Of Super Glue Highs, Darfur Lows, and Yet Another Problem ala Sudan...

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*Sniff...ahhhh*
In my experience in Sudan, I have grown accustomed to seeing filthy 'street rats' begging, but more often demanding money, wearing clothes that look like oil rags and that barely give them a decent cover. If you walk down to the market here in Nyala, as a white person, you will be accosted by some scrawny child who hounds you until you either give him what he wants, or someone in the market pulls him away from you. Sometimes as we sit at some local restaurant, children will come up to the table to beg.

Most of the time the preferable action is to simply ignore them. It sounds harsh, I know, but the tragedy is that if one of these children is given money they will run off and buy glue and the cheap high that it offers. While I was still in Khartoum, I was eating at a restaurant late in the evening, and a boy of about 14 years came up to our table and asked for money. We offered him food. He said, "No, give me money." I was rather shocked as I had never seen a street kid turn down food before. The kid was high, probably coming down, and he wanted money to prolong the experience. When he refuses food, what do you do?

There is a small kid in the Nyala markets that we've all encountered on several occasions. He is probably seven years old, wirey as a paper clip, and the most persistent beggar I have ever seen. Aaron and I were in the market shortly after I arrived and this kid came up and began to demand money, mixing arabic with the only english that he knew, "Adeeni money." (give me money). He does not have pants, only a shirt that falls halfway down his thighs, and his face and nose is crusted with dried glue and mucus. His hair is caked in dirt, his hands are the same with glue and grime, and his eyes have a wild flare. He grabbed my arm as I walked away, and tried to pull me back. For such a runt he was surprisingly strong, but I pulled away and kept walking. He grabbed me again, all the while demanding money. Finally someone in the market grabbed him, and he immediately began screaming as though his fingernails were being plucked...clever kid. We see him all over Nyala.

Darfur has its many problems, deadly tribal feuding, full-scale military conflict, banditry, rape, oppression of women, etc., and to add to the sad list is a generation of street children stuck on glue. It is a sad reality, and one that is generated by the lack of abilities of families to care for their children, a direct result of being forced from their villages and barely being able to pull enough resources to keep hunger at bay.

While it is a good thing that there are homes such as the one described in the article, and that they are saving children from a living hell, they are not the solution to the problem. The sad reality is that that home is full and will always be full as long as the deep rooted issues of this society and culture are not addressed from a grass-roots level. I am not naive enough to say that I have an answer, I wish I did, as I know that you cannot take societal traits that run centuries deep and turn them over with a simple solution.

Of Khartoum Traveling, The Team, and Security...

August 29, 2006 - 5:50am
I would say ‘the familiar sights and smells,’ but the face of the Khartoum Domestic Airport has changed so much that that would not be accurate. Well, the smells are familiar, but not like smelling a German Chocolate with coconut icing on my birthday, or Christmas cookies, or the decorated tree in our house. They are, the smells here, familiar because I have smelled them before, even though I showered, I smell it on me now, contributing to the thick that push and elbow their way to the ticket counter. Take a long sniff *** Ahh, good old B.O. At least some thing never really change. So I sit and wait, counting the minutes and the number of times that man across the room picks his nose. Some Chinese, oilmen here, gab on their mobiles; a Saudi, businessman of some kind, sits to my left counting prayer beads and looking austere with his tablecloth hat and ‘someone notice me’ white gown.

Later - Enroute to Nyala
Just outside my window I am privy to the sights of the flooded Nile. Thousands of homes are under water, their owners ‘evacuated’ to who know knows where. The water is mirky and looks as if it hosts all sorts of parties thrown by diseases. I heard that bodies from the Ethiopian floods have reached even Khartoum.

Late in the Evening - 11:39pm
Well, I am here. I won’t say much but to say that it was a day of effusive reunions, much hugging, and meaningful moments with people I care about. Sarah Mosely, Coy Isaacs, my old staff, and so it goes. I will begin in the Wat/San sector as there is no one to fill the place of the guy, an Ethiopian, who just quit. A lot of responsibility, but I’m excited.

August 30, 2006 - 7:29am
I’m not sure when I woke up, but the power was out and my fan wasn’t keeping off the mosquitoes. The high pitch whining buzzed my ears, but I somehow fell back to sleep. I got back up at 7am, made some oatmeal, sprinkling cinnamon on top from the stash Mom bought for me. Jim, the Kenyan, walked through the kitchen, and we grunted greetings. After my first night back in Darfur I do not yet have a strong assessment as to the future. From my experience last time, I know that a rhythm develops eventually and I look forward to that. I really felt for Aaron with his not having a job up to this point, and I am glad that I’ll be jumping right into baby-sitting Wat/San. The team are as follows: Coy Isaacs - PC, Angie Turner - Finance, Scott Aronson - Education/Protection, Jim - Food, Aaron Adkins - Education officer, Beyene - Agriculture. One of the big changes is that this is a multi-national team and also that the average age is much higher.


September 5, 2006 - 11:13am
It isn’t blistering, but it is still rather warm in the office. Today, for about half of it anyway, we’re bound to stay indoors, precautions made due to the tensions around town which are evidenced by protests of UN agencies and rock-throwing at NGO’s in general. This is the first time I have seen it get to this point. When you couple today’s activity with the impending expulsion of the AU, the fresh influx of GOS troops, the splintering of rebel groups, the tribal squabbles, a UN resolution to employ 20,000 peace keepers in the region, and a dozen other indicators, you have a picture of Darfur that spells ‘bleak’ in a clarity not previously seen. With the exception of a few, these indicators have been regular items of interest at various intervals, but now they are all thrown in the caldron at once, and for the first time, with any seriousness, evacuation is being prepared for. So we sit in the office, planning as though flowers bloomed peacefully outside, knowing with a measure of certainty that we shall soon be viewing Darfur from 10,000 feet as we are carried up to Khartoum.

September 6, 2006 - 8:47am
We’re still in Nyala. I just pulled a big beetle off my neck. The demonstrations yesterday fizzled out, the muzaharat, but overall tension level remains high. I’m still sorting through my job as Wat/San manager, struggling to make sense of another man’s lack of organization and create a system and workflow. A frustrating aspect is having a staff who looks to me for daily duties and not being able to oblige them. This factors into my plans; I am going to set up this project in such a way that empowers my team supervisors to draft their own schedules, and then provide them with a system of reporting that allows me to know exactly what is finished, what is in progress, and what we have to look forward to. In that sense I’m glad for this lockdown, as it gives me a breather and time to get the gears in place and turning.

September 6, 2006 - 4:09pm
I was able to send a team into the field today. It feels good to have work being done, even when I myself am limited to office work. I’m trying to set it up so that I’ll be able to spend at least a week in the field per month. If I am stuck in the office ‘kulu zummin’, I’ll go batty. Right now the big task directly ahead of me is to provide Angie in Finance with a projection of funds requests for the whole year, broken down by quarter. In order to complete the task by the tenth I need a host of questions answered by Coy. Once I have that info, the actual planning will go ‘like buttah’. Insha’allah.

September 9, 2006 - 2:51pm
It is a warm day, a sign that the Darfurian rainy season is closing shop and making room for the less hospitable dry season. As familiar as the bleating of the roving bands of goads, and awkward rhetoric of lone donkey’s, the whir and squeak of my ceiling fan and gentle hum of my floor fan set a lazy tone to the afternoon, which is being spent recouping from the last several hours of working with Coy, Scott and Aaron to prepare this evening’s meal. With little to do in Nyala other than work, read, watch a movie, or, in my case write, we try to fraternize with the other expats stranded here by arranging dinner parties such as tonight, or wait until someone else puts out the effort and invites us over. These events display how mundane the life of an aid worker truly is. Hollywood has, of course, sprinkled glamour on the vocation with movies such as ‘Tears of the Sun,’ which display a gorgeous - clean - aid worker (Played by Monica Bellucci) combatting evil and dodging bullets in such a way that makes you think she is ‘Queen of the World’. It just ain’t so. It’s dirty, smelly, and sometimes the only break in monotony is having to find a dry path through the mud puddles on my walk to the office after a night of rain. Even the sketchy power grid ceases to provide excitement, and the disappointment caused by my collection of fans suddenly winding down becomes less and less acute. The throaty hum of a city of generators kicks in and provides the background music for the remainder of the day.

I’ve maintained a steady output of poetry, finding that meter and rhyme offer a solace not obtained otherwise. Reading poetry and earthy philosophy keeps me thinking beyond my daily bath of sweat, and my thoughts and plans for my future are reaffirmed with each page I turn.

The horror of the military build up and flexing penetrate our lives only at security meetings and market hearsay, provided by our staff, as Nyala remains untouched by the tense events ‘outside’. It does not trouble me that my heart is not broken every time a scraggly street kid asks for money, because I know it has been broken before, will break again, and that the child’s plight, and that of his country, will not be remedied by the breaking of hearts. Such a concept is not easily understood by the American mind which, when confronted with pictures and stories of such children, quickly donates money, not realizing, or maybe even caring, that that child won’t see it, and if he does will spend it all for the fleeting pleasure of sniffing glue. The world’s problems are not solved with money, nor by the temporal things money buys. The millions of dollars flowing through Darfur illustrate that with a morbid point.

September 11, 2006 - 9:22am
Five years have gone by since the World Trade Center towers crumbled and fell to the horror and disbelief of the world. This is my second anniversary of the event while in Darfur, although on the last one I wasn’t paying much attention as just two days earlier I had arranged a helicopter evacuation for my team after the town they were in was attacked by the Janjaweed. Even now, away from the sensational, I’m sure, ‘remember 9/11’ reports on US television, and the emotional appeals of the ‘victim’s’ families, it is hard to view the day as somehow anymore special than tomorrow, or yesterday. Of course, one thing I do reflect on today is the attitude of the world towards America and the policies the Bush government embraces and carries out each day. There isn’t a single person that I’ve met that speaks favorably, and this ranges from Palestinian, to Lebanese, to Jordanian, to European. All of them have American friends, were friendly with me, but display great distaste for US government policies.

[Of course, the flipside of that is that their own governments are not without blemish and that it is easier to criticize your neighbor than to objectively evaluate yourself. I am not an advocate of laying aside personal convictions just to make someone, or a group of someones, happy. However, I am learning, more and more, to not be quick to devalue someone else’s opinion. My basis for this is that I cannot understand the experiences they have had that have led them to hold onto their current beliefs. This does not mean that I validate their views, or accept them as equal or ‘right’, it just means that I am lest hasty to pass condemnation. It is not possible to view life through a lens free of bias, anyone who claims such is either themselves deceived, or they are deliberately deceiving others. It is possible to view life through a lens seasoned with grace, and approach each conflicting idea with respect, not based on the value of the idea, but on the value of the person holding the idea. A recurring theme with the people I’ve talked to from the countries named is that they smart from the cold shoulder they seemingly receive from those they criticize.

I am foolish if I think that everyone thinks as I do, and that they should easily understand ‘where I come from’. The truth is my background is singular to me and the way I think, the things I believe, they are derived from, and easily so, the way I was raised, the luxuries I enjoy, etc. Things that make sense to me do not make sense to other people. That was classically illustrated when I was trying to organize the crowds during my times as the Food project manager. Getting people of Darfur to get in, and stay in line was nearly impossible. It did not register with them that waiting patiently was better than crowding to the front. The paradox there is that both of our views on the subject were 100% ‘right’ in their own context. In the Darfurian culture, if you wait patiently in line you will not get what you need, you must be the first hand in the pot. In the American culture, if you wait patiently in line, you have your number, and ‘54’ will be called after ‘53’, and ‘56’ will not be served before ‘54’.

It does not make sense to me why someone would join a group like Hezbollah. Why should they, when the organization clearly targets innocent people? What I need to understand is that to that person signing up, who has grown up in the culture, who has heard ‘Hezbollah’ all of his life, it makes sense. This is not assigning a moral value to his decision, but in order to get him to listen to me, I cannot barge in and tell him he is wrong, evil, etc., because it will only make him turn off his ears to me. Jesus even says not to condemn people because they are condemned already. It is my job, especially as someone who claims the name of Jesus, to approach any interaction with another person with love. We are to be salt and light. We need to be careful that we are the salt that makes people thirsty, not the kind that stings the wounds it is cast upon. I submit that in order to make people thirsty they must know that we are loving and friendly to them in spite of what they believe. If we do that, then when we do get into a conversation of moral values, there will be a weight to our words that is substantiated by a history of respect and love.

I experienced this in my conversations with one of my staff last year. After I had been in country for around ten months, he approached me and asked me why we, the expat team, treated each other with love, treated our Sudanese staff with love, as demonstrated by building relationships with them, their families, etc, and why we did not lie, react with anger, and a host of other qualities he saw in us. When I shared with him how our relationship with God compelled us to live in the way he saw, he listened to me with ears that had been prepared by ten months of history with me. There was more respect for what I said than there would have been if I had immediately, after stepping off of the plane for the first time, ‘shared the gospel’ with him.

There is also the frustration of encountering radically different concepts of reality than our own. Here in Sudan, the concept of justice that I have does not exist. Take this as an example: If one man borrows his brother’s mobile phone and drops and breaks it, he is not obligated to repay his brother. Even if he offers money to pay for a new phone, the ‘offended’ is obligated to not take the money. All that is required is a paltry ‘sorry’. This translates over into their view of their relationship with ‘Allah’. If they sin, they are required only to say ‘sorry’, and ‘Allah’, because he is ‘merciful’, will forgive them. My concept of requirement of penalty for transgression does not apply here. Another example is a tribe in the south in Sudan. I was told that a missionary was working there to translate the Bible into the local language and he encountered a situation where the locals praised Judas for what he did to Jesus, but condemned Peter for open denial. In their opinion Judas was ‘clever’, a quality that they admired. To deny someone behind his back is clever, but to openly deny them was stupid. How do you communicate with that?

The overall point is that I have learned that I must approach a discussion of world views entirely different from what I was raised. Even if I am not offered the same grace and respect, I must be willing to offer it to whoever I encounter, otherwise their experience with an ambassador of the Creator will lead them to reject words of truth.]

Of My Duties, My Security, and My Request...

Dear Readers,

My literary outputs over the last week or so have been sparse, at best, and I offer this missive as a chance to explain.

In preparation to come back to Darfur, I was under the impression that I would reintegrate with the food program, not in my former capacity, but in one that would lend me many opportunities to grow in my knowledge and experience. Upon arrival in Khartoum, I was informed that, due to the sudden resigning of our Wat/San (water and sanitation) program manager, I was to assume the duties he left behind.

Thus, my last few days have been rather interesting as I have been sifting through the piles of paperwork and files of my predecessor, trying to pull out a description of my duties and objectives and determine a course of action for a wad of cash under my jurisdiction that dwarfs, many times over, any amount that I have previously been responsible for.

Adding a bit of spice to that already hard-to-digest task are the recent developments that we are currently experiencing in the realm of security, things that are readily available from any trusted news source. Having the experience and background that I do in Darfur, I can say, without hesitation, that we are facing an unprecedented situation, and that tensions are beyond previous levels, and the outlook is less and less stable.

Another set of purposes for this communiqué is to assure you all that I am in no personal danger, the team is safe, and also to urge you all to make use of the avenue of prayer, available to all of those who call God ‘Abba Father’, and to implore those of you who desire peace for the world to not forget to daily call upon the Almighty to intervene on behalf of the downtrodden and oppressed.

It is not glamorous, but there is a part of me that revels in the chance to be on the front lines of serious history in the making, and I wonder for what reason I have been afforded such an opportunity. Time will tell.

So, like Walter Mitty, I stare the danger and adventure straight in the eye, take one last drag on my cigarette, and step forward to my meeting with destiny. (okay, that was a little sensational, but I figure I’m allowed some creative license.)

Regards,

Jonathan