Here's the thing...

I have just touched down in Boston after 48 hours of travel. I look and smell hideous. The drug dogs stopped me - probably because I smell like goat. The customs guy let me in despite bright red marks put on my papers at passport control - probably mostly out of pity. And all I can think of are the words on the Statue of Liberty which take on new meaning when you actually are the wretched refuse from a teeming shore: Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore

The Bare Naked Ladies song, 'If I had a million dollars' has been going through my head now for almost 24 hours. Sing it with me if you know the tune... "If I had a 1,000,000 (If I had a 1,000,000) I'd but you a green dress ( but not a real green dress that's cruel) If I had a 1,000,000 (If I had a 1,000,000) I'd but you some art ( A Picasso or a Garfunkel) If I had a 1,000,000 (If I had a 1,000,000) I'd buy you a monkey (haven't you always wanted a monkey?) If I had a 1,000,000 If I had a 1,000,000 If I had a 1,000,000 If I had a 1,000,000 I'd be rich!" The song has stuck because I am trying to get a million dollars out of a donor. Well, not a million dollars exactly...it's more like 1,716,589 euros...but you get the point. The donor seems to be enjoying the cat and mouse game they're playing with us. E-mails with pedantic questions. Calling us for a meeting and then sending us away without having met with us. More pedantic

Sometimes I think that my life can't get more bizarre...and then it does. Like this morning when the staff were all singing Christmas carols in the other room a very ugly monkey - standing about 3 foot high - strolls in through the door and takes a seat on the door right out side my office and begins watching me. I find this unacceptable so stand up and pick up a stapler to throw at it. The monkey jumped off the chair and bounded out the door. I followed still holding the stapler in a threatening manner which was meant to convey: 'Don't mess with me cause I will brain you with this cheap, Chinese office implement.' I edged toward the door to close it when the monkey...obviously not finding either me or the stapler all that threatening...rushes the door that I barely managed to slam in time and he bounced off it. He took a few steps back and stood there staring me down. I tried to make noise to scare him off but he just too a few more steps back and then took a ru

Motot is quiet at night. Dead quiet – with the exception of the drums that some drummer out there seems to enjoy playing all night, and the occasional dog barking, or herd of cattle moving around. It is beautiful in it’s complete and utter silence. You can hear people talking across the village. The moon has been full and bright throughout my entire visit so that the night never gets fully dark and you can walk without a torch (inadviseable but possible). Thus, when the silence is broken at 4.39 in the morning by one woman, then another, then another screaming the high-pitched cry of celebration/warning that sounds like a swarm of banshees it is one of the most eerie and disturbing thing I have ever heard. Dogs began barking. The guards began running. Everyone begins shouting. I go out and stand authoritatively in my pajamas, in the middle of the compound, hands on hips realising that I haven’t a freakin’ clue what is going on. The guards are peering out through out through our reedy

There is a Romanian photographer who has published a book called: In the Most Beautiful life and as the plane bumped down in the field site today just like it had hundreds of times before; as the children from the village run up to see who might be disembarking; as staff stood on the airstrip waving as if their lives depended on how effusively they wave; I find myself thinking of the title of this book. How many times a day, or a week, or a month or sometimes even in your whole life do you find yourself grinning thinking, ‘I can’t believe I get to live this life!’

"Mmm...I haven't had goat for seven hours now. Wonder what's for dinner?" "How many frogs in the shower is actually too many frogs to shower with?" "Is there an actual conspiracy by staff to prevent me from getting any work done by coming into my office every 2.5 minutes?" "If the plane doesn't come to get me tomorrow will I burst into tears on the runway?" "Would it be considered bad practice to pay the tribal drummers around here not to drum?" "If I were to take a broomstick and jam it roughly and randomly into the thatched roof of my tukul I wonder if I could scare away/kill the bat that is up there rustling around ALL NIGHT." "I'm tired of chewing." "I don't think my feet have ever been this dirty." "Isn't it funny how staff cannot come to the office to file their reports but have no trouble making it through the floods to get paid?" "Ahh...baby

I was glad to receive an e-mail yesterday from our head office saying that anti-venom is on it's way out to the field on our charter this coming Friday. Phew! That's a relief! So if I had been bitten I would only have been dead for six days before the anti-venom arrived. :)

Should you ever find yourself in the unfortunate position of needing to use the latrine in South Sudan at about 9.30 on a pitch-black evening and, upon crossing the compound, you shine your head torch to the right and find – approximately 12 inches from your bare, flip-flopped foot – the highly poisonous Black Mamba I will now give instructions on what to do. 1. Freeze and stare 2. Back away as quickly as possible out of striking distance while yelling: ‘Uhhh, snake! Quick! 3. Somebody! There’s a snake!’ 4. Keep your head torch on the Black Mamba cause if that thing stays on the loose you’ll never sleep soundly again. 5. Sudanese staff should come running. Note, that is it only the women because the men don’t hear the screams for help due to a football game on tele. 6. One, particularly noble Sudanese nurse dressed only in a towel and bathing cap, named Selina (always make sure you have her around!!) will grab a large stick and will start hitting the snake on any part

Some days you get to the end of and think...how, exactly, did everything go so wrong? It started out just like every other one. Got up. Checked the floor for cobras. Flicked a dead insect or two off the mossy net. Made some coffee. Read a psalm. Had some bread. Came to the office and then...POW! Everything goes wrong. By four o'clock I had officially declared it: "Storm out of the office day". Additional points for door slamming. Seriously, I feel like I have about 300 badly behaved children who are having a strop for no particular reason except they feel like it. And yet...yet...bad behaviour isn't going to change my mind. Someone once said that the problems that you're dealing with right now are going to be the easiest ones in your life. No matter what it is the challenges only get harder, the problems only get bigger, the situations more complex. If that is the case, I fear tomorrow.

I followed my own good advice last night...something I rarely do and it paid off. Let me paint you a picture: It's about 9:30 and I've been reading in my tukul for awhile. I think about getting up to use the latrine but have a debate in my head about whether to wait until morning (there's not much to do here in the field so I find I talk to myself a lot more than normal). I finally decide to just get up. I put on my head torch and tromp across the compound dodging the bats, hedgehogs and assundry of abnormally large 'other' living things flying about...and then I tromp back. As I have bent double (our little huts have very low doors) and just started to push wooden door open I notice an odd black wire running into my little hut. 'Hmm...how odd,' I think. 'I don't remember that being there before.' And that's when my good advice comes to mind. If it looks like a snake it probably is a snake. So, as I let the door fall shut and back away

I sometimes feel like I’m living one of those fourth grade math word problems.  You know the kind: if a train leaves Detroit going 40mph and another train leaves New York going 60mph which will get to Paris first? Except my math problems go something like this: If two health staff take two weeks off, and one nutrition nurse takes three weeks off, and you have to keep four people in the main compound and two people in the sub-base for security, do you have enough people to keep the programme running until Christmas? Or: WFP delivers 1050 bags of CSB (Corn-Soya Blend – used in nutrition programmes) unexpectantly because their logistics and planning are worse than UNICEF’s and you can’t store them in the WFP warehouse because their guards are a bunch of thieves and MSF says you can store 700 in one of their empty warehouses and 300 in another but the second warehouse has to be empty by Tuesday where are you going to put the CSB? Lucky for you the tribes nearby have st

My watch stopped at 11.12. Standing in the airport our watsan advisor asked me why I was wearing a stopped watch. “I like it,” I said. I didn’t mention that I thought it was appropo of going out to the middle of nowhere the day of the U.S. Election. No electricity, no televisions, no phones, no contact with the rest of the world for a week. It would be like time was standing still. No McCain, Palin, Obama (poor Biden…never got much of a mention). It would be blissful in it’s own cocoon sort of way. Tuesday night I went to sleep with the mice, lizards and bats scratching out a living in the top of my tukul smug in the knowledge that my blissful ignorance might carry on for a full week. There have been few things that I have cared less about than this election and it’s nice sometimes not caring – about everything just because we’re told that we should. But then, on Wednesday morning, I was awoken by the squawk of a badly tuned radio catching a frequency on and off. And t

between facilitating Middle East Peace and killing rats you might immediately think: 'killing rats' cause 'hey! it's easier!' I'm here to tell you that you might want to re-think that decision. Think very, very carefully.

As was tactfully pointed out by a dear friend from Chicago I haven’t posted for a month. This is not, you’ll be glad (?) to know, because I have nothing to say but rather because I have too much to say and not enough time to put pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard – to say it. As I write this I am sitting in Loki – one of our support sites in Kenya – where I have just been in a technical workshop with a lot of our field staff as well as some lower level govt. of Southern Sudan officials with whom we work and I have spent several of those days depressed. Not for any very valid reason except that, at every turn, everything seemed to not be working out. Have you had those days? Where it seems that the obstacles and challenges and problems seem to far outweigh the solutions? Sometimes those days like to chain themselves together in to weeks out of sheer vindictiveness. This has been my week. Last night, one of the government officials seemed to be lingering around where I was having

I'm not going to name any names in this blog. Protect the innocent and all that. Just let it be known that I'm even more indebted than usual to my wise teachers... 10. If you must drive an SUV for safety and security purposes do make sure it has enough cupholders. 9. While your hosts might talk a good game they are actually never going to take you for a picnic by the side of the highway. 8. If you must change the carpets, upholstery and draperies make sure you do it in that order. 7. Sometimes people change their political stripes and become ultra-right-wing conservatives for no explicable reason and this is very confusing for others who are accustomed to arguing one side convincingly. 6. The Dead Sea is rather painfully salty. 5. Mohammed Ben Khalifa did not win any gold medals for Jordan at the Beijing Olympics but he can probably trim a mean rose bush. 4. Cheaters never prosper...unless you happen to be sitting next to the British Embassy table and then you p

Mark it on your calendars now. Start the countdown. How can you not get on board with something that has such an adorable logo?

Livingstone to be Chavez advisor Despite Boris' completely nerdy appearance at the Olympics closing ceremony it appears that I'll now be leaving Ken for good.

BBC reporting on our Tieraliet site here .

Well today was a momentous day. I got my 'New Sudan' driver's license which means that after 2 1/2 months here I am legally allowed to hit the road. What I found rather amusing is that it enables me to drive motorcycles, motor cars, medium good vehicles, heavy tractors, heavy goods vehicles, and light omnibuses that do not exceed 20 passengers. So, when I tire of this humanitarian gig you might find me out pursuing my 3rd grade dream of being a bus driver.

I am listening to a song right now by Cobalt Season that's called, 'Careful not to draw your maps in pen and ink'. The lyrics go: You are gonna change your mind someday So just let go of all your thoughts on tomorrow You may find your bearings in disarray Though you may lead and trip and fall and follow And all that you thought black will be proved red Full of life and complication and sorrow And all that you thought white was in your head For life is lived in the shadows that we borrow And I’ll look far, but may see nothing And I will thirst, but may not drink And I will yell to those behind me “Careful not to draw your maps in pen and ink” The same road disappears up ahead Will you ever understand this equation? The compass in your hand is all but dead Time to feel your way around this evasion Read the words again, for you might see Life where you saw death, a way to your salvation Best to lay down what you thought was certainty Freedom’s found i

Apparently, I have a stomach bug. This is not surprising. My stomach and intestinal track have played host to countless number of little bugs, worms and parasites over the past ten years or so. I like to think that we have a cozy sort of arrangement. They're welcome to pass through as long as they don't stick around, or cause me any major discomfort for over - say, a two day period. I mean, it's a rough world. They've got to live somewhere. So, I've come to think of my digestive system as a B & B, of sorts. It's a nice place to stop by but you shouldn't try to stay. When the bugs do try to stay we have a problem and so begins the boxing match. I like a fair fight so I don't use anything that would give me the upper hand. I drink a lot of water. I will my system to kick them out. Usually this works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the little buggers (pictured above) refuse to pack up and leave. Despite the blows it becomes necessary to bring

Today I was at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi for the 10 year anniversary of the bombing in which 46 staff were killed. The event started with the marines playing Taps which got me thinking about how music so easily strikes an emotion. I mean, is Taps an inherently sad song or have I just seen and heard it at enough sad events that it's inextricably linked to sadness. Same with Amazing Grace played on bagpipes. Does certain music actually evoke a similar emotion in everyone or could some hear Taps and think it's a pretty good party tune?

It is a sad day. If you have not yet read the Gulag Archipelago or A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch you should stop what you are doing right now and go buy them. "For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones." One obituary is here .

When I finally got around to eating last night I found several of my colleagues sitting - plates in lap - watching the food channel. Correction: torturing themselves with the food channel. Nigella was on with her lilting accent making some sort of salad which involved blueberries. It was almost physically painful to watch. But what amazed me was that - even as I sat picking at my cold, fried fish head and cutting my coagulated pasta - I didn't even have to watch. Nigella could still torture me by just describing the food she was making. When did we start using words like: dulcet, luscious, rich, savoury, and succulent. There are phrases like: Dinner tonight was adventurous and intriguing. Are we describing the hike to base camp or food? But it did get me thinking. How would I describe our meals? Looking down the fish head stared plaintively back and all I could come up with was: "Dinner tonight was challenging but uninspiring."

Seriously. Good stuff: He ventured forth to bring light to the world.

There is lizard poo all over my bed. For you long time readers you'll note a trend. A wildcat pooed on my bed in Indonesia. A hedgehog in Darfur. And now, I seem to have a lizard pooing on my bed here. Or several lizards because it's impossible that one benign, reptile can be creating the amount of poo there is on the bed. In fact, I suspect that an entire lizard clan is up there aiming their droppings at my pillow. You wouldn't think that lizards can poo so much but let me assure you, they can. Now, lizard poo dropping from above I can handle. I draw the line, however, at actual lizards raining down on me. This afternoon I left to office to come back to my room in order to concentrate on a report. Little did I know that I was trading the din of of office staff for the din of lizard wrestling. No kidding. Several of them were balancing on the roof beam that runs across my room having a fight. The WWF of the lizard world going on above my head. I choose to ignore them and

It’s also a river in Sudan. While the source of ‘de nile’ is still up for debate what is clear is that it flows out of Uganda and into South Sudan where it spreads its fingers out in thousands of tributaries and inlets that make much of the surrounding area a vast, lazy swamp. Somehow, it manages to pull its act together again somewhere prior to hitting Khartoum where it meets the Blue Nile and manages to carry on acting like a proper river all the way to Egypt. But it’s really most interesting in South Sudan where it doesn’t behave itself, doesn’t stay within it’s ban ks and that is where we are today - on the Nile, headed for the Kingdom of Shilluk. Shilluk is in the state of Upper Nile and if you asked me to point to a place where north and south Sudan meet I would probably point to Upper Nile. We arrived into Malakal early in the morning because we have to take boats to Shilluk. Driving through the streets of Malakal we hear the Friday prayer call from the old mosq

While I was in Shilluk three disconcerting things happened. The first was the attack on the peacekeepers in Darfur which has led to the subsequent pull-out of all non-essential staff (why ‘essential’ staff stay to get shot at is something that has never made much sense to me). Everyone is denying that they had anything to do with it. The second is that Sudan conducted a census in order to figure out how much of the South’s oil profits it actually has to share with the South. The figures have come back and, surprisingly, the North has declared that there are 38 million people living in Sudan. 3.8 million of them live in the South. Now, I’m no statistician but I’ve been in the North long enough to figure out that they haven’t got 35-odd million people up there. Unless they’re keeping them underground. Which they might be. This means that Khartoum must be larger than New York City. Another clear case of denial - mostly of reality. I doubt the southerners are going to stand for this and I

I managed to escape Juba where birthday tradition dictates that you get doused with water at some unsuspecting point during your day and thought I would keep things mum in Kodok to avoid any other unusual birthday traditions. This plan went well until I spoke to my boss by sat phone in the morning. ‘Happy Birthday!’ she announced. ‘How’s it going?’ ‘Great!’ I replied. ‘Got a couple of e-mails and have a series of meetings. You know, work and stuff. It’s good.’ She turned serious. ‘Have you told the team?’ Geez, she made it sound like I was dying. ‘Ummm, no.’ There was a pause and I knew what was coming – either I told the team or she would. ‘I’ll tell them tonight,’ I said. So, as we gathered around in the evening I told everyone that it is my birthday. They all congratulated me and then proceeded to shuffle around mysteriously. Right before dinner, our health coordinator starting fussing around the table. She put down a lace cloth, started stacking biscuits on a tray and

T he land rover is about to pull out of the compound with our health team in the back, lined up on seats like school children on a bus headed for school. They are going to our health clinic in Panthau . “Please tell Agam that we said hello,” I told Dr. James, a cheerful man and brilliant doctor from Uganda. “I will,” he promised. “I will send her consolidarity.” Agam came to our clinic in medical unit in Wathmuan yesterday when we were conducting a nutrition feeding. She sat on the ground outside the building with her legs helpless and swollen to one side. Her eyes were bright and she smiled up at us as the community health worker, her mother, and countless members of the community gathered around to see who at whom all these ‘khwajes’ (foreigners) were looking. She had walked as far as she could and could not walk anymore – even with the help of her mother and we were determining how to get her to our clinic in Panthau which was 16 km away. “We will drive her,” a

5:30am: The sun is not yet up and it is already hot. The generator is not on so the still air inside my tukel has grown even hotter. I hear the scuff, scuff of the water man dragging his feet pushing his heavy wheelbarrow outside my wire mesh window. He unloads four or five 25 gallon plastic jugs of water, dropping them on the ground with a thump. I open my eyes and ensure that my mosquito net is still tucked in to protect from the bugs, bats, snakes with whom we share our space. Satisfied that I am alone I roll over and go back to sleep. 8:30am: Scuffling inside the plastic ceiling of my grass-thatched tukel wakes me up. It is probably a lizard crawling around making a racket. Others are up already and moving about. The builders from Kenya have begun banging nails into the roof of the cement block kitchen they are building. There are no builders in this part of South Sudan and so we have to have them come to build anything other than the mud tukuls in which we normally live and wor

Have you ever wondered how difficult it would be to simply disappear? Not very, let me tell you. Ok, so maybe in the states or Europe it wouldn’t be incredibly easy but if you are willing to live in Sudan you can be gone….easily…poof…just like that. I have this thought because I am in Rumbek which you have probably never heard of and neither had I until WFP unceremoniously dumped me, and the six or seven other passengers from my plane, here. “You have missed the plane to Juba,” they announced. “Could have been because you were 3 hours late in picking us up,” I said. I think I’m getting more acrimonious with the UN every day. “We could not hold the plane for another hour for you,” they said. “You could, though, tell us where your plane disappeared to for three hours while we were sitting on the landing strip in the scorching sun for that time,” I said. I do not say that an unexplainable, unaccountable three hour jaunt might be one of the reasons that they haven’t enough fu

We left Lokichoggio before dawn. Or, Loki as it is called. This outpost Kenyan town that looks like most outpost African towns with men idling in front of dilapidated shops and children running barefoot rolling tires. The only difference being that I am here. And thousands others like me. Flying in and out of this border post as we make our way into Sudan. Today, we were flying a MAF charter into Jongelei state to a place called Motot. Never heard of it? Neither had I. Don’t bother trying to find it on a map. It won’t be there. It’s not even on most UN maps and they have a vested interest in knowing where it is. Our pilot finds it by doing what all good pilots do when they have no idea where the landing strip is: make wide, sweeping turns over where it should be until he sees it.  One of our area coordinators describes to me the pros and cons of snake-killing. A skill he is convinced that I should possess. “The key is,” he says making a chopping motion with his arm. “You hav

Steri Pen. Handheld UV light water purified. Will someone please buy this for me and the other 1.7 billion people without access to clean drinking water? Seriously. We've got a cholera outbreak in Juba and a Hep E outbreak in Kitgum. I could do some wicked good with about 1000 of these and a team of trainers.

Well, of course there are more than that. But stick with me on this one... There are the type that like round-trip tickets and the type that prefer one-way tickets. I like to think of myself in the former category. You're still going somewhere but you always have the safety of coming back, getting out, an end of the road, so to speak. I never saw the charm in the one-way, open ended sort of nonsense and considered it for the truly intrepid traveller - the kind that borders on idiocy. But I'm changing my mind. I went to Cambridge this weekend and bought one-way tickets the entire way and back. It was freeing. There's no schedule to meet. There's no reason to be any place at any given time. Completely opens up your mind. If you want to stay longer you stay. If you want to leave you leave. Genius. I think I'm going to think of South Sudan like that. If I have no reason to leave I'll just stay. Why not? (I also thought about Greta and what she is going to s

I was in a briefing today with the head of logistics. An energetic and talkative British man who, at the time, was describing to me the various varmits (rats, spiders, scorpions) that one would need to kill at any given time in South Sudan. The talk turned to snakes and he clasps his hands together earnestly and says, "There are snakes, you know. Huge snakes. Pythons." "Really?" I say. "Like how big are we talking here?" "I've got the pictures," he say. "One killed a guard and, after consuming him, was caught crawling under the fence of the UN compound in Juba. It was electrocuted as it tried to get free." "Riiiiight," I say. He lost me at guard. "So what you're telling me is that there are python in Juba that are large enough to swallow humans and that some guard (and I know how lazy and comatose some guards can be) was so sound asleep that he allowed him self to be strangled and then eaten by a python a