Recent news headlines have drawn attention to the cholera epidemic which hit Juba and other towns within South Sudan. On arrival here, I asked if the cholera outbreak is still a risk. We have been informed that cholera is still present, but not as prevalent a risk as before. However, posters at the entrance to our compound and in the windows of local eating places remind us all to "WASH OUR HANDS, TO REDUCE CHOLERA RISK". We tried the food at a Juba cafe today, where Esther got worried abut the cholera awareness posters plastered over the cafe doors. She was keen to ask the waitress for a place to wash her hands before she ate her chips. Sensible girl.
These are the posters at the entrance in our MAF compound:
The subject of cholera brings me neatly onto the subject of clean water. I am learning our new system for water!
First, there is a tank of "city water" which comes by pipe from a city supply of water, which has been purified- in a small way- from its source: the River Nile! It is dispensed into this large tank and we can collect it in large jerrycans, clearly marked with red lids. This is the tank:
The sign on the tank indicates that we must filter this water before consuming it:
At home, this is our trusty water filter which did a great job in Dodoma and is now working hard on the water of the River Nile, which is a little murkier and a little more sandy than Dodoma water when it goes in, but comes out at the bottom crystal clear and ready for drinking! Hurrah for water filters!
They do say that after drinking from the Nile, you never want to leave the land where you drank of its waters... I guess that only time will tell if this is true for us!
When city water is not available (it is not a reliable supply), we can collect water from the MAF staff kitchen, from the BLUE TOP jerrycans (not to be confused with the red-lidded jerrycans!). These blue-lidded containers have 20 litres of purchased bottled water, which can be safe for drinking, but we are still advised to filter it anyway... just in case! So we are allowed to collect 2 of these per household, but must return the empties to the staff kitchen so that they can be restocked.
When it comes to washing and tap water and washing machines, we use tap water. This water comes from a wonderful bore hole sunk 80 metres deep under our compound. It is clean and usable, but a water safety test revealed high levels of copper, making it unsuitable for long-term use as drinking water (with some health implications, although we don't know what those would be!). However, we can use it to brush our teeth- which is more than we could do with tap water in Tanzania, so the job of filling water bottles each day for teeth brushing is one job less to do in Juba! :-)
On the topic of washing, let me tell you about my washing machine. In Juba, it lives upstairs. In the bathroom!! This is a new concept for me! It is all plumbed in and happily I am able to use it: but the outflow pipe does not yet have anywhere permanent to flush out the dirty water, so usually I place the pipe over the bath so that the water can drain out through the plughole. Yesterday, the pipe pinged out of place, out of the bath- and the water pumped out all over the bathroom floor! I did not realise until it was too late!! I had a bit of a flood to soak up with towels and sheets:
Another area to get used to here is that of electricity. We have a compound generator which runs at fixed hours of the day and is switched off at lunchtime, early evening and at night. Appliances plugged into sockets like the one below will only work if the generator is running:
Other electrical goods can run on the lesser-powered battery-based sockets, which are marked so:
The other day I had a drama with the ironing. I plugged the iron in one socket, then realised it was a battery socket and the iron should be on a generator socket. So I moved the iron to another socket across the room and then moved the board and clothes etc. Then I had to check the generator times to see if I was able to use generator power. Finally, I did the ironing! So now there are some logistics involved in planning domestic jobs!
I also need to remember to plan any bread-making in my brilliant new bread-maker around the generator times, but I am learning that have to plan for unexpected blips, like the other day when the generator ran out of diesel or something and was switched off at an unscheduled time, leaving my loaf half-baked in a redundant machine! Fortunately, my gas oven was on for baking, so I slipped the loaf in to the oven to finish it off. The oven was the wrong temperature for bread, so my loaf came out burnt outside and doughy inside! We had an interesting lunch that day!!
Just to add a bit of spice, sometimes the Juba city power supply is working. To save burning fuel unnecessarily, the city power will run on our homes and over-ride the generator, which is then turned off. This means that we may have bursts of power in our generator sockets at unprecedented times. At night, for example, a machine may burst into life that was assumed to be off for the night while the generator is scheduled to be off. One night, our air conditioners suddenly sprang into action and woke us all, freezing us in our beds just as we had acclimatised to the hot air of a Juba night!
It is all very confusing and I still have a lot to get used to in this whole electricity department!
Another thing to get used to is the city environment around us. It can be too easy to stay in my house, switch on the air-conditioner (if it is generator time!!) and tune out the life of the people of Juba whose country I am living in. However, all I need to do is look out of my bedroom window to remind myself that this is Africa and that life for many is lived without western comforts that I too often take for granted:
When I see my neighbours lighting their fires to cook their meals, or traipsing through the mud between the different parts of their living quarters or carrying their buckets of water for washing, I face the fact that we are living in a developing nation- and one that has a turbulent recent history. I have so, so much to learn about living in Juba and the people of this new nation where we are now based.
One thing, though, remains the same: my children's fascination for all things related to nasty creatures such as lizards or snakes! Esther and Ben found these little eggs in the compound and are trying their best to encourage them to hatch in a sheltered part of our garden:
