South Sudan is not a country
that will have you drooling with excitement every time it’s mentioned as one of
your next possible destinations. You will have read stories about all sorts of horrendous
acts and gruesome murders and kidnaps and you will wish the “South” is removed
so you can at least end up in Khartoum.
If it’s your first time, your
family will pray for your journey mercies throughout the night. They will spend
the rest of the day praying for your safety while you toil for their (and your)
future. Your friends will think you are going to make lots of money so you can
buy “house” them if you return because South Sudan is such a high
risk area that your company must be
paying top dollar for you to work in such an environment.
You will hope the
stories you have read in Western media were exaggerated, and that South Sudan
is some really cool place where you can afford to take a selfie in the middle of
the road without some angry teenager accusing you of having snatched the
handset from his uncle in the army.
You imagine you are going to
have a fairly good time until you get to the airport and some mean-looking Seven-foot
chap grabs your luggage and you have to fork out 10 South Sudanese pounds before
he can release it to the guy receiving you.
You are dumb-founded. You do
not have local currency, but that is none of his business. You will try to
forge a piteous look, but he has probably seen hundreds of sorry faces that
your attempt at faking bewilderment will come across as a piece of streetwise
playacting. He simply doesn’t mind. Pay him and your luggage will be yours
again.
Juba is searing hot and you
will be sweating from every pore of your skin by the time you take refuge in
some air-conditioned apartment with a noisy generator in the backyard. Somehow
you will have to get used to the noise because there is no hydroelectricity and
solar is not as commonly used as it should be.
Every once in a while you will hear
sporadic gunshots after 10 PM in the night because every rich guy owns a
gun. You cannot tell whether someone pissed them or they are doing routine shooting practice.
You just don’t wake up and feel safe and secure even if your apartment is a
stone’s throw away from the UN apartments on Bilpam road.
Semi-affluent locals here eat
meat with bread, but there is variety of Ugandan food if you can find your way
around. There are lots of eateries strewn all over the place, housed in makeshift
wooden structures. There are hotels, of course, in case you feel like leaving a
chunk of your savings in Juba every once in a while.
A number of market stalls sell Ugandan
food as well. Like Mama Walcott’s
just off the Juba-Nimule road. I could have taken a few shots, but you just do
not take photos anyhow in Juba. All government establishments appear to be out
of bounds for any irksome wannabe photographer. Once, I almost sent my
chauffeur into panic mode when I pulled out my phone to snap at the porous bridge on the Nimule-Juba road.
There are no Visa ATMs
in Juba. You have to carry all the money you need with you and hope it will be
enough. There are no forex bureaus either. You either settle for the bad bank rates or look for more friendly exchange rates on the black market.
The Ugandan community in Juba
is quite big, so you cannot lose your way unless you are some 15th Century
hermit. Once in a while, you will bump into Balaam Barugahara wearing one of
his 15,000 orange T-shirts.
09th October found
me at the Ugandan ambassador’s residence. Every year, Ugandan professionals in
South Sudan meet at his place to have their own version of independence
celebrations. People meet, make merry and dance to Ugandan music.
For a moment, you imagine you
are breathing Ugandan air until people start sneaking out after 9 PM. Then it
finally hits you. You are approaching the wrong hours. You are better off holed
up in your apartment or else you will have to make it to your place like a commando.
I had overheard someone narrate
one of his nocturnal experiences the previous week and you could still sense
the fear in his speech. On the fateful night, he was stopped by an
AK47-weilding guy near one of the junctions that lead out of the city.
The AK47 man then did a thorough
security check on his garments, relieved
him of his wallet’s contents before letting him proceed with his journey. But he
was the lucky one. Others had not been that fortunate. One was forced to give
someone a lift, only for him to be murdered along the way and his car taken.
Another – a Caucasian expatriate
working with one of the telecom firms – once had his spectacles stomped on and crushed
by an army guy after the latter was asked to assist and pick an item our
short buddy could not reach, on the upper shelf of one supermarket. He instantly
regained his vision and left the country. He has never resurfaced since.
But it’s not always gloom in
the South Sudanese capital. Juba has another side to it. There are sprouting
buildings at almost every corner. My chauffeur tells me some of these are owned
by Ethiopians, Eritreans and some Ugandans among others.
A quick look at these reveals a
number of mushrooming salons and massage parlors too, mostly run by
Kenyans. I checked a few of them of them and the service was excellent. By
default, they speak Swahili to anyone that does not look like South Sudanese.
"You see that lady over there", said my
chauffeur, pointing to a light skinned lady that had just zoomed past us in a pearl
white Toyota Nadia. "She used to be a
low-end hooker back in the day. She is Ethiopian. She must have finally hit a
jackpot with some Sudanese general". He tells me Ethiopian prostitutes sell
like hot cakes because South Sudanese are smitten by their cute faces and light
complexion.
We once stopped by a traffic cop
on one of the morning trips to the workplace. He muttered some Arabic to our chauffeur before
checking on his driving license and signing off with a phrase that sounded like tamam. It was not the first time I
was hearing this word, so I asked him what the traffic cop wanted with him.
"He wanted to see my rukhsa (driving license). These traffic cops
can sometimes mean to waste our time", he goes on,
rather absentmindedly. He tells me tamam
is Arabic for any of well, good, or okay. It is sometimes smuggled into formal English
conversations. So if you ever happen to be in Juba and someone asks you if things are tamam, don’t give them a blank stare.
Dan A.
