day thirty eight: don't say 'danish'!

It should come as no surprise to hear that my plan has changed once again.  I’m physically over any feeling of shock than can occur during lackadaisical times.  No Khartoum for me anymore, the UN CRMA will have to come to me.  The barrier of the day is cartoons and religious NGO names… but being under the auspices of GoSS (Government of South Sudan) probably doesn’t help these days either… the country is only pretending to be one just now, the split seems to already be in place (just nobody has even mapped a proper boundary yet!).

So it’s Juba until I return back to the Bonnieland.  Speculative rumour of the day goes to Juba as the most expensive city after Tokyo.  At $10 for a tub of yogurt I can believe that!  Joys of internet and all day long electricity are sharply contrasted by the cesspit-like surroundings.  I doubt anyone is caring about the 50 Sudanese Pound fine you receive for littering here; it comes in all shapes and sizes.

Boom-boxing pickups saunter by during the scorching days while the sounds of heavy machinery tearing up roads send shudders through our container-stacked-up compound every day here. 

Sadly, I have no time to join the drive by politics today or any day… I can feel the deadlines catching up on me so it’s actually a nice feeling to be behind on a desk instead of on the road again.  My first stop has been to train a database manager on an information system by the UN that I’ve yet to see or use.  Then for the next trick, using only mis-spelt reports and settlement names, I turned our draft account on a State’s baseline conflict analysis into an all-encompassing representation of the key conflicts and hotspots.  Not that anybody in Government here’s heard of the Oakland Raiders…but I was told my first attempt at symbolising cattle raiding was a little too intricate for A4 printing…but I’ll be pushing for it come the wall size charts.

I think it works quite well, don't you!?

It’s amazing how productive you become when you have more than just daylight to play with…I even have time to practice the geeky programming things, but if I told you more about that you’d be trying to pinch it!