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?

Time for R and R

If all goes to plan, at 7am tomorrow we'll be heading to Juba airport to depart for Nairobi. It is time for some R and R!

It's been an eventful 12 weeks! Along with the usual business of flying and home-school, we've had lots of other excitement....
...unexpected visa delays, strange illnesses, possible political insecurity with the packing of our just-in-case "go-bag" and of course, a fatal shooting on our doorstep. I think we all feel ready for a little change of scenery!
We'll miss our Juba friends, but it will also be good to catch up with Nairobi friends, as well as Andrew's sister and our friend Kay from London, who happen to be in Nairobi this weekend :-)

Unfortunately, Joel is not feeling well this week and spent yesterday afternoon throwing up. He often complains about headaches since his cellulitis a few weeks ago. One of the things we are really keen to get to in Nairobi is the doctor's surgery, to have Joel's health properly checked.

The other things we are looking forward to...

• cheese!
• ice-cream
• fresh, pasteurised milk
• no malaria (the part of Nairobi where we stay is too high for malaria mosquitoes to pose a real threat)
• a week off home-schooling
• cooler evenings
• a chance to go supermarket shopping and stock up on essentials at reasonable prices, as opposed to Juba prices!

R and R, here we come...

Afterwards

After the shooting incident, we found out that it was actually three men who died that day. The gunmen got away with their cash; the three victims were left for dead just outside the fence of our MAF compound.

After the shooting, I find it hard to walk past the spot where I know three people died. It is just so cruel. Also so brazen, to shoot people in broad daylight in the street for their money. But violent crime is one of the hazards in a city with such a checkered history of civil war and fighting.

After the shooting, I find I am more sensitive to the sound of guns and stories of gun-crime. I found myself feeling outraged yesterday when Grace arrived for work at our home and told us that a member of her family had been shot dead in a Juba street on Thursday afternoon. He was 18 years old. An unknown gunman suddenly let loose with his gun. Four people were left dead, others injured.

The motive was unclear: but what is not unclear is that the repercussions are huge for many innocent people. Grace told us that her relative was drinking tea with his friend when he was caught in the line of fire. His friend, aged 22, died alongside him. A young lady from Uganda was another of the victims, busy doing her washing when she was hit, along with a school child walking home from school.

Grace related to us that she is so afraid when she goes to her home at night. She lies down and hears the gun-shots and fears for her 2 young children. Not surprisingly, when her 18 year old relative has just died. She left work early yesterday to go and meet her family for funeral preparations.

Last night, I woke at 2:30am and heard the sound of guns firing. Although we are fortunate to feel secure on the guarded MAF compound, I thought of Grace and how afraid she must feel. I also wondered who else had died last night. I feel like the shooting incident on our doorstep has made me more aware of the danger posed by the sound of gun-shots.
It is a sad fact that crime is escalating in this city where guns are plentiful.

Despite this reality, daily life carries on...

Andrew continues to be busy and enjoys his flying. He has just started up a daily work blog to give a better picture of his flying:  http://andrew-liz-parker.blogspot.com

Joel tells us that his Kindergarten school is "lovely" and comes home with a huge smile every day, which is wonderful to see :-)

For Esther, Ben and I, home-schooling is getting easier. With a year's experience behind us, I can honestly say that we enjoy it (mostly!! when there are not too many maths problems and tests!!):

We enjoy the growing community of friends as we get to know more people in Juba. It is good to be part of an expanding MAF team, as well as meeting more people from outside of  MAF.
Each Tuesday, I take the children swimming at a local hotel with a family from France/South Sudan who also home-school. (They are here in Juba to work with YWAM). Their 3 children match our children in age, so it is great to get together weekly for a swim!
This week, we went with our friend Sue and travelled to the hotel by rick-shaw. The walk is not far, but the sun is HOT, so it was nice to sit in a rick-shaw and saunter along with a through-breeze to cool us down!