Bloodcurdling

"Bloodcurdling". This is not a word we often use.
Yet the word itself brilliantly expresses its own meaning. On Wednesday evening this week, bloodcurdling is exactly the word I needed to describe what I was hearing.

About 10pm, I was downstairs in our office room, trying to catch up with a few emails. Suddenly, a terrible screaming noise started. At first, I thought it was stray dogs howling- a frequent night-sound in Africa. As the noise persisted, I listened more intently and then noticed that I could hear dogs barking separately to the screaming. This meant that it was not dogs I could hear.

The noise worsened in volume and pitch. It became a desperate, howling scream. I realised with horror that it was a woman screaming somewhere nearby. I opened the window to try and gauge where the awful sound was coming from, In the black of a Juba night, it was hard to tell exactly where the lady was; but it was easy to tell that she was in great distress.

I felt afraid for her but did not know what to do. In Juba, I can't rush outside to help- it simply would not be wise. I can't call 999.

I could not settle to work again and I could not sit down, because I was aware of some terrible event happening. It was a a fear-filled scream. My mind slipped into question mode:
Was she being raped?
Was someone attacking her by the compound wall?
Was someone trying to kill her?
Was someone going to attack her and then come to attack us inside the MAF compound?

Disturbed, I said a prayer for the woman. I paced the room- but when the dreadful banging noises and the shout of men's voices reached me, I bolted upstairs to wake my sleeping (worn-out-pilot) husband. Then I burst into tears. My palms were sweaty, my legs were shaking. Some dreadful, horrible thing was happening to a lady and I could do nothing to help.
Despite me waking him so abruptly, Andrew was tranquil and sensible, calming me down. But it was a horrible situation. I also felt fearful. Was the banging sound just a preliminary noise before another shooting incident?

The screaming stopped after maybe 10 minutes. After 15 minutes or so, the frightening banging noises stopped. The sound of voices began to fade.

I did not sleep well that night. I kept waking up, worried about the woman and upset for her.

The next day, our MAF neighbour took a translator with him and went round to the houses behind MAF to ask people what had happened. It transpired that one of our neighbours had a violent husband. In a fit of rage, this husband had tried to kill his wife, attempting to break her neck. When that did not work, he resorted to savagely beating her. That is what we at MAF had heard, along with her desperate screams for survival.

Thankfully, other local neighbours intervened, They removed the man by force and beat him in turn!
He is now in prison.
The woman is in hospital,
Her young son, who must have been there for the incident in their tiny hut-home, is being looked after by relatives.

 I hope we can visit this lady at her house when she comes out of hospital, to show our support for her in this horrible situation.

Domestic violence, sadly, happens all over the world. But Juba is the first place in my life that I have ever heard such a horrifying sound of someone screaming for their life. A truly bloodcurdling sound.

New Aeroplane

Last Saturday, we had a special celebration to mark the arrival of a new aeroplane in the South Sudan fleet.

This smaller plane is the "182" (for technical details, you will have to contact Andrew, since my knowledge of aeroplanes is still sketchy, even after 6 years with MAF!).

As far as I understand, it has 4 seats and is therefore more cost-efficient for any partners who may not need the larger 14-seater caravan plane, which is the plane Andrew normally flies. 

As a team, many of us went to Juba airport, to dedicate this plane:  

Our Programme Manager, Bastiaan, started by saying a few words, highlighting the significance of this new plane for the work we do in South Sudan. It was only 10:30 in the morning, but it was already very hot, so  you can see us here sheltering under the shadow of the larger MAF caravan! There was a caravan parked either side of the smaller 182.

Next, we gathered for a short time of prayer to dedicate this plane- to pray that it will be well used to bring hope and blessing to the people of this country:

Monitoring the Situation

We have recently been graced with visits from this handsome chap:

This is a Nile Monitor Lizard.
He is impressive, with his circular markings. He is about 75cm long. We get lots of lizards and geckos in Africa, but I had never seen a monitor lizard before coming to South Sudan.

Unfortunately. our South Sudanese neighbours who live on the other side of the wall keep trying to kill him. As soon as he appears on our wall, I feel my stress levels rise. I dread the moment when our neighbours realise he is there and start poking him and then trying to beat him with long sticks that they brandish wildly above the wall level.

Earlier today, there were two monitor lizards on our wall, but suddenly, the sticks appeared from the other side. One of the lizards was knocked down into the neighbour's compound. I imagine that was the last we will ever see of him :-(
I ran outside, shouting, "STOP!" but it was too late.

It can be uncomfortable for me, living next door to a culture which can seem so cruel to animals. I asked Grace why the neighbours are so intent on hurting the monitor lizards. She replied that locals eat them ("they are like chicken", she said) or they sell them to foreigners, who apparently buy them to make them into medicine or for their skin.

Still, it is sad to witness cruelty to these fascinating creatures...

Magic Time!

We have had a little excitement at breakfast times in our Juba home this week...

I found a new kind of cereal in town!

It was on special offer: just 20 South Sudanese pounds a box = around 80 pence. What a bargain for Juba!!! This is truly an unheard-of price for cereal here!

Normally, we just eat Weetabix for breakfast, because it is the only cereal with a decent price in Juba, at around £5 a box. Most of the other cereals are priced around £8 a box. I find it very difficult to pay £8 for a box of cereal which lasts about 3 days!

However, these "Magic Time" bargains were not to be ignored! I happily stored 5 boxes of this "magic" cereal in our larder. The expiry date is for December - hence the special price!! They already feel a little less crunchy than they maybe ought to, but we don't care.
I have never heard of "Magic Time" Cereal before, but once again, we don't care. The vital thing is that this cereal is NOT Weetabix!!
I am happy to report that the children love them...

However, I am not one to go for sugary cereals myself, so with the money saved from the boxes of  "Magic Time", I went a bit wild and treated myself to this:

The price seemed rather eye-watering, at 153 South Sudanese Pounds:

I tried not to work out this cost in English money. I preferred to be in denial about the amount of money I was spending on a single box of cereal! Anyway, last week's exchange rate was 16 South Sudanese Pounds to 1 American dollar and then I still needed to convert that to English pounds. All that arithmetic was a little challenging for my mental maths whilst I was out and about on a shopping trip!

Impulsively, I grabbed the Rice Crispies, paid for them along with the Magic cereal and took it all home. I have been enjoying a bit of Snap, Crackle and Pop every morning this week- what a nice change from Weetabix! It was a little on the expensive side, but with fluctuating exchange rates, I am still rather hazy as to the exact price!

Still. at least we got a bargain for the children's breakfasts, with our nearly-finished Apple Rings, our (not-so) Crunchy Way and our Choco-Wows!!

Gettting There and Back Again

Getting to our R and R in Nairobi and getting back to Juba again is always a mini-adventure!

Today, I can finally post a few photos from the two journeys. Recently, internet troubles have plagued me and time has been difficult to find. So this a belated update on last month's journey to R and R and our return home to Juba!

Going to Nairobi
Organising the family to leave the house at 7am is always a challenge!

We must ensure that we have all the relevant luggage, documents, paperwork, picnic lunch, flask of tea (there are no air-stewardesses to give me tea on the MAF flight!!) and a travel bag (with tissues, hygienic wipes, loo roll for any emergency 'squatting behind the bush' at village air-strips and changes of clothes in case of a repeat of our March MAF flight vomiting experience!!).
Finally, of course, we must remember all 3 children!

I also need to make sure that the children are fed, the cat is fed, our neighbours have the door-key, the beds are stripped and that the sheets put into the washing machine, as other people will be using our house while we are away. Thankfully, Grace will be coming to work in the house on this day, so she can hang the sheets out to dry and wash up breakfast dishes, which is a great help!

We tumbled out of the house by 07:05 and assembled in the car-park for our lift to the airport. It was such a rainy day! When we got dropped off outside the airport, it was rather muddy:

We boarded our plane with the other passengers, including a Bishop...

Our first stop was the bush-strip at Kapoeta.
Interested locals gathered under the wings and took great interest in the off-loading passengers.
I'm glad they were distracted... it meant that the children and I could sneak off behind some bushes to make good use of our emergency loo-roll, somewhere discreet... MAF planes are too small to install bathrooms!!

 As we took off, some of the young people watched us strange foreigners departing in the MAF plane:

 We had a second stop at Kuron, where the Bishop alighted from the plane. The Bishop runs an inspirational programme there, which Andrew has visited (for more info, see Andrew's blog, with the post on "Kuron").
By that point, I had terrible pain in my ears and sinuses because I had a head cold. Every descent through the changing air pressure caused incredible discomfort. Joel was also starting to go a little green... So I have no photos to show you from Kuron, although I can tell you that it is a beautiful spot.
I would have loved to speak with the locals who met the plane, but my ears were so painful that I could hear nothing at all! The locals were dressed in very little except animal skins. They were decorated with tribal scars. The children wore nothing at all. It is the most remote bush location I have ever been to.

The next stop was Lokkichoggio, where got stamped into Kenya at the small Immigration office. Lokkichoggio is where Joel started to vomit. I started to feel tearful, seeing him suffering and also feeling more ear-pain after this third descent. It was lunch-time, but two of us definitely did not feel like eating!

Finally, we got to Nairobi and arrived at our Nairobi home around 4pm- just in time for a lovely cup of tea with our neighbours! We had made it! Joel had only vomited 4 times in total, which is an improvement on the 9 times on our previous MAF flight!
We were glad to be on the ground again and happy to start our R and R!

Travelling Home

I have to report that our journey back to Juba from Nairobi was the best and most unadventurous journey I think we have ever done! It was such an easy, trouble-free experience! :-)

Nobody vomited.
Nobody had a head cold, so no-one suffered with ear-ache or sinus pain.
And we only had 2 stops on this particular day, which made the whole journey much, much easier! It is the descents which seem to cause sore ears and dodgy tummies, so it was nice to have less of them.

Waiting to board the plane at Nairobi:

I also employed a couple of strategies to help smooth the way and to help pass the time:

1. We had anti-travel-sickness pills for breakfast! (all of us except Andrew!)
2. I bought myself some brain-numbing reading material, to distract me from any queasiness or bumps on the flight! It was a happy distraction, to escape into the shiny world of the Rich and Famous for a couple of hours by means of a glossy magazine:

What a great journey home! Here are the contented travellers:

 

And here is our descent into Juba, coming in to land over the River Nile just after lunch time, with thankful hearts for a trouble-free, smooth and happy flight! :-)

Fuel Queue

Here are some pictures of part of yesterday's queue for fuel, disappearing into the distance, right up to the end of the road. It carries on round the corner and then continues all the way up the next street. This must require so much patience from the drivers!
The queue we saw at 08:30 this morning was even longer than this...!

When There Isn't...

When there isn't much petrol, getting around Juba becomes tricky.
At the moment, there is a severe shortage of petrol in town.

On the mornings I go jogging, the streets are unusually quiet. Vehicles are few and far between. When we jog past the hospital, it is eerie, as the noisy mini-bus taxis are conspicuously absent. Normally, these minibuses come bumping past us, sometimes with heavy, thumping music disturbing the early morning. They grind to a halt at the roadside, the rusty doors swing open and crowds of passengers spill out onto the street. The fact that there are usually lots of people being dropped off on this road is one of the reasons it appeals to me as a jogging route, since I feel safer with lots of people and movement around. But at the moment, it is rather quiet.
Likewise, the petrol station, where I often run through the concourse to take a short-cut (!!) is now fenced off, to prevent cars from entering, as its fuel pumps are not operational (the fence also prevents lazy joggers like me from taking a short cut!).

When the garages do open to supply fuel, the queues of cars, motorbikes and trucks snake a long way down the street. It can take a long time for vehicles to get to the fuel pump, as the drivers wait their turn.It is a strange sight, to see these long queues, waiting so long in the sweltering heat.

On Tuesday, we were due to meet up with our YWAM friends for a swim at a nearby hotel. The hotel is only walking distance for us, so it is for us easy to get to. But our friends live right across town. They do not own a car and on Tuesday, they were unable to find any transport at all to bring them to the hotel. The Mum had to spend her afternoon consoling her 3 disappointed children, who had been looking forward to their swimming outing. This may not sound very dramatic, but if it is one of only a few outings a week for home-schooled kids, it is a big deal for them.

At MAF, we are able to find fuel to continue to operate and to be able to drive to shops or to church on Sundays. However, we are aware that supplies are low and that this has a big impact for many in Juba. Our house-lady Grace finds it very difficult to get to work from her house across town and sometimes needs to take several different mini-bus taxis to get here or return home. This obviously costs more, as each driver demands a fare, but each transport vehicle cannot take passengers a full route at the moment. It is a real problem.

Another thing which has been lacking this week is reliable internet in our house! We have had some startling, crashing thunder-and-rain storms recently and they seem to have knocked a vital component of our internet receiver off the roof. Today, I am attempting to write this in the schoolroom, using the office network for internet; so if you can read this today, you can know that I have found a way around the fact that there isn't a strong internet connection at home!

Beautiful Africa

We had a lovely break away from SS with a recent visit to our next-door neighbour country, Kenya. We spent a few days at the Kenyan coast. The long stretches of white sand, the crystal clear seas, the incredible sea creatures...It is all so beautiful...

Back Home

We are back in Juba! We arrived home yesterday, with boxes full of food supplies and our heads full of happy memories from a lovely time in Kenya!

One of the items I was determined to bring back from Nairobi was a bunch of roses. It is not every day a girl gets red roses- and I have never seen a bouquet of roses in Juba- so I thought it was well worth trying to bring back this beautiful bouquet. Here they are, wrapped up in paper, complete with a bag of water secured around the stems, ready to travel on our MAF flight from Nairobi:

 I had already enjoyed these gorgeous blooms for 2 days in Nairobi, since they were given to me, but it seemed such a waste to leave them behind in Kenya. So I carefully tended them, as they trundled through the airport luggage-scanner and as they sat for 4 hours on the MAF plane.

I am happy to report that they made it! Here they are on our table in our Juba home! :-) It is something very special to have fresh flowers in Juba!

These roses are a luxury item to bring back. They really brighten our lounge! However, one of the necessities we were obliged to bring back was cat food for Woodlee, the cat we inherited from the previous occupants of our MAF house. Knowing that it will be a few months before we can get to a cat-food shop, we had to buy in bulk.
Last month, we ran out of cat food for Woodlee and he stubbornly refused to eat anything, growing thinner and thinner by the day, but rejecting fresh meat, tuna, chicken remains... what a fussy cat. This leaves us with no choice but to stock up on cat biscuits for him, so that he does not punish us by starving himself to death and leaving us with a guilt complex! Yesterday saw us staggering through the front door with 16 kilos- yes, sixteen kilos- of cat biscuits from Nairobi, to feed the fussy feline.

 Do you think Woodlee was grateful? Sadly, not a bit of gratitude was expressed. After feeding him today, he promptly threw up, all over my freshly-mopped floor..... grrrrrrr!!!!!

When we got home, I needed to get to work making bread for our meals. My fabulous bread maker was put straight to use.
The flour I was using has been in my larder since early October. I didn't think to check it for any possible "changes" that may have occurred whilst we were away, so I merrily threw 500 grams of flour into the bread pan and pressed the "Start" button.
It was only later, when Ben and Joel decided to "help" me by making some cakes, that I got the same flour out of the larder. This time, I realised it was alive! Sitting in my larder for a couple of weeks in Juba heat is not good for flour. All kinds of revolting little creatures had come to life and were having a party in the flour! I got out the sieve and cupful by cupful we sieved out the culprits: maggots and weevils:

This means our cakes are hopefully bug-free. But it was too late for my bread- which means that tomorrow we will be eating bread that may have a unique crunch to it and perhaps a slightly different flavour!?!

Anyone for some Weevil-Maggot Loaf?