Here's the thing...

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...

Ah, the eternal dilemma. I didn't sleep on the plane coming over and don't have meetings until this afternoon. Do I take a snooze for a few hours this morning and risk not being able to sleep tonight or do I plow through in a haze?