‘Where’s the city?’ I asked Emmanuel, the tall Sudanese young man who met me at Juba International Airport.
‘It’s not really a city, more a town.’ He smiled apologetically and pointed. ‘You can see it over there. Those are the government buildings.’
I couldn’t see much across the scrubby grassland, just a few low roofs. And the airport was not what you would call international, just a single building with a couple of soldiers making a big deal of stamping entry permits and passports without reading them. The bags arrived on trailer pulled by a tractor and there was a scrum of returning Sudanese, Kenyan businessmen, and sweating white development workers, all of whom had come to Juba, the capital, to help build the fledgling country of Southern Sudan.
We drove on the only stretch of tarmac in town, about half a mile, then onto dirt roads, bumping in and out of potholes, avoiding the larger ones, as people, goats, ducks, chickens, and dogs wandered across. Children played outside clusters of tuculs – the ubiquitous round mud-walled houses with thatched roofs – or collected water in plastic containers from standpipes. Women were selling foodstuffs, fruit and drinks from makeshift tables or open-fronted shacks. The few more established shops had Arab signs. Rubbish was strewn along the roadside spilling into river gulleys, or piled high where goats nibbled and the poor rummaged. I had worked other African countries but quickly realized this was less developed and more impoverished.
The government buildings, which were the most substantial I’d seen, were being renovated and those that had been completed looked quite smart. Not so the Ministry where I was to work: offices with warped doors, scuffed walls, bare floors, crudely hung curtains, dust everywhere, and the few pieces of furniture that existed dirty and broken. But the NGO office within the building wasn’t too bad, and there I met the Programme Director, Eunice, a Kenyan committed to the project in Sudan. I had come to do some back-office work setting up a training database but, perched on the edge of one of the desks in the crowded room, I gulped as Eunice assigned me my first task; ‘I need you to write a speech for the Minister.’
Daunted and desperate for a cup of coffee, I asked Musembe, another Kenyan and fellow consultant, who directed me to the Sudanese office assistant, Dorothy. Her smile was nice but her English limited and I ended up with hot milk that had been heated over a charcoal fire in a type of African Starbucks situated under a canvas awning outside the office. When I enquired about the toilets, Musembe said ‘I’ll show you,’ and we went around the back of the building. There was a small bamboo structure and, on the floor inside, rocks and puddles of piss. ‘If you want to do anything else,’ he said, ‘It’s best wait until we’re back at the camp.’ Outside the government compound locals just dropped their trousers or lifted their skirts on the waste ground.
Before the afternoon had ended I had written the speech, which became easier once I’d found out the topic and second hand, the Minister’s views. But before I could relax, I was given a further task; the Minister wanted a team building workshop with her managers the following week and I had been chosen to run it. I experienced a sinking feeling – having met some of the civil servants, I had noticed their extreme deference to authority and the way that work was passed vertically downwards, and wondered how teambuilding would be received. It was time to check the accommodation.
At the Nile Beach Camp I was shown my tent; at $120 a night it was one of the best beds in town, although we were told some of the more expensive camps had upgraded to prefabricated chalets. It was of dark green canvas, securely erected and neatly aligned with a hundred or so others. I pulled my trolley-bag across the site, but its wheels, made to run smoothly over tiled airport foyers and shiny hotel floors, soon got clogged with mud so I carried it. The other residents, a mixture of Sudanese government officials for whom this was home, and Kenyan consultants who were part of the group I would be working with, nodded knowingly and invited me to join them for a Blue Nile beer, and to watch the satellite TV whilst the power was on. We dined in the mess tent around plastic tables; the goat that had been dragged bleating behind the staff tents was now a tasty stew and I was picking its stringy meat from my teeth. It was followed by fresh fruit imported from Kenya – people were still too scared to farm because during the war the boundaries of the town had been mined and no-one had dug them up. I debugged the tent with insecticide spray and snuggled under the mosquito net just as the generator elapsed and the single bulb faded, wishing I’d packed a torch.
It rained all night, and when I went to the toilet block at 3am, I lost one of my flip-flops in ankle deep mud as it flowed through the lines of tents down into the Nile, just twenty meters away. In the morning, as I trudged to the shower block for a cold shave, I met George, one of the Kenyan camp workers, who assured me that the rain was a blessing – I had to admit it had refreshed the air and damped down the dust.
Clambering into the back of the Toyota Land Cruiser with Musembe, who was smartly attired while I sweated in a t-shirt, I asked ‘How do you keep your shoes so clean?’ He told me a young boy, who probably should have been in school, came round the office and shined them for a Sudanese pound. Leaving the campsite through flooded wasteland we passed a few brick buildings, the remnants of a government training centre, now occupied by several families, the surrounding rock outcrops an impromptu toilet. The road led through a hamlet of tuculs and stalls by the old stadium with its disheveled white walls, and eventually to the main road. Nothing except four-wheel drives had much of a chance and we passed one stranded pick-up truck, the front wheels of which were buried with a dozen people like mud wrestlers struggling to release them.
There was a derelict cinema looking oddly out of place, and a school comprised of shabby one storey buildings without glazing, the children in simple, surprisingly clean white uniforms queuing by its Arabic sign. Churchill, the Kenyan Programme Manager who was driving, pointed out the governor’s building, one of the few large buildings in Juba but in poor repair. When I asked Churchill if the tuculs had light, he informed me; ‘No, the people only go inside to sleep and to make babies’. With the heat, a shady spot under a tree seemed to be the preferred place for conversation and family life.
Thrown around in the back as Churchill negotiated the ruts and avoided the biggest holes, I said ‘Is there a Minister of Roads?’
‘Yes,’ he laughed, as we dipped down a bank at a muddy intersection of dirt thoroughfares, narrowly missing a goat. I added; ‘I think he’s got a big job’.
The Minister for whom I was working was addressed ‘Your Excellency’, and was a tall imposing women whose mediation work with international agencies had prepared her well for the task of country building. She told me she needed her team to work together, get things done when she wasn’t around, and collaborate with other ministries.
It seemed simple enough, except for the cultural conundrums of hierarchy I’d noticed. The workshop had grown to fifty people and we needed a decent venue.
With the Kenyans running the camps and the Northern (Arab) Sudanese the shops, I wondered about the Southern Sudanese sense of enterprise. Until I met Edwin. He wore a gold necklace and an expensive looking watch and talked, smiled and moved with the confidence. Only in his twenties, he was a Sudanese entrepreneur, from a well- connected family, bubbling with money-making ideas. We sat around a shiny metal table under a colourful umbrella sipping cold drinks on a beautifully paved patio next to his newly opened restaurant and conference facility. After what I had seen of Juba, this place, aptly named Home and Away, took me by surprise. Edwin told us his plans to start a bank had been momentarily set back because of a heist of his money being transported from the airport to the town, but at that point luckily still the responsibility of a Kenyan bank. Eunice and I quickly decided it would be an ideal place for the team building workshop. While we negotiated a reasonable price, Edwin had his new Humvee brought to a position in full view of the patio, where later that evening they would host the President of Southern Sudan.
On Sunday morning, as I walked to the Anglican Cathedral, children called out to me ‘How are you?’ and laughed when I took their photograph and showed them the image. The church was sturdy looking with its twin towers and had a nicely kept interior. It was full and I was warmly welcomed and invited, as a visitor, to introduce myself. After the service I met other Westerners and realized the plethora of development agencies that were here: Oxfam, Tearfund, Save the Children, various UN offices, War Child, and so on, and that they all owned Toyota Land Cruisers!
On the day of the workshop I waited nervously, wondering who would turn up since they had only been informed that morning. Everyone arrived, and they all stood when the Minister entered. They had occupied tables according to their rank and the Minister immediately asked that I mix them up. I didn’t realize we should have started with prayer – Southern Sudan has a strong Christian heritage – and that corrected, the Minister invited one of the few Muslims to recite some verses from the Koran in the interests of harmony; a magnanimous gesture I thought given that they had fought the Muslim-Arab north to a stalemate over two decades. I set them a team task but they worked individually at their tables, ignoring one another. So, after deferring to the senior participants, I got them writing on post-its what they thought needed to change, which went better. Following lunch, a team game helped dispel the tension, and then a task where they had to work together which, after a tentative start, they actually seemed to enjoy. By the end of the afternoon I wouldn’t have described them as a tight-knit team, but they had identified some actions to work on. I was a little unsure of the impact until they all came to thank me for such a fantastic day – it was the first time many of them had been asked for their views and now they knew they could work as a team.
As well as the differences of status, tribe and religion I had encountered in the workshop, I found out from talking with Sudanese at the camp of other divisions caused by the war. There were those who had stayed and fought with the SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army) or were part of its political wing, the SPLM, some of whom now held senior positions. Others had left to live in refugee camps in neighbouring countries such as Uganda and Kenya or, if they had money, settled in Europe or North America – the diaspora – resented by those who had remained, but now the most skilled. And some had collaborated with the northern Khartoum regime when Juba had been occupied as a garrison town. I met one civil service manager who had spent 22 years doing almost nothing when the town was effectively sealed off. So, with such a mix, I realized that the workshop, which could have failed spectacularly, had been more of a success than we could have hoped for. But also that I needed to tread carefully with such raw sensitivities, always involving the senior people first so as to treat their ordered hierarchy with respect.
Despite the basic facilities, I came to like the Nile Beach Camp, set idyllically in the shade of mango trees on a grassy bank of the Nile. The river, 200m wide at this point, was a calming influence, swiftly carrying its load of foliage and detritus from Uganda northwards through Sudan – I was told you could journey to Khartoum by steamer if you have a couple of weeks to spare – and eventually to Egypt and the Med. Next to the camp people came to bathe, some arriving noisily on motor bikes and four-wheel drives. It was quite a meeting place, despite the crocodiles and the worms that can get inside you then eat their way out. Each afternoon the long-horned cattle would take their turn, lowing as they enjoyed the cool water. Ignoring the stained concrete floor of the shower block, and the buzzy insects and fleet-footed lizards, I looked forward to my cold showers morning and evening. The staff washed and ironed our clothes, except socks and underwear that we rinsed out ourselves sitting on the septic tank. One night watching the History Channel describe Ancient Rome with its clean running water, hot baths and plumbed toilets, I wondered what had gone wrong in Africa two millennia later. But the comradeship of camp life, and the fact that we were doing something worthwhile made it bearable, in fact, fun.
I finished the training database and headed for the airport. It had been a challenging two weeks but I had learnt that some things, like building a country, are worth sacrificing home comforts for, as many returning Sudanese are bravely doing. A lot could have gone wrong but it didn’t because of the goodwill of those I was working with, who accepted me and helped me gain an understanding of Southern Sudan’s heavily layered but warm and varied culture.
Sitting in the crowded airport terminal I noticed a banner advertising the new Sahara Hotel: ‘5 stars; close to airport; close to attractions; close to perfection’. So perhaps things are looking up. Would I go back? The tickets for my next trip are already booked.