Shopping Trip

I spent 446 pounds today on our food shopping.

Here is the list of goods I bought:

6 apples- 15 pounds

2 oranges- 6 pounds

8 bananas- 10 pounds

Then there was the visit to the meat shop, situated near to the airport, where meat is imported directly from Kenya and sold a little bit cheaper than elsewhere in Juba. This was a chance to stock up our freezer for the months ahead.

I spent...

4 small chickens (each chicken weighs 1.1 kg)- 100 pounds

a bag of minced beef (1kg)- 45 pounds

2 fillets of Nile perch fish- 50 pounds

4 kg sausages- 140 pounds

500 grams of cheddar cheese- 35 pounds

2 boerwors sausages - 45 pounds.

To be fair, the pounds I refer to are South Sudanese pounds! The exchange rate to a British pound is about 5 South Sudanese pounds to 1 British pound; this makes my total shopping bill around about £90. This still feels like a fairly large sum of money for the food I bought. I can't help wondering what I would pay at Sainsburys or Tescos for the same amount of food?

I feel like there are 3 things I will have to adapt to in Juba as I shop for our family of 5:

- dealing in the high figures and wads of notes which are required when spending South Sudanese pounds

- gritting my teeth and paying higher prices for foods than I would expect to pay on Kenya, Tanzania or England

- learning how to weigh up the guilt I feel when paying for food with vast amounts of South Sudanese bank notes when I am painfully aware of the poverty around me for the average person I meet behind the shop counter, in the food queue and in the street; and acutely aware of the looks cast on us as we pay our huge food bills. I have to balance this with the need to feed my family with foods that I know are good for them and healthy for my children's growth. It's a very difficult situation.

Today, we are off to visit a soap centre where ladies make soap and sell it, as a way to provide for their families. It is always so much easier to visit these places as a foreigner, when you know that spending money directly benefits the seller. Being a foreigner in Juba, with our foreign eating habits and expensive diet is much harder on my conscience during the average food-shopping trip.