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I’m currently sitting in my office listening to the sound of traffic outside. Much like traffic in most countries except here every five minutes is punctuated with the squeal of brakes being applied with the force of a stunt driver, the first couple of times I’d move to the window to see what had happened but now I am carefully adjusted to moving only when the squeal is followed by a suitably large crunch of metal on metal. It’s considered gauche here to be interested in the smaller accidents.
I just got back from a day trip to Juba, the capital of the south, a short and sweet hour and a half plane journey away. I went there for a large event being organised by work, for the government of the south and north and all the major donors/players in development in Sudan to discuss the implementation (or lack thereof) of the peace agreement. It meant hanging out with a lot of ambassadors and heads of agencies and resulted in one particularly surreal bus journey where I was sequentially interrogated by the japanese and german delegates as to why I didn’t speak either fluent german or japanese. I escaped by distracting the dutch ambassador with a hedgehog impression.
The view I had of Juba was from the airport to the conference room (and back again) in the bigwig packed air conditioned bus, listening to bulletins from bbc world about conflict in Mogadishu. Outside the bus, goats and people negotiated their way through piles of rubbish, past the occasional bonfire and dead truck resting in front of health warning signs put up by UNICEF. Every plot passed had an image that would do justice to an ironic art installation. On the drive we’d pass roads where one side would be a cement foundations being laid, the start of new buildings and some development, and the other would be a series of huts with frogs and flowers silhouetted on the sides.
The roads are dust tracks, full of bumps and inclines taken at full speed by the bus. The drive was such that it ought to have been punctuated with gleeful cries of "wheeee" from the visiting politicians as they raised their hands to the air to increase the feeling of vertigo. I tried to start a version of the "the wheels on the bus go round and round" but the donors couldn’t agree on what colour the wheels were so we stopped.
This event has been punctuated by a number of occassions where I have realised how little I have changed since my most formative years between ages 6 and 7. Moments like these have tended in my twenties to be limited to board games and relationships but it seems that the combination of working hours eating into both mornings and nights with weekends as a sinful pudding, sudanese politics, donor country demands and generally insane meetings where insults are muttered under the breath into the microphone, have led to me being forced to admit that the limits to my patience are way shorter than I ever admitted and that my negotiating tactics when run-down are reminiscent of a middle east conflict.
One particularly joyful moment was when me and a senior colleague were disagreeing (loudly) over what had priority in the last couple of days before the event. The conversation had become heated and convinctions were set in stone, other staff were beginning to stare. I ended the conversation with a dignified "fine, do that, nothing else will now get done, but fine, that’s your choice" before I swung round briskly and angrily to march back to my office. Mid swing my knee dislocated, I fell flat on my face. Getting up and hobbling back to my office was made not one bit easier by the marked silence of people not certain whether they can laugh or not.
