the exotic fabrics of a technoscape? A digital Bedouin, at once at home but seldom in the same place, you travel mediatized roads leading to other people's lives.

Are you a neonomad?

Are you a migrant, a refugee, a military brat, a stowaway, a diplomat, a journalist, a blogger, an ex-pat, in exile, on safari or on a mission? Are you getting tired of the whole idea of national boundaries. How often do you ride your electronic camel into the transfrontier?

When you consider Norwegians or Cubans or Masai; what are you? Are you where you were born? Are you where you have citizenship? Are you where you lived the longest? Are you where your folks are from? Are you defined by your ideology? Are you deterritorialized? Are you a global citizen? Are you a hybrid, a cosmopolitan, a subaltern, a counterhegemon, the indigenous foreigner, or a new social imaginary?

How do we get schooled in this stuff?

~

Recently after a banjo performance, a woman came up to me and inquired about a song I'd played. "Is that a real song," she asked, "or did you just make that up?"

Does the difference between what is real and what is imagined matter only if you are being deceived?

The Transubstantiator: transformation through the flip-flops of the neonomad.

2007-05-29T19:12:00.000-05:00

Some definitions:

transubstantiation: change from one substance or form into another; metamorphosis; mutation; transmogrification.

neonomad: the global Tuareg, the digital Bedouin, the local refugee, the indigenous foreigner, the primordial hybrid, and the occasional international and comparative educational researcher.