Here's the thing...

"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 hav...

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...