Next Big Thing?

            I’m rapidly approaching the end of my two-year term of mission.  I cannot believe how quickly the time has passed.  It would be incredibly difficult to try and explain here, now, all of the things I have witnessed and experienced, how this experience has altered my life in so many, many ways.

            Many of the things I have witnessed are mundane happenings and merely different than what I’ve experienced at home but otherwise hardly remarkable other than their being exotic compared to what I’m used to.  But other things, especially in the way people view their lives and each other, are amazingly complex and will require from me further consideration and reflection before I will fully understand them.  People here can at once be so very considerate and then again so very brutal with one another, at once incredibly generous and the next surprisingly greedy, but there is a genuine difference between our sensibilities, those of us from the west and the people of Africa and yet the people here are aware of the world and want very much to be a part of it without losing their Africaness, as it were.  One of the biggest challenges I observed is the struggle within the people here of adapting to western ways while still retaining their intrinsic sense of shared community.  There are some people here who gladly wear western dress and grab everything they can with both hands, by methods both fair and foul, while others still retain the village concept of shared wealth.  In the end I’m certain the more western attitude will prevail.

            One of the difficulties I face is what to do after being here in Sudan.  While I’ve been here I’ve been privileged to observe the Referendum in January, 2011, which then led to the creation of South Sudan on July 9, 2011.  I’ve witnessed this new country as it tries to grow and develop but also while it struggles with internal conflicts such as tribal warfare and insurgencies.  It has been an amazing time to be present here and I don’t know what could top this in terms of world experiences.  But on a more personal level, I have been able to become part of a great community within the Church and also within the ex-patriot community here in Juba.  I’ve created a life here that I enjoy, in which I’ve become competent and useful, and I don’t believe my work here is done.

            I’ve tried to imagine going home but I cannot picture what in the world I would do for employment.  My work experiences have been so varied and extreme; I’ve almost never had a “normal” job, which has been both my delight and terror.  It’s difficult to imagine what I would be deemed suitable for back home while here in Africa I’m viewed very highly as a person with badly needed skills and experiences.  I miss home, I miss my friends and family, but I’ve also settled into a life here and now when I’m at my most experienced and capable it seems a shame to abandon all I’ve achieved.

            I do not want to continue working as the finance manager for the Province, of that I’m sure.  After two years I am exhausted from the continuous daily grind of trying to keep the Province going.  I believe I can look back with some pride at the fact that I was able to pull the Province back from the edge of financial abyss, certainly in terms of its international partners who had all but given-up on the ECS, and that I was able to raise the level of general financial management somewhat from what I found when I arrived.  But now it’s time to turn things over to someone with stronger administrative skills than I possess.  I’m fortunate in that I was able to hire to take my position someone much more capable than myself in terms of creating financial controls and who has a better vision for how the Province’s financial systems can be organized.  I always found myself so busy trying to put out fires and keep everything going that it was difficult to find time to see where this tottering ship was heading or create better systems of control.

            I have applied for a handful of jobs around town, and though I was being considered for one I haven’t made any progress with any of the others.  One problem I’ve had is having enough time to send off applications.  By the time I get home in the evenings, cook dinner and clean-up it’s usually already pushing 9pm which doesn’t leave a lot of time for going on-line and completing applications.  I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t even applied anywhere in a month.

            One of the areas in which I was very interested in working has been in the field of micro-finance, helping people to do what I did back home which is to save money and start their own small businesses.  Access to credit, to banking tools such as establishing savings and checking accounts is incredibly limited here.  If you consider all the ways in which people are able to access credit in terms of debit and credit cards, ATM machines and regular banks, there is probably greater access within one mile of a busy roadway like Route 3 back home than exists in all of South Sudan.  I’ve long realized that creating a network of community banks in which people can access credit is one of the greatest challenges facing this country.  Doing something about this problem has interested me for a while.  I’ve prayed about it and thought about this work for a while and hoped that an opportunity would open up.

            Thus I was surprised when about two weeks ago my friend Raj – who’s real name is something like Nyana-Raj but whom I always called Banana-Raj which he good naturedly didn’t mind – came to me to ask if I’d take over his microfinance project.  Raj, who is from Chennai in India, has been here for about two months heading up a microfinance project that has been working in our Juba Diocese for about a year.  Like most microfinance projects this one began with helping interested people to have a safe place to save their money while educating them about business and management and then when a sufficient pool of money had been established and some good ideas presented making small loans to help people get their businesses off the ground.  So far the results have been very good, the repayment rate is somewhere around 90-percent and most of the businesses are doing well.  Juba, fortunately, is a fast growing city and there is strong demand for almost all goods and services and businesses which are well run and which pay attention to providing good customer service – an alien concept here – can succeed.

            What I’d like to do is to take this small project and make it a Provincial project so it can be expanded throughout as many of our dioceses as possible.  One of the lessons I have learned from my forays out to the dioceses conducting training is how desperate some of our people are to start their own businesses if they can be well trained and if some start-up capital can be provided.  Few people here have any experience managing a business or of being trained in how to manage finances.  But I believe that within every diocese there are a few people capable of managing who could create businesses which would provide employment and income where none existed before.  To my mind, this is a far better idea than any bottomless aid program which teaches only dependency.

            So, where I am now is trying to decide if this project is the gift it appears to be, an answer to my longings, or if I would be better-off returning home and standing in the employment lines or keep sending out applications here and hoping something materializes.  I knew when I got into all this two years ago that I wanted to spend the next decade of my life involved in international development work in some way.  One of my motivations was reading Jacquiline Novogoratz’s book The Blue Sweater describing her experiences working in third-world countries, mostly in Africa, helping people to create their own small businesses.  I really think this is what I’d like to do for a couple of years and it seems like my experiences here to date have prepared me for this opportunity.

            When he was visiting here last November Bishop Suffragan of Virginia, Rt. Rev. David Jones said he didn't know what God had in store for me next but based upon my background and what I'd experienced in Juba he was thinking it would be amazing!  That's pretty heady stuff and it has made me conscious of wanting my next move to matter.  It's probably silly, but I feel the weight of the bishop's statement and it has encouraged me to be thoughtful about whatever I do next.

            Oh, and just in case anyone wonders, yes this IS a paying job, a salary plus housing and living allowances so I will cease being a poor missionary and once again enter the world of the gainfully employed.  If I decide to do this I will probably go home for a month when my term as a missionary ends in early July and then return around the beginning of August.  There is a rule that so long as you are not in the US for more than 30-days in a year any income you earn overseas is not taxed, so that will influence the amount of time I stay at home.  Just long enough to get my laundry done, fatten-up a bit and say hello to folks.

            We’ll see, but I'd really appreciate people's opinions.

Naked Guys

            One of the more interesting phenomena I’ve witnessed in Juba has been the appearance every so often of naked guys walking around town.  This is Africa and I expected, having grown-up with National Geographic magazine, that I would encounter a higher level of nudity than one experiences back home.  And this has been true, especially when you pass by places like the Nile River where people regularly go to bathe.  Public water is scarce so having places like rivers and streams in which to bathe are important.  I’ve sometimes seen dozens of people, mostly men, bathing at the riverside.   Along the Nile in Terekeka there was a “men’s section” and further downstream a “ladies and children’s” section for washing-up.

            Breast-feeding in public is also much more natural and open than is done back in the US.  But then this corresponds with the general view of breasts here which, unlike in the west where female breasts are viewed as sexual objects and used for advertising everything, here they are considered merely milk delivery devices.  In Sudan, a woman with large breasts is considered no more sexually appealing than another, but she is deemed potentially better able to feed many children, something which is done very openly anytime, anywhere.

            But the phenomenon I’m talking about is the appearance every so often of fully grown men walking around naked or mostly so.  There are about four or five men, all of whom appear to be if not directly related certainly belonging to the same clan or tribe, who wander around different sections of Juba in various states of undress.  They all have a dazed, wild look in their eyes, unkempt hair and since they seem to live on whatever they can scrounge, are on the lean side though in general they appear to be remarkably fit.

            I hadn’t been here long when I spied a young man, looking to be around 18-years old or thereabouts, a wild look in his eyes, nonchalantly walking along a nearby road completely naked.  When I got home I mentioned this to the others I lived with and they all started telling of their encounters with naked guys around town.  I began to notice that I would see this particular fellow around our part of town, and that I would see other naked guys regularly in other parts of town.  It was as if these fellows had divided-up Juba and each decided to occupy a particular section of town.

            The fellow I used to see around here I now see mainly over in Konya Konya, and there’s now a different, slightly younger guy I see near home and who regularly walks past our office, same vacant dazed look on his face and the scraps of clothing he has managed to obtain hanging off his body.  The oldest member of the group I see over in Malakia.  Malakia is an area crammed with retail shops owned mainly by Arab merchants for whom personal modesty is important.  I have no way of knowing but imagine the merchants of the area persuaded this particular fellow to wear shorts, or at least the front section of shorts, which are held-up by a piece of rope and completely open in the back.  I remember driving over to a merchant in the area with one of my housemates who upon observing his bumm (she’s English) opined, “he seems very firm.”  

            I once saw a woman who appeared to be from the same group, having the same general appearance, but she was fully clothed.  It’s an odd phenomenon, nudity.  Where it is appropriate such as in bathing or swimming, it raises not the least interest.  But where it is inappropriate such as in someone walking around town or in any other casual setting it is widely frowned upon.  It’s hard to explain but it makes sense if you appreciate first, how practical people here are; one can hardly wash-up if dressed, can you?  And second, how also generally conservative people here are, a legacy of the decades of Arab occupation which is one reason while in public most people here are fully covered in long sleeves and trousers or skirts.  The lady I encountered was fully clothed because were she not one, she’d be the object of advances and two, it would be considered entirely inappropriate for her to be seen undressed.

            About a month ago my housemate and I were walking home after work.  When we passed by the crosswalk on Unity Avenue in front of St. Joseph’s Catholic School we saw a fellow standing in the crosswalk completely starkers.  The funny thing, well, in addition to his being completely naked, was that he was standing in the crosswalk and in between moments of looking up towards the sky and motioning wildly he was attempting to direct traffic along the busy road.  In this he was actually a little more successful than the crossing guards who occupy the same place in the morning because motorists were certainly slowing down to look at this naked man standing in the middle of the road.  School fortunately had already let out for the day; there were only a handful of students still around who had to witness this spectacle.  This fellow didn’t look anything like the other naked guys around town, well, other than being naked.  But we speculated he might have slipped-out from Juba Hospital located across the street, perhaps ill with some sort of brain fever which deprived him of his senses.  Like the other naked guys, no one seemed to bother him or yell anything at him but just pretended like he wasn’t there.  Never a dull moment in Juba!

Waiting for the Bombs to Fall

There is a lot of heated rhetoric right now between the government of Sudan (the northern part of the country) and South Sudan (the new country in the southern part of the country.) I'm in the southern part of the country.
Like a couple that had a bad break-up and still has some unfinished business to resolve, the split between these countries though seemingly peaceful enough was actually fraught with a lot of unresolved issues. Thanks to the north's aggressions there has been an almost constant series of low level clashes along the long and unresolved border between these two nations. Northern troops have dropped bombs and attacked in small numbers places all along the border. The south has demonstrated pretty remarkable restraint in resisting these constant provocations but two weeks ago the southern army decided finally to strike back. As a result of its actions the south actually ended-up taking the town of Heglig and some area north of there. Heglig is significant because it was a major oil producing area for the north. As if the tensions between the north and south owing to cultural, religious and every other kind of reason weren't bad enough, the fact that there is oil lying under the border area makes a rotten situation even worse.
As a result of these events the northern government through its leader Omar Bashir, a man indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, has denounced the south and threatened to bomb Juba and replace the "insects" which govern there. People around Juba have taken to referring to one another as "insects." On a more sinister note though, people in Juba also think that Bashir referred to the leaders of Juba as insects possibly to justify the use of chemical weapons.
It is surprising and I think hurtful to the South Sudanese people how quickly the international community has condemned South Sudan for its taking of Heglig. The world community tsk-tsked and pooh-poohed when Sudan invaded Abyei, and invaded Khordofan/Nuba, and Blue Nile chasing out a democratically elected governor, and dropped bombs in southern territory including on schools, hospitals and refugee camps. And throughout all of this South Sudan did not respond militarily. But when finally pushed to the limit the South struck back the UN and other bodies have started howling about South Sudan's "aggression" and labeling it a bad state. In response some people on the ground here have begun not to take the international community seriously which is a bad result.
I'm hopeful that cooler heads will prevail and that the two countries will not again fall back into all out war. There has been so much progress in the south over the last couple of years, so many buildings and schools have been built, so many lives rebuilt, it would be a shame to see all of this destroyed.
I ask people everywhere to pray and hope for peace here in this troubled part of the world.

Giving Blood

I gave blood here for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I’d been meaning to for a while, but my schedule is always so busy and I would forget. Now that I’ve been to Africa the blood donation system in America considers me a pariah. I’ll have to wait at least a decade before I can ever donate in the US again if ever.
Juba Teaching Hospital, where blood donations are made, is just across the street so I have no excuse. I’d actually made an appointment once and got as far as the front gate of the hospital only to have the gate slammed in my face because a fracas had broken out. Seems a person from one family had stabbed someone in another family and now both families were battling to settle the score. I saw one lady try and take a security man’s nightstick which caused another security man to raise his nightstick I feared to crack this lady’s head open but fortunately the man hesitated long enough for someone to pull the lady from harm’s way.
The melee went on for a while; myself and many other people stunned watching the events unfold in front of us. The hospital security men pulled people from the heap and eventually got to the bottom of the pile. Even though order was restored things around the hospital were still in chaos and the gate remained closed. The technician I was to meet called and we agreed we’d have to reschedule for another day.
Juba Hospital has been in the same place for decades. I’ve read that some of the first work that was done on the Ebola virus was done there years ago when the disease first emerged not far away. Although South Sudan has diseases of biblical proportions – leprosy, polio, plague! – still, I haven’t heard of any Ebola around since I’ve been here. That my second floor office is directly across from the hospital means I have a good vantage point from which to observe the happenings.
A person admitted to the hospital here is entitled to a bed and some degree of medical attention. But the person’s family has to provide the patient with bed-linens, food, bathing and other bodily needs. I’m not certain but given the general lack of medicines I suspect that patients are given prescriptions but that the patient’s families have to go out to one of the pharmacies which surround the hospital and actually buy the medicines. All day long I see family members of patients gathered patiently, in the Sudanese way, sitting in the shade preparing food or washing clothes or attending to their children. Almost no Sudanese is ever really alone, there is always family about or people from a home village who can help. Unlike in western families, no one here would hesitate to drop everything to go to the hospital for days to attend even a second cousin or any type of relation. Family and tribe ties here are simply too strong to ignore any call for help.
From what I’ve been told most patients in the hospital suffer from malaria, typhoid, dysentery or some other type of treatable disease of misery. Accidents are common; I cannot recall how many times during my walk to work which includes the quarter-mile past the hospital I have seen people walking covered in bandages over their heads or with arms in slings or on crutches. Precious few Sudanese can afford anti-malarial pills or have been fortunate to receive typhoid immunizations like we westerners have.
Sadly, most of the diseases from which Sudanese suffer and from which they die are preventable with either simple medications or better sanitary conditions. So much of the misery people here endure stems from either a lack of knowledge about safe hygiene or a stubborn refusal to adopt the lessons they are taught. In some cases illnesses continue only because authorities cannot be bothered to distribute donated medicines since there is no financial incentive for them to do so. One particular type of blindness caused by bacteria and easily preventable with regular doses of donated medicines endures and tons of the medicines rot in warehouses every year because people are not paid to distribute the pills. A friend that works in public health policy has had surreal conversations with people who claim they would rather suffer from blindness than work for free.
Death is common across the street. A regular part of the funereal customs is for the women of the family to wail and shriek and I hear it often. I remember hearing one lady scream for an entire afternoon for a deceased family member. My flat mate and I learned of the passing of the brother of the man that lives behind us when late one evening we heard the women of the family start wailing.
Except for very high ranking persons for whom a proper church funeral is required, weather conditions here mandate that deceased persons be buried as soon as possible. The families will hold prayers for the dead later, often a series of prayers at different times after the death up to the one year anniversary. For families from villages far away the cost of transporting bodies’ home for burial can be devastating let alone the costs for hosting the hordes of mourners. I attended funeral prayers in Terekeka for someone’s deceased mother that attracted several hundred people all of whom had to be seated, fed and given something to drink. Usually there is a collection taken-up to help the family defray the expenses, but appearances here are important; a family which doesn’t give someone a good funeral would be considered as not being respectful of the deceased. Still, the costs of an expensive funeral can cripple a family financially for years.
I hadn’t been here long when I noticed that several times a day a pick-up truck would drive past with people in the back shaking percussion instruments and, I thought, singing. It seemed to me like it was the same people and I asked someone in the office if these folks were celebrating. No, I was informed, these were people heading to the cemetery to bury someone. Sure enough, next time I heard the sound of the shaking gourds filled with seeds I looked carefully and I could see the shrouded corpse lying in the bed of the truck. I still believe that I see the same people often doing this work and that they are professional mourners, but no one else in the office will believe me.
When I finally made it across the street to donate I was met by a young technician studying to be a doctor. He walked me through the paperwork and the preliminary tests you have to take to give blood: blood pressure, hemoglobin count, etc. I saw the refrigerator the hospital has for storing the blood. One refrigerator, that is all for a city of a million people and a country of between 8-12 million. Just one refrigerator for storing blood. I’m not surprised by this; there are so many basic medical devices we take for granted in the west which do not exist here. For example, there is not a single dialysis machine in South Sudan. This has real concerns for us in the ECS because one of our senior pastors’ wives requires dialysis. This woman is forced to remain in Khartoum where she can receive dialysis even though as a southerner she would rather move to South Sudan. If this lady moves south to enjoy political freedom she will die without treatment. Yet if she remains in the north there is a real possibility since southerners in the north may lose their rights to government services that she will likewise cease to have access to treatment and will again die. It is a terrible stress under which these folks live.
The biggest concern about giving blood in Africa is the cleanliness of the equipment. Given the high prevalence of HIV/AIDS and other life-threatening communicable diseases anyone donating will naturally be concerned about this issue. I requested to see the equipment before the procedure began and I was pleased to see that the storage bag, hose and needle were all contained as one unit inside a single use sterile bag. There was a bit of a problem when the procedure began using my left arm. I don’t normally like to give blood using my left-arm, it doesn’t seem to go well and this was no exception. There was some type of blockage in the hose leading from the needle to the storage bag and after five minutes the bag was still only about one-fourth full. This needle and all was removed; I was pleased to learn that the blood would not be wasted but would be enough to help a child. The procedure began again using my right arm and with all new sterile equipment and this time I had the bag filled in about two minutes. The technician praised my veins and overall good health.
I treated myself to a Coke during the procedure and to a package of biscuits afterwards. The snacks and juice is the best part about giving blood but here I was forced to devise my own rewards. But it felt good to finally be able to give again. I believe I should be able to give one more time before I leave which I will try to do. It’s nice to think of my blood going to help some people here.

Change in the weather

On Saturday the weather finally started to break a little from the unbearable heat we have been enduring here. I know I have whined about it a couple of times now, but the temperatures have been horrid for weeks, everyone in Juba has been drained by the heat and rising humidity as we approach the rainy season. Sleeping at night - for the majority of us who don't enjoy air conditioning or even electric power - has been very hard without so much as a fan blowing over you. It is nauseating waking-up many times during the night in a pool of sweat. The simple act of rolling over - I'm a side sleeper - causes my entire body to erupt in a torrent of fluid, so gross.

On Saturday evening the skies turned cloudy, windy and a little cooler. I was out at the HASH run out by Jebel Kajure, which was an absolutely brutal run up the mountain but the subject for another blog, and mercifully the air turned somewhat cooler making the run bearable. By Sunday the skies were quite cloudy and gray and the wind was strong all day. By evening I and my flatmate were actually feeling cool, like temperatures had dropped into the 80's! You have to understand, there has not been a moment cooler than 90 for weeks, not even at night.

We're approaching Easter here in Juba. This has been a difficult Lent season for me. I have been feeling the effects of exhaustion, a combination on endless heat and continuous work. I never get a day off here. I have people contacting me about church business seven days a week. The tiredness reaches down into my bones. It effects my mood to where everything is annoying and it is hard to find joy in anything. Normally I am able to focus upon Lent, pray more and even fast at least once, but here, this year, it has not been possible for me to remain focused properly upon the season which I regret. I revel at times in the lack of distractions here, that I am able to focus more upon my work and mission. But the same lack of distractions makes getting away from my everyday life hard. I understand now why all the NGO's are continuously giving their staff time-off. I have often thought it ridiculous how much vacation people get here, but you really do need to get out of this environment, got out of country to get a proper rest. One disadvantage to working for an indigenous NGO, and a poor one at that, is that even if can take time-off I really cannot afford to go anywhere so I just sit in Juba and keep working. I am looking for work with an international NGO. You can best believe I will be checking out those NGO's vacation programs seriously!

I wish everyone a blessed Easter full of peace, hope and love.

A Small Thing

     There has been a workshop taking place in one of the meeting rooms at the Guest House, where I live, this week.  In order to provide the workshop participants with light, fans and power for their equipment the Guest House has had to run the generator during the day all this week.  We normally only have power in the evenings, from 7pm until mid-night.  Power only used to last until 11pm, but a few months ago it somehow got stretched to mid-night, which was a great improvement.
     Since there is power during the day I have taken to making myself two cups of coffee in the morning.  Last time I was home my brother-in-law mercifully loaned me a french-press in order to make coffee.  It was so terribly frustrating to live on the continent that gave us coffee and be forced always to have Nescafe!!  Everywhere you go in Africa people are drinking Nescafe, it's awful.  I remember reading Novogoratz's The Blue Sweater and her commenting upon the same experience in Rwanda.  Surrounded by some of the world's finest coffee and being forced to consume instant because of a lack of brewers or electric power.
     Anyway, this week I indulged by making two cups of coffee, really nice Kenyan Blue Mountain coffee, drinking one and putting the other into our refrigerator!  It was so wonderful coming home at the end of a long, hot day knowing there awaited me a cold, creamy sweet cup of iced-coffee!!  There are no workshops scheduled again for a while, so I enjoyed it while I could.  But that simple cup of cold coffee was more of a treat than anyone can imagine!  Pure bliss!

In the Que

            One of the ways you can tell how long people have been in country is their behavior in a que, or line.  It is one of the realities of life in the third-world that there is no concept of personal space like in the west.  Someone waiting in line in America will keep a few feet back from the person in front of them but here people will be pressed check to jowl.

            I recall visiting a bank a few months ago.  There was a line of about two-dozen men waiting at one of the customer service desks.  The men were all pressed against one another single-file.  You could not have passed a piece of paper between them, they looked like a centipede, just all legs and arms.  While I was waiting for a teller I saw in a different line a young western woman.  The young lady was standing several feet back from the person in front of her and eying nervously the person standing closely behind her.  “Newbie,” I thought.  I’ve been here long enough and have gotten used to the way things are that I am now comfortable standing right behind the person in front of me and don’t mind the person behind being equally close.  I’m sure I am going to have to re-adjust myself upon my return to the US else I will cause offense and make people needlessly nervous.

            The same is also true in terms of being served.  Unless you are prepared to push and shove your way to the front of the line and demand to be served you simply will not be served.  If you expect to stand politely waiting your turn western-style you will certainly starve to death if you are at a restaurant.  It certainly takes some getting used to but once you get the knack it becomes second nature.

            Washing hands before and after one eats is such a part of the culture here, all restaurants have washstands.  I hadn’t been here long and was waiting patiently in line for my turn when someone just cut directly in front of me, they just jutted in as I was about to wash.  At first I wondered if this was because I was a kawaja, a white person, but then I noticed people doing this to others as well.  I soon learned of the need to protect your space and to shove your body in front of those trying to cut-in.  It’s not an aggressive, hateful thing as would happen in the US where angry words would be exchanged.  Here it just more matter of fact: I allowed a tiny opening and someone took advantage of it, so what’s the problem?

            Setting-up a copying machine on the sidewalk or side of the road where you can find power and then charging for copies is a very common small business here.  One day I desperately needed to make a copy and there was no power at our office (surprise) and so I was forced to use one of these street copiers.  But as I was waiting my turn these short ladies, nurses from the hospital across the street, kept jutting in under me and pushing up to the copier.  Realizing that I would have been kept waiting all day, and as I was taller than the ladies, I simply reached over then and shoved my document into the hands of the guy running the copier.

            The lack of personal space extends to transport as well.  Riding in a matatu, one of the Toyota minivans that have been adapted to hold 15 or more passengers, you have to be prepared to be pressed tightly against the person next to you.  Riding from Yambio to Ezo last month I was squeezed into the rear of a Toyota Landcruiser with 19-other people, a third of them mercifully were children who didn’t take up much space.  Still, every bump was agonizing as we all crushed in upon one another.

            I remember riding the bus from Stonetown to Jambiani Beach on Zanzibar in December, 2010.  Here the bus was more like a small stakebody truck which had benches and a roof built over the rear section.   Upon the roof were loaded dozens of bags of sugar and flour and other goods for shipment way out on the island.  Although we started out with only a handful of passengers, because we stopped often soon the back was full except for the seat next to me!  No one wanted to have to sit next to the white guy until the very last passenger, number 24 I think, came aboard and there was no where left to sit.  It’s an interesting experience to be the passenger no one wants to sit next to because of how you look.   

       It is so difficult as a westerner to get used to this, it goes against every notion of politeness and decency and yet it is the way things work here.  I have now gotten used to throwing elbows in lines and pushing my way forward.  It is one of those traits which it will be hard to drop once back home, like passing cars anytime or considering motorcycles as anything other than annoying pests.