day eighty-two: departure

My last week in Southern Sudan has been delightfully surreal and chaotic.  Basically, I was getting ballsy.  With my comfort levels in Torit reaching an all-time high, I found myself a regular visitor to the markets, taking the never-ending trails of laughter and ‘Yes Rasta!’ in my stride.  The guitar also got the chance to venture outside the confines of the compound too.

When the manager of Torit Hotel told me his newly purchased microphone required a musician, I thought I’d get my sorry ass involved.  When I showed up with my guitar strapped to my back, my only thoughts were on a quite jam session and maybe some beers over the football on TV.  What I didn’t expect was to be greeted by a delighted hotel manager telling me I had thirty minutes to tune up…I was going on ‘after dinner’.  What dinner?  One step outside into the back garden and the horseshoe set up of white-cloth-laden tables had me in a small panic; who’s dinner?  The quick answer to that: the State Governor’s, alongside every Ministry Director…

Nervous much?!

After downing two Tuskers in the space of two gulps, I was tuned and plucked on a chair, dead centre of the horseshoe.  Everybody looked so prestigious and pristine…I hadn’t even showered that day.  But with Sam Cooke’s Change Gonna Come under my belt I knew I’d be OK; what else was I going to open with to a Country on the brink of a naissance and a State Government that was the frontline in the fight against the North??!!

…it seemed overnight I had achieved Rock Star status.  The rest of the week went down smoothly after that, with the guitar being brought to every pub I visited…after all, if I supply the music, everybody else seems to supply the beer!

Having returned to Juba on Wednesday, the last couple of days was all about concluding my ‘deliverables’ and making sure all my mapping and database outputs were in the right hands, and of course that my Sudanese data and pirate GIS software was in as many hands as I could find.  With the continual floundering of the database design from Government and other NGOs, it seems sadly that I’ll be taking some work home with me…but as long as it’s not 51.8 degrees Celsius outside, I think it’ll be a breeze.

day seventy-three: that's no tan, it's just dust

Sometimes it takes the worst of events to help you fathom new fads.  With my personal laptop crashing just two days before this adventure in Sudan, my hard drive was the back-up and the only entity holding my digital belongings.  My database counterpart had conveniently nabbed my small USB stick whilst handing over laptops to County staff had me wipe clean my work as I changed workspace again; so this was all I was left with in Eastern Equatoria.  So when I plugged my hard drive into a colleague’s laptop to help him email some files from my laptop, contracting a virus that turned every folder of my hard drive into a 1Kb shortcut was a heart-wrenching moment.

The thought that every photo, map, and academic memory I own was now rendered dead, and with any attempt to open or retrieve my files feeble; my reliance and attachment to the digital world became overwhelmingly conscious.  As did the apprehension that without my masses of pirate baggage I brought with me, there could be no GIS component to this project.

With only slight but steep-costing satellite connection, it felt like an age just to update the virus database to even recognise my disease.  After learning that she’d attached herself to the hidden folders connected with the OS and placed my own folders there too, I was already winning.  Sixty hours after my initial panic, my digital life was back on track!

Now I and my pirate software are heading to the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission State Headquarters to show the government how easy it is to make simple conflict maps.  All that’s left after that is to smooth over another workshop with County staff entitled “Sending your conflict via email” and my work here should be done.  With all my training materials now recovered and completed, I can smell the snow from here…

day sixty-eight: a laptop is like a lady, your father can try to teach you but it's only when you get your hands on her will you learn

It’s been a week from hell.  Database training is so much harder when somebody keeps deciding to change the database.  I’ve been ‘shocked and stunned, but not surprised’ (to use a famous Niven quotation) by the communication between organisations while I’ve been here.  So it came as no surprise to hear that the ‘new’ database which nobody had told me we were using turns out only to work on XP… rendering the 4 Windows7 netbooks relatively useless….pirate software to the rescue again!  I try to remain calm.  So I spend a few sleepless nights restructuring the training manuals, still sweating like a cartoon in Khartoum.

The training days arrive and my database guy is still floundering and fixing the glitches of his database system while I get straight to it; who here has used a laptop or computer before?  A deadly silence with just the stuttering of a broken generator in the background can be heard, failing miserably in powering my projector.  It quickly dawned on me that I’d forgotten to add to my pretty presentation some slides on how to use a mousepad or keyboard…I thought it was going to be a long two days.

Several simple diagrams later and few practical sessions on practicing turning on and off the computer, we were getting somewhere.  Dancing from one laptop to the next, I could see the excitement of new technology in their eyes.  I found myself reminding the County Staff the value of their continual use of simple Radios for facilitating their role as the ‘eyes and ears on the ground’.  After all, their improvements over two days had them mastering the ON button, not the database.  Either way, I still felt like Santa.  The plan is to attend a Government Conference on conflict in Kapoeta and train the staff again once they’ve had a chance to play around a bit with their new toys.

So after feeling pretty chuffed with myself, I thought it nice to have a relaxing Friday evening at the nearby Torit Hotel…of course you need to have friends that can afford the £1.75 it costs for a beer there!  A bit of an anti-climax but at least loneliness is not stressful!

Me and all my buddies @ Torit Hotel

Or permanent.  For the first time since my arrival, my fellow compound in-mates at Merlin decided to show face…so we all sauntered down to the market for a sunset beer and to buy ‘fresh’ cat-fish!  Sounds simple, but the joys of getting out and about as well as gutting fish and cooking for yourself is a life-saver for your sanity...even if I have to endure the stares and shouts of “Yes Rasta!?” every inch of the journey.

day sixty-five: ascertively sweltering over sun and system struggles

There are sometimes positives you can take from such blistering heat…on one side I’ve had to move my wee Mozi tent outside so as to not sweat myself awake, much to the amusement of staff arriving at the compound at 7am.  On the other, the water from the tanker is supplying me with my first hot shower since arriving in Sudan.  The other bonus is that watching shooting comets, stars and fireflies above your head all night is as soothing as it sounds.

With every pleasure however, comes the painful part.  What was once just a mere comparison of two information systems, mine and the UN’s CRMA project, seems to be turning into a war.  Both require the internet to run.  With only three weeks left on my contract, I should be forgiven in standing up for what I believe is right: a conflict early warning system that can be easily adopted given the current IT capacity of local Government staff and one that can be automatically visualised, clustered and disseminated to anyone with a internet USB stick to help induce a coordinated, harmonised response.  This, versus a robust database system network that cannot yet map or recognise the fundamental fact that conflict can be attributed to more than just one cause, whether it be political, economic, environmental or historic in nature.  In the UN CRMA, a crisis report comes under one category...in reality neither conflict nor crisis should. They gave me the source code to see if I could integrate the host of changes I recommended.  To make that system fit our needs I need my gurus Panos, Amin, and Mike Johnson with me along with about 3 months of programming fun probably!  I doubt there’s a programmer in this world who wants to write and change a UN stranger’s code in 40+ degrees…

The show must go on though; starting tomorrow I’ll try to begin my database training for the County staff…lesson one: the POWER ON button is normally located on the top left, centre or right of the keyboard; and normally has a round circle icon encompassed by a fingernail-sized round button.  Maybe I shouldn’t use ‘encompassed’…

Lesson One

day sixty-three: MS, maps and malware

I have returned to Eastern Equatoria where the dry season has officially kicked in…I can tell because my back is wet, the roads are hard and the feeling of dust in my eyes is constant.  We can kiss goodbye any hopes of sleeping in this heat now that AC is off the menu and 45 degrees is on it….the container formally known as mini-Scotland has been renamed “AGA the sizzling sarcophagus”.  It feels like the Eastern Equatoria I’d almost forgot given my time in Juba before leaving for the Bonnieland the other joys, such as sharing an Ethernet cable with 3 others, a broken generator and a chef that can’t cook… I almost sound spoiled…but if I was allowed to wonder around markets and have a pot to cook with, I would.

My first day back at work and there’s no time to mess around, not from my side anyway…I now have more laptops than friends here who can use them.  Ten to be exact: one for each County ‘Peace Committee’ and two for me (I had three but feeling less selfish now).  Unsurprisingly disorganised, the Danish (DG) and Catholics (RS) should be paying me extra for my library of pirate software packages…what would they have done about getting Counties to map a database and send it online if it weren’t for piracy?  ESRI don’t do licenses here (yet), genuine Microsoft Access copies’s are nowhere to be seen and who carries around antivirus software bar the random geek with dreads?  That’s what I thought, nobody.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, the chicken that once pranced around our compound making blether is now dead (in my name apparently)….and in my belly with some chilli sauce and rice topped with one can of Irn Bru.  Phenomenal.  That’s right, Sudan’s recent imports include one crate of 15 cans of the golden stuff and one bottle of 14 year old Glenfiddich, so who needs ice…!

day sixty-two: to juba airport and around again

After several weeks of travelling within the country, it was my first occasion to travel beyond it back to the Bonnieland.  As with airports around the world, you’re offered a glimpse at the jet-setting demographic and this usually brings around some form of amusement for me.  My experiences with Juba Airport is no exception…

If you remove the unbearable heat of the dry season’s beginnings, inevitable delays and expected departure lounge crowding, there’s still room for a smile.  The lounge is a sea of Greater Eastern African culture with a few white specks dotted around with the repeating video of South Sudan’s new national anthem interrupted only by a few glimpses of today’s newly crowned-to-be Princess Katherine.  Most here share the role of playing some part in the country’s embryonic development and this to make me realise how much I should’ve packed more business cards.  For the first time, Sudanese feel like the minority and I’m guessing that the majority of those returning back to their country after years of civil conflict must be taking the bus.

The airport in Addis Ababa however brings far more international flavour.  Where else can a Scot randomly bring together an Indian business man, an Israeli ex-special forces and an American tourist for draft beer and hours of enjoyable conversation?  Again, I should’ve brought some business cards… Sometimes I feel you learn more from the discussions with passing strangers than you do when prodding for the answers you seek. 

I'm yet to sleep thanks to the masses of screaming babies making up the majority of flights...so for my Saturday night I think I'll do that now...