Celebrating Christmas in Juba

This is our 10th Christmas in Africa, but our first Christmas in South Sudan.

So how did we celebrate Christmas in Juba?

Children's Christmas Nativity play (Dec 19th)

Esther and Ben were very kindly included with the pupils from Joel's little preschool as part of the acting cast for the school's Christmas Nativity.

Esther was Innkeeper.
Ben was Joseph.
Joel was a shepherd.

All 9 children involved did very well, remembering their lines and performing brilliantly for the parents and the entire MAF staff, who all came to sit on plastic chairs in the playground to watch the show...

Christmas Carols on the banks of the River Nile

It was wonderful to be involved in Juba's first ever Carols By the Nile!

Actually getting to the 5pm Carol Service ended up as rather a challenge. Surly-looking soldiers had blockaded the roads leading down to the river. Standing or sitting sullenly on large, black tyres at the road junction, the soldiers were munching on packets of food and drinking bottles of coke. Despite their relaxed appearance, they proved to be uncommunicative, so it was impossible to know why the road had been blocked off. We tried a different route, but the traffic was backed up from another blockade.
In Juba, with a car-load of children, we don't take risks. We felt uncomfortable as we headed into this traffic jam:

We did not want to get trapped, as we did not know what was going on and were concerned in case the situation deteriorated. So we turned the MAF vehicle around and started to head back for home, disappointed that we might miss the Carol service.

But just at that point, the soldiers suddenly mounted their jeeps and drove off, clearing the road and creating a passage for us to get through to the hotel where the Carol service was to be held! Andrew turned the vehicle around again and we drove on unhindered...

It was an amazing venue, situated alongside this historic river (on left of photo):

Esther did a great job when it was her turn to do one of the Christmas Story Bible Readings:

As dusk fell, it was the turn of the children to come up to the front and sing "Away in a Manger". Beautiful!

I enjoyed being part of the choir for the evening. When the dark night of South Sudan covered our view of the river, the fairy lights came on, winding around the thatched banda and creating an almost magical atmosphere!

 A nice surprise
We were taken by surprise one evening when Carol Singers turned up on our door-step one warm Juba evening! What a nice gesture for Christmas.
It was the first time our children had experienced the concept of Carol Singers, but for me it was a lovely reminder of traditions from my UK Christmases, pre-Africa!

Secret Santa
On Tuesday evening we hosted a small Christmas get-together for friends from the compound/Joel's school. It was a fun evening, with a bring-and-share meal, a Christmas Quiz and a Secret Santa game.

For Secret Santa, everyone brought a mysterious, unlabelled gift to place under our well lit tree (tree- lights courtesy of a local shop- we ended up with more lights than tree, but it was a nice effect!):

 Everyone got into the spirit of the "Secret Santa" game. It can get very competitive at times, as it involves lots of "stealing" of other people's presents if they have chosen a gift you like!

It was nice to have everyone over to our home to celebrate Christmas together.

Christmas: A Time to Give
We all joined in with helping friends to pack up 400 Christmas packages to be distributed among some of the most needy in our neighbourhood.

It was a big job to pack up all those food parcels! Many people came along to help, which meant that this huge task was completed in just the Tuesday morning.

There was plenty to do, from measuring the beans, flour and sugar into 1 kilo portions for each parcel, to making sure that each package also had the allocated amount of tea, milk powder, biscuits, cooking oil, washing soap and a piece of clothing. Necessities which we take for granted, but a luxury for those who live day to day with next to nothing.

We were all kept busy...

On Christmas Eve, some of us went out into the community with the leaders from the organisation that heads up this amazing Christmas distribution. Ben chose to come along with Andrew and I, joining in with some teenage girls from a local orphanage, who also came to help give out the parcels in some of the slum areas of Juba.

The poverty in the shanty-town areas should shock me, Sadly, I have seen it so much in South Africa and in parts of Tanzania. It no longer shocks me, but it still saddens me every time. Giving out the food parcels was a tiny something to help provide enough for a decent Christmas dinner for the families living in rickety shacks, in dingy, muddy corners of the city...

A view from behind our delivery truck as we arrive at the homes where we had the first distribution point:

After this distribution point, we moved on to the town cemetery, where there is an informal settlement of wooden, ramshackle homes, where the poorest of the poor survive day to day. Prostitution, drunkeness, violent abuse of women and children is horribly rife in these areas.

Arriving at the cemetery entrance and preparing for the distribution of the food parcels:

The one thing that strikes me in these situations is the lack of security. If you live in a little wooden shack, with tarpaulin for your roof, with rotting walls and without enough money to purchase a door or a padlock and perhaps only a curtain to close over the doorway, how do you have any security? How could a woman prevent a man bent on rape from entering the hut she calls home? How can she shield her children? The children in this particular area are especially vulnerable to abuse, neglect and starvation. There were plenty of naked children, with distended stomachs, wandering around when we arrived on Christmas eve.
 There were also a few women tottering around, their eyes unfocused and bodies swaying with the effects of too much alcohol. Some of them were onlookers. A few had come with an invitation card which gave them the right to a food parcel. I watched one of them wander off down the dusty track, 3 food parcels balanced on her head as she swayed and staggered away. I couldn't help wondering how she would use them, hoping that she would use the contents to make herself and her children a good meal and not sell it to fuel an addiction.

The majority of recipients were mothers and some grannies and dads, who queued in an orderly fashion at the entrance to the cemetery. They brought their invitation cards with them and we ticked each card as they received their package, so that the giving out of food parcels could be monitored and each person just took the one allocated to them. The system worked well, despite the great crowds that started to gather.

Ben watched it all from his vantage point on the roof of the pick-up truck full of parcels:

In just one hour, the parcels had been given out. A fantastic initiative on the part of Dutch friends who led and organised it.
It was good to be able to be involved, although sad to see the desperate and overwhelming need in this place. Hopefully, each parcel is a sign that Someone cares for each of these people caught in lives so full of challenges that we cannot begin to imagine.

Christmas Angels

Last Saturday, we had a MAF Christmas party for all staff. It was a lovely way to celebrate Christmas with the staff team!
From 08:30 until 3pm, the celebration included breakfast and lunch together, time to sing some Carols, presentations for staff, testimonies, speeches...all sheltered from the hot sun in this marvellously colourful and cool tent:

There was even a home-bred version of the Nativity, in which the Juba pilots, including Andrew, made wonderful angels (!!):

We had a Mary and Joseph too, who did a great job with their roles:

Here, you can see Aunty Susan again (see previous blog from Ben's birthday), who did us proud last Saturday in her starring role as a beautiful Mary:

But today, Susan is not standing.
I have just been to visit her within the dire confines of Juba Hospital, Susan is lying on her hospital bed with a painful gun-shot wound where she was shot through the top of her leg two nights ago.

Four robbers broke into Susan's home in the dead of Wednesday night. Two of them were armed and did not hesitate to use their guns. Susan now bears the mark of that, as she lies on her side, a bullet-shaped hole ripped through the top of her leg. Blood-soaked bandages bear testimony to the places where the bullet entered and then left her body, from the top of her left leg, torn right through to her buttock.

Amazingly, Susan can still smile, but the drip in her hand helps to administer painkillers to dull the ache from her injury. She told us that the robbers got away with her brother's motorbike, but little else. However, they have taken so much more than that from Susan, as she lives with the pain and the memories from that horrible night.

Thankfully, Susan has many caring friends and family members to help care for her as she lies on her rickety, metal hospital bed in the crowded ward. I met several of her family and friends around her bedside as we visited this morning. They bring her food and care for her needs as she lies immobilised on the sagging mattress of a dirty bed, surrounded by the beds of other patients, all of whom had bloodied bandages or wounds, lying around in a ward where dirtied, blood-stained cotton wool lies abandoned on the concrete floor. The lack of hygiene is a cause for concern, I didn't even dare to ask what the toilet facilities must be like.

Outside the shabby hospital wards, relatives camp out with their cooking pots and plastic buckets, lighting fires to cook food for their family or friends in the hospital. Children play or sleep nearby, having to come along with their mothers. Impromptu laundry and cooking areas are scattered about, under the shade of trees and along the metal fence on the grassy verges between the single-storey brick wards.

But what of the other patients who have nobody to care for them? Everywhere I turned this morning I felt a sense of helplessness as my eyes discovered sights that shocked and saddened me and left my heart with a heaviness that is hard to shift.
What of the old man on a soiled mattress lying on the floor in the corridor, just outside Susan's ward, curled in a foetal position, vacant eyes devoid of hope as he stared at the brick wall...?

...what of the patient opposite Susan, a middle-aged man, with his ankle secured in handcuffs to the leg of the hospital bed and squirming on a thin mat on the floor, half of his face blown off, skin and bloody tissue hanging where his jaw used to be... ?
His story is tragic. He found out he had AIDS and in horror, shot his wife and girlfriend, then, not meaning to, he also shot his child. Feeling deep regret, he then tried to shoot himself. He failed. Now his face is shattered and torn open. He cannot eat, He cannot speak. HIV is rampant in his body. How much longer will he survive? And what of the deep torture in his mind and heart, never mind the painful suffering of his body and the shame of being chained to the leg of a hospital bed? Puddles of water surrounded him where he had attempted to drink water and missed, as it splashed out of the hole where his throat once was, water dribbling in undignified streams down his body and onto the dirty hospital floor.

...what of the young lady in a bed diagonally opposite Susan's, who arrived with no-one to care for her? Actual treatment at the hospital is free, but if you have no relatives or friends with you, you have no-one to provide food, water, soap or even clean bedding or clothes for you. Laundry is not provided at the hospital, so if you want a sheet or blanket to lie down on the well-used mattress, you have to bring it yourself.
I went to speak to this lonely girl, but it was difficult with the language barrier. "Lucy" showed me her right shin, where a deep wound festers, full of yellow pus and dried blood. The flies buzzed incessantly around her, frenzied with the odour of rotting flesh.
The male trainee nurse told me that Lucy has cancer in her leg and the doctors will clean the wound then let her go. Apparently the cancer has not spread. I asked what happened if patients like her have no-one to care for them. In Dodoma, the hospital provided a basic gruel-type meal for such patients, as far as I was told. In Juba, no food is provided. So you go without. Imagine if the NHS scrapped all food and relatives had to provide it all? There would be outrage. In Juba there is no outrage, Just hunger.
All I had to give to Lucy was a bottle of water, a banana and a small bread roll, She ate and drank hurriedly, seeming very thirsty and hungry. But it is so little in the face of such great need.

Christmas angels brought a message of hope and peace all those many years ago. For so many this Christmas it will be hard to find that hope and peace. So if you are a praying person, please pray for people like Lucy. For the man hand-cuffed to a hospital bed with so much pain and so little hope in his troubled mind. For Susan as she recovers. For the message of the Christmas angels to become real for them this Christmas.

My African Birthday Boy

Born in South Africa, where he also celebrated his first birthday, Ben then celebrated his third, fourth, fifth and sixth birthdays in Tanzania.
And now my African boy has just had his seventh birthday- in South Sudan.

Together with seven other MAF kids (4 of whom are here only temporarily), plus Esther and Ben, we had lots of fun celebrating Ben's seven years!

Ben chose a Space Theme for his party.
The fun blasted off with some Space craft activities, followed an egg-drop challenge (lots of fun! for more info, see http://lemonlimeadventures.com/creating-perfect-egg-drop-project/#_a5y_p=1491040), then some space games like "stick the fire on the blasting-off rocket", alien chase... and of course, a birthday tea.
It was all rounded off with a rocket birthday cake and party bags (with contents sourced from Nairobi shops!).

Craft-time:

Egg-drop Challenge:

Aunty Susan (who cares for some of the MAF kids and works as house-help for a MAF family here), joins in the fun as she attempts to place the fire at the rocket's base:

 

Getting ready for birthday tea- and it was amazing how useful Ben's bed-sheet proved to be as it doubled up as a table cloth, perfect for his theme!

Kenya

We had a restful first R and R!

Off we go to Kenya...

As we waited on the tarmac to board the MAF plane which would transport us to Nairobi, there were plenty of planes, helicopters and humanitarian vehicles for the children to watch...

(As well as this view of a lady carrying a suitcase on her head: a sight so normal here that Ben and Joel take no notice at all! I wish I had good enough balance to be able to carry even a book on my head, never mind a suitcase!)

Almost time to board...

We climb onboard with Andrew as a passenger, since he is on R and R! We prepare to taxi up the runway in the very capable hands of our MAF pilot Jane Wambui:

Ben enjoys passing the enormous relief helicopters, of which there are many. These are some of the world's largest helicopters, so Ben was in his element having such amazing machines to look at!

Soon we are airborne. I enjoyed seeing some of the beautiful, lush landscapes which are in evidence alongside the great river:

We stopped at a couple of villages on the way to Nairobi, to drop off and pick up other passengers. The recent rains meant a very muddy airstrip in this village! We came to a squelchy stop in the dark mud. Despite the mire, this did not put off a crowd of interested onlookers. They were as interested in us, especially blonde-haired children, as we were in them!

The next stop was Nairobi... 

We had the first weekend in a guest house and them moved across to the MAF A Compound (NOT the compound where we lived from January to July this year). This was our very restful abode for 7 nights:

There was time for trips out for ice-cream (not something we can easily find in Juba), visits to friends, shopping trips and a walk in Nairobi's peaceful Karua Forest:

The weather was rainy at times and wonderfully cold in the evenings... and yes, I really do mean that! It can be nice to live in a warm country much of the time, but it is also lovely to get a break from the intense heat and enjoy a change of weather for variety's sake. In the early mornings, Esther exclaimed that she felt so cold, she had "never been in such a cold place!" I think she has forgotten the snowy winter we spent in England in 2012!
It was even cold enough for a log fire in the evenings! A nice way to write Christmas cards- reminiscent of a British Christmas:

On Monday,we set off again for our actual home.
It had been a lovely break. It served its purpose, as it also felt good to be back- to be greeted by MAF staff we know...

...to feel the warm sun again, to land in an environment which is starting to feel more familiar and to feel ready to get back into work; looking forward to joining in Christmas season festivities with new friends and to being settled in our own house again.

R and R

MAF  have a policy that offers all the international staff based in Juba the chance to get for a week, once every 3 months. This is called, "Rest and Relaxation" time- R and R. It is a chance for a mental break from the intensity that being in this particular environment seems to demand.

The system operates on a rota basis. Every 12 weeks, we can take a week out and travel to either Kampala or Nairobi. Sometimes, our week out might clash with someone else's time away and then we need a little flexibility, which has happened to us, so we are a bit behind in taking our time away.

Last week, I felt ragged, unusually tired, worn down. We worked out that we were 4 weeks overdue for our R and R time. That helped me to feel better. On reflection, 12 weeks seems to be an optimum time to take a mental breather. When we over-ran that time, exhaustion caught up with me and I took a dive into feeling unable to cope with even the most basic of challenges. Things that could have made me laugh were making me cry!

Tomorrow, we will take our very first R and R trip, climbing aboard the MAF shuttle to go to Nairobi. No tight flying schedule for Andrew. No Juba heat. No home school. We have worked non-stop at home-school since the beginning of September, so this will be like a belated half-term.
And we are all soooo excited!
I have the longest shopping list in the world, a cooler box to carry back some meat from the more reasonably priced Nairobi supermarkets and just one appointment for us all to get our cholera vaccine whilst in the more developed Kenyan capital city. We are ready for our very first R and R...

Development...

I was quite taken aback the first time I saw this poster on a wall in Juba. It is a billboard poster that is plastered across the city, its message loud and clear:

It is great that people are being taught about hygiene in such a positive way. 

However, it shocked me to read this and to understand just how far this country has to go in terms of development when it is still having to teach people the basic necessity of using a toilet.

On the other hand, I heard a tale the other day from an international aid worker based here. 

I was told that in a certain remote village in South Sudan, people make a concerted effort to defecate outside their home, especially in the evening. The poop should then all be made fully visible for all the neighbours and passers by to clearly see the next day. The more there is on show, the better! The reason for this is because it will apparently demonstrate how well the residents have eaten and therefore show them in a good light as being well off and able to provide well for their family...

There may be some logic in this, but not much to promote good hygiene and health awareness! 

Thankfully, this does not appear to be the culture in Juba! I am all for posters like the one above....

Update

Today I am very happy to report that my brilliant bread-maker has been saved!
After a good, careful clean and a chance to cool down, we tried it again and it is working- horray!! It is such a bonus to use it; to be able to get a loaf baked for our lunch whilst I am busy with home-school. What a relief that the last misadventure did not break it. I do not want to add dough-kneading and bread-making to our weekday schooling schedule!

And on another topic, Ben was very excited this morning to have an update on the Spiky Caterpillars. His sharp eyes picked out a beautiful African Emperor Moth resting on our balcony early this morning!
We went outside to see close up what those incredible caterpillars had hatched into. Esther held her hand close by to get a sense of its size and we snapped this photo:

We rarely venture out onto our balcony. It directly faces the Juba sun and is uncomfortably hot for much of the day, but early this morning we enjoyed discovering some of the creatures who were out there, like this gorgeously patterned moth and the praying mantis: