Not a single story

It has been a while since I blogged about my life in South Sudan and not because I was lost for words but because the internet connection of our Yei field office was closed due to financial constraints. Modems were used to supplement such a lack but their extremely low speed can discourage even the most prolific creative mind, therefore I used internet only for necessary communication and I largely disconnect myself from the rest of the world. It’s easy to feel lonely when you are the only resident of a compound located in the outskirts of a semi-urban town and the only friends you have are either your South Sudanese colleagues who go home after work or your life-time friends who are tons of miles away from you. But being detached by the so-called virtual reality pushed me to discover the reality around me, and one of the things I learnt by liberating myself from the net was that I was not alone at all. The compound was actually inhabited day and night by men wearing uniforms and smiley faces: the guards.

Almost every NGO and UN agency has one, two or more security guards to protect its staff and its assets. We had two during our working days and one during the weekend, who became my best companion. E. is a 28 years old guy with whom I spent almost all my Saturdays and Sundays chatting, cooking, learning Juba Arabic, going to church before his day shift starts, going to visit his beautiful wife and his equally beautiful kids after his day shift ends. E. was my door opener, the guide in the unknown alleys of Yei who gradually disclosed to me its majestic teak and mango trees, its streams and rivers, its neighborhoods, coffee-places, restaurants and bars.

The reality I came to be familiar with was quite different from what I initially know or I thought to know. I was particularly surprised on how fast the perception of the world around me changed in the course of few months.

The mind of a white Westerner who has never been in Africa as me is full of pre-conceived images of this continent, that a generally sensationalistic press described as ravaged by poverty, war and a sense of hopeless disillusionment. However, by strolling around the streets of Yei, I came to understand that what is destroyed can be reconstructed, what is lost can be regained, and that the bare-feet children who populate way too many European charity adverts, are not necessarily poor but are just playing upon their own soft and sandy land.

I don’t want to propose a too rosy picture of South Sudan, a country which I still know too little and of which I have seen only the better off areas. I know that South Sudan is fragile as it could be a two years old infant, with a lot of ongoing emergencies and challenges ahead. But to portray only the hardships of South Sudan won’t do justice to the enormous efforts that its citizens are doing to stand on their feet and it will still mean to tell a “a single story of catastrophe”  which is how the entire African Continent has been told for too long.

And yet, after 10 months of blessed solitude which never made me feel isolated but on the contrary in unison with the universe, it came the time to leave Yei. Before us, other NGOs have left the compound where we were working (and I was the only one living), to operate in other areas of the country. After the completion of the ALP project, we were the last to say goodbye to this beautiful place, its bougainvillea, its foxy cats (which stole my dinner so many times), its starry sky and fairy fireflies which used to appear as a predictable surprise every night. 

Now, the nature of Yei has given way to the people of Juba, the magic of solitude to the magic of encounters, a shitty internet connection to a fast and efficient one, thanks to which I can tell my stories again.