To the North of the South

Few weeks ago, I have been sent to an assessment visit to Northern Bahr El Ghazal to assist Daniel in collecting information, looking for local partners, establishing connections with the international ones in order to possibly implement a 18 months project that will start in January next year. Ibis would like in fact to expand its activities up to the North where the need for education is great: for example, only in Aweil North County, one of the three counties chosen by the State Ministry of Education as a potential operational area, 65 out of 80 schools are under the trees, do not have qualified teachers as well as trained education officers to inspect and monitor their work. However, the learners’ enrollment is quite high, teachers, who usually do their job on a voluntary basis by being paid in kind by the community, are committed and the education officers are willing to improve their skills. For this reason, Ibis is now writing a proposal that, if accepted by the European Commission, can become a project focusing on the capacity building of all the education stakeholders just mentioned above.

For the time being, here are some of the pictures taken during the hectic days spent in Northern Bahr El Ghazal where we had limited time and a myriad of tasks that somehow we managed to accomplish fully. It was tiresome but exciting to see another part of South Sudan very different from Central Equatoria: geographically flat, culturally arabized, ethnically Dinka.

The Director General of the Ministry of General Education and Instruction of Northern Bahr El Ghazal State read carefully a summary of the project that Ibis would like to implement.

Daniel Wani collects quantitative and qualitative data regarding the status of education in Northern Bahr El Ghazal State that are going to enrich the proposal and will be the base for the design of the activities. 

Nicolò Di Marzo leaves the Ministry in his official car…

The coffee/tea culture of Aweil Town: before starting our morning, drinking a franzai (caffelatte) and eating freshly baked bread was a must.

On our way to Aweil West and Aweil North: Northern Bahr El Ghazal is flat as Denmark but with storks instead of seagulls.

I was trying to take a picture of the under-the-tree-schools...

...but quite a number of learners took over the background…

ConcernWorldwide  has been operating in Northern Bahr El Ghazal since 2001. They hosted us for one night in their extremely nice compound where each tukul is a room. 

I and Daniel prepare the schedule for the next day while enjoying fresh air. 

The Education Officer of Aweil North County stands up proudly in front of his (tiny) office.              
He is the only to work in one, since his colleagues work outdoors due to lack of adequate working places.

The United Nations Humanitarian Hair Service (UNHAS) facilitate the mobility of food, medicines and NGO personnel around South Sudan.  Here Daniel ready to jump in and go back to Juba. 

I am reading V.S. Naipaul’s The Masque of Africa, a travel book centered on the theme of African beliefs. The following lines can describe in better words the South Sudanese landscape that I saw from the plane: “The land was green: not the dark green of primeval forest, but the fresh green of land that had grown things many times over and was still fertile, requiring only rain and sun to burst into new vegetation [….]. I was under the spell of the empty green landscape, which I hadn’t seen before, not in Trinidad, not in India: wide and green and empty”. 

Radio Miraya or the power of words

Since I set foot in South Sudan, a jingle has become part of my daily soundtrack, the jingle of “Radio Miraya, the pulse of a new nation”. Radio Miraya was launched on June 30 2006, in partnership with the United Nation Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) and the Fondation Hirondelle, a Swiss NGO constituted by journalists and humanitarian workers, whose aim is to support independent information in war, crisis and post-conflict zones. With the help of the Fondation Hirondelle, 30 millions people are getting free information in countries such as Kosovo, Timor Leste, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Liberia, DRC Congo and South Sudan, where Miraya (which means Mirror in Arabic) is able to cover the whole country thanks to its 25 transmitters and its 140 national and international staff members. No wonder a recent survey has ranked Radio Miraya the first radio of South Sudan for credibility and quality of information provided.

I get up at 7:15 am every morning but I start to wake up only when I tune to Miraya Breakfast Show, whose most popular feature is probably Miraya Connect. According to the Fondation Hirondelle: “after a conflict, societies do not only need to re-build their infrastructures, but they also need to re-build their social network”. From 7:35 to 7:45 am, Miraya Connect receives calls of friends, relatives, classmates and colleagues who have lost touch with their loved ones during the war and hope to re-connect with them through the frequency of Miraya.

I start to work at 8:30 am, so I cannot listen to the other programmes of Radio Miraya, but when I happen to be home, I greedily listen to Tribes from 11:00 am to 12:00 am, which broadcasts traditional music of South Sudan’s myriad of ethnic groups. If I want to be updated about what’s happening at the  moment, I do not only listen to Miraya’s news but also to Inside South Sudan, that in the past weeks has extensively reported on the border clashes between Sudan and South Sudan, on the populations affected by the conflict and on the efforts by communities, aid organizations, UN and governments to assist them. When I prepare my dinner at 7 pm, my guests are those of the Round Table, a daily discussion programme about the topical events effecting South Sudan. I do enjoy very much their company, since they change every day, they let me eat all my food without asking for sharing it and do not get offended when I don’t listen to them anymore.

Yei has also its own radio station, Spirit FM, which has hosted Ibis few months ago for a talk show. It was difficult to believe that through the red velvet walls of a tiny room, the voices of Felix Amule, Central Equatoria State Coordinator for Budgeting and Planning, Daniel, the ALP project manager and those of the County Education officials could be heard by thousands of people listening on how important is the role of parents in the education of their children. But the dozen of calls we got from the listeners, swept away my doubts. In a country where almost nobody has power at home and where few can read or buy a newspaper, a radio which run on batteries remains the only source of information. Fortunately radio waves, as words, can float throughout households and clans and villages spreading knowledge at no-cost as the South Sudan’s Ministry of Education Science and Technology (MoEST) has noted. The MoEST has in fact implemented a Southern Sudan Interactive Radio Instruction (SSIRI) project, that provide learning opportunities for children, adults, and teachers with activities like: the Learning Village, whose lessons are designed to complement classroom instruction in local language literacy, English language, mathematics, and Life Skills; RABEA (Radio Based Education for All) that provides an opportunity for learning or strengthening English language skills; Professional Studies for Teachers, a distance learning course to improve the teaching practice.

Thanks to Radio Miraya, I rarely walk without my portable radio, which has become a faithful companion to my no more lonely meals. 

4 Easter holidays and a funeral

A happy belated funeral

The Easter break has coincided with my induction to South Sudanese culture, or at least to a small portion of it, since more than 200 tribes, each with their own language and custom, form the shape of this country.

Saturday preceding Palm Sunday, Daniel, the project director, has invited me for a funeral to his hometown in Lainya county. Nobody has never invited me for a funeral before and I have never thought that I could be so happy to go to such an event. The funeral celebrated the death of an elderly member of Daniel’s family who left this world 3 years ago without having a proper ceremony that accompanied his last journey, since the economy of the family couldn’t assure a decent party at that time. A funeral usually last more than 3 days and requires that all the members of the clan are invited to exchange goats that would be eaten after the religious functions and before the dances. If we consider that Daniel’s clan is the biggest of the whole county, counting 13 families under its umbrella, we can easily imagine why they waited 3 years to hold a decent reception. But now time (and wealth) has come and here I am, seated under a gazebo listening to a pastor who makes the audience bursts into laughter every two sentences of his speech. Unfortunately I don’t understand what he is saying, and Daniel who was patiently translating for me, has now gone to fetch water for the guests. The only words I pick up are: hallelujah, amen, ibis. I think I am too much Ibis-focused and I just heard this name everywhere but Daniel’s cousin, who has now taken his place next to me, explained me that this kind of gathering are often used to mobilize and sensitize communities to encourage enrolment and retention in school. I realize that those are what are called ‘Education Advocacy Activities’, and that the guy who said the word Ibis was not the comic-pastor, but one of our local government counterpart, since Lainya is part of our ALP program.

Prayers are over and we find restore under the shadow of a tukul, where Daniel, his cousin, Ibis counterpart and I, eat delicious goat stew and drink Nile beer. Daniel explains me that he belongs to the tribe called pojulu, that together with the kuku and kakwa belong to the bari group, the largest ethnic minority of Central Equatoria State. 80% of the South Sudanese population are instead  dinka, who are traditionally a pastoralist community as the mundari. Living together in such a melting pot is hard, and recent inter-tribal clashes showed that South Sudan is still in search of a common identity. “But things are not easy for a new country” says Daniel, whose borders are, somehow, simpler to define than its sense of nation.

Music has started and the youth will soon drink and dance, but we have to go back to Yei (probably because we are not young anymore..) before dark gets darker.

Chilling out in Kajo Keji

Thanks to Abdu’s hospitality, I spent my Easter holidays at his home in Kajo Keji, a lovely town right at the border with Uganda.

I first reach Abdu in Juba where he has gone in advance to apply for his jinsia or Nationality Certificate, a document that has become quite valuable since the majority of job applications are for ‘South Sudanese nationals only’. The latter must provide a witness who demonstrate their relationship with their own country and Abdu’s uncle proves to be the right candidate, since Abdu has successfully got his jinsia and is now applying for his passport, while I wait outside the Immigration Bureau drinking avocado juice and filling the first sudoku of my life. It’s too late to go to Kajo Keji as we initially planned, so we spent the night at Abdu’s sister’s place, where her daughter entertains me singing the national anthem that she has just learnt at school and teaching me Juba Arabic.

The day after, Rose, our Juba colleague, who is also from Kajo Keji and is going with a friend’s car back home, give us a lift. The road to Kajo Keji lies in very bad conditions, besides we are 6 in a car and I am squeezed between Abdu and two other plump individuals. It’s a painful journey that at the same time brings me back pleasant memories of past trips with always too many people for a single auto. Fortunately, the miserable position doesn’t discourage my travel companions from discussing passionately. Rose, Abdu and the others are all in their 30s and have all found refuge in Uganda during the war. Despite having spent  almost 20 years of their life eating one food-ration per day, they have not only suffered deprivation in the camps, but have also had the chance to get an education that now pays off. They are in fact, the backbone of a South-Sudanese intellectual middle class, prepared and committed to reconstruct and lead the country.

After 6 hours ride and flat tyre in between, we are finally at Abdu’s house surrounded by his smiling wife and his 4 happy children.

The relaxing serenity of a deserved holiday is what characterize my days in Kajo Keji. I oversleep every day, eat tons of mangos every three hours, play with the kids every minute. I also go downtown with Abdu, involve myself in surreal conversation with the neighbours (“ Is your country there?”—asks the old lady pointing somewhere in the horizon — “…..yes…..” — “I knew it: you people come all from the direction of sunset”), listen to Italian music with Father Ezio, a Comboni father who lives there since three years. On Easter Sunday, I discover that Abdu is actually a Muslim and that I will spend Easter in alternative day: I will wash his car.

Abdu is the first person I know who has bought a car on-line from a Japanese retailer who shipped it from Tokyo to Mombasa, and he is probably one of the few people in Kajo Keji to own one. If buying a car is the dream of every well-respected family, in Abdu’s case it has made the joy of the whole neighbourhood. All the children of the area are in fact willing to clean the car, certain that this will ensure a ride around the countryside. We have almost an entire kindergarten seated in the back, 

who fall asleep 10 minutes after we get off. They are surely used to the luxurious vegetation, waving hills and limpid blue sky that I greedily admire from the window.

It’s hard to come back from holidays especially when it means leaving the fresh air of Kajo Keji for the hot air of Juba, but we have to stop by the capital on our way to Yei, because Abdu has to pick up his brand-new passport of his brand-new country. We compare it with the Sudanese one he used until  9 July, 2011,  that didn’t allow him to go to Israel.

Now he can go everywhere.

  

Streets of Juba

I am back after more than 2 weeks in Juba, the momentary capital of South Sudan, since Ramciel has lately been preferred to this old town that after the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement has been transformed into a metropolis.

Juba has now paved roads, permanent buildings with yellow-earth walls, an university named after its name, a mausoleum erected to the memory of John Garang de Mabior, and thousands of people who come from all over South- Sudan, from all over Africa, from all over the world. Returnees from Khartoum, IDPs escaping the recent clashes in Jonglei State, Somalis in their black-red squared tunic, Kenyans with their nose for business, Japanese experts in engineering, and all kind of muzungu (or khawadja, as the white foreigners are called here). During my stay I met:

- a (long-winded) American, who came to Juba on a honey moon in 1985 and decided to construct the guest-house where I was staying, as a 25th anniversary wedding gift to his wife;

- a Canadian, who on Wednesday 14th was working for a tea-company and on Friday 16th signed his resignation letter;

- an Italian, who was a former rock band-lead-singer and former-anthropologist, before joining CESVI, an NGO that together with Ibis is member of the partnership alliance 2015.

But my best encounters occurred at Ibis-Juba office, since I had the luck to meet Rose, Charles and Denis, the freshly appointed staff in charge of implementing a new project that aims at getting the street-children of Juba off the streets.

In 2008 it has been estimated that 1200 children were living along the streets of Juba. Due to their mobile nature, it’s very difficult to establish their exact number, but it’s almost undoubted that their number has increased as has increased Juba population.

The reason why I was sent to Juba was to assist my three colleagues in conducting a baseline survey that aimed at collecting quantitative and qualitative data about the condition of children living in street situation. In the course of these two weeks, we selected the area of intervention of the city, we created the questionnaires to be used for interviewing the children, we trained 8 social workers to be sent to the streets and we finally analyzed the data we gathered.

We discovered that in Juba there are two kinds of street children, ‘children on the street’ and ‘children of the street’, to use UNICEF’s words: the firsts spend most of their time on the street but return home on a regular basis while the seconds live entirely in the streets without any adult supervision or care.

The children of the street of Juba are the most vulnerable and therefore Ibis’ priority. Thanks to the survey we determined that they have chosen the streets because of poverty (the majority of the interviewees’ parents are demobilized soldiers not integrated yet in the new South-Sudanese society), domestic violence (one was harassed with a gun by his mother when he asked why his sister was married at such a young age), lack of parental care (most of them are orphans). Unfortunately what they found in the streets is not so much different from what they left behind. Since they don’t have a shelter they just sleep in the markets where are beaten by the elderly boys, abused by the police officers, and especially in the case of the young girls, raped at night and forced to join the sex industry.

Despite the urban despair they live in, the street kids of Juba are aware that their permanence in the street is temporary (although some have already lived there for 10 years) and they are certain that a bright future is at the corner. Most of them want to go back to school, go back to their family “to help my mother and the nation”,  work hard “to make money and help children like me” .

I and my team were very passionate about the street kids project from the very beginning. And from the very beginning, we got along very well. Although we have just met and worked together from such a short time, we felt like old colleagues who have already old daily habits: our favourite restaurant to eat our favourite food (which is always korofo (greens) that not only taste good but are also believed to be malaria-free), our afternoon strategy to defeat the heat (since our office is a prefabricated little house that gets veeery hot particularly from 2 to 3 pm),  our internal jokes.

But because my colleagues were “very concerned about my loneliness”, we also spent time together after work and went for beers to a place close to the White Nile, one of the two main tributaries of the mythical Nile, that passes trough Juba without being noticed, since you don’t feel the presence of water in such a dry city.

I think we transmitted such a friendly team spirit to all the people we met and worked with during these two weeks, especially our 8 social workers, seconded from the Ministry of Social Development and the CBO Street Children Aid, who were amazingly able to interview 155 children in 3 days.  We were so grateful to these 8 heroes that, under Peter suggested, we invited them for dinner and gave them Ibis T-shirt as souvenir (I got one too!) . 

And we forgot how tired we were before a good plate of chicken-and-fries, chats and laughs.  

Into the field

ALP or the challenge of education

My first internship-week has been quite intense. I observed a lot, I took a lot of notes, I went to a lot of meetings with the local authorities but, most importantly, I went “to the field”. In the slang of my office, “going to the field” means to visit the schools in the surrounding villages of the counties of Yei, Morobo and Lainya where Ibis implements its ALP programme. ALP stands for Accelerated Learning Programme, since it condenses the normal 8 years of primary school into 4, so that over-age children who couldn’t study during the war, can finally have access to basic education.

According to Ibis’ work-plan, the last week was dedicated to what’s called “pre-planning”. Pre-planning is done by the teachers, who have been trained according to the vision of the ALP system and thus are called ALP teachers, who schematize the entire academic year before lesson start (and lessons will actually start this week).

So me and Abdu were in charge to go around the schools of Yei county, which are not called schools but ALP centres, to check whether the teachers were doing their job or not.

We started at 10 and we finish at 17, and we managed to visit 7 ALP centres. The impression that I got was quite various, since some centres were functioning well, the head-master looked committed and the teachers were relentlessly scheming what they will teach to their ALP learners, whereas others registered a poor enrolment rate and teachers haven’t even shown up.

Education is considered by the government of South Sudan as an effective tool to build the nation of this newly born state, and since 2007, Ibis is trying to mobilize and sensitize people on how education can free frompoverty, empower people and help to achieve individual and collective rights. But thing are not that easy, an illiteracy rate up to 85% cannot be easily wiped out and the burden of 21 years-war is still on the shoulder of the South Sudanese people.

That’s why cases like the Jombu ALP Centre really makes you hope for the better.

Jombu ALP Centre is constituted of two permanent building constructed by the parents of the learners, which are located behind the shadow of a huge tree where we found the teachers who were completing their pre-planning. The head-master, a wise man with a wise barb, was proud to say that a conspicuous amount of learners have already registered, and that the community is very keen on raising the mudded walls of a third building to host future students. The role of the community is quite crucial in ALP:  if the community perceives the centre, and thus the entire ALP programme as its own,  it will cherishes for it, even when Ibis will leave. “It’s a matter of psychological ownership” as Abdu says.

I will be curious to come next week and see the learners in their classroom. Abdu explains me that the majority of the learners are demobilized child soldiers, children without parents, young mothers,  between 12 and 18 years of age, who have already a busy life working as farmers or pastoralists. For this reason, ALP classes start in the afternoon to give the learners time to do their jobs in the morning and last three hours, to allow them to go back home to take care of their children.

Despite a certain drop-out rate, learners are usually so passionate about ALP teaching system that end up becoming teachers themselves after having finished their last fourth year, so that a quality education could be guaranteed to the generation to come.

In South Sudan, the appointment of qualified teacher is quite a big challenge as well as the involvement of girls in learning and teaching activities, since early marriages, early pregnancies and a general chauvinist culture is the cause of a big gender gap. Therefore, Ibis’ gender policy is used as the main reference point in ALP programme and even beyond that. Our office in Yei has in fact a female driver, Mariam, who raises quite a fuss every time she takes us around, since Yei people are not that used to see a woman at the wheel.

First night out of Yei or the noises of nature

In my first week-internship I already had the opportunity to sleep “in the field”. This time I was with James, my other colleague whom I share the office with, and Felix Amule, Central Equatoria State Education Coordinator, a key person in the transfer management of the ALP programme that will be given into the hand of the government by August 31^st. This time we went to Lainya county to visit the ALP centres in the early afternoon and to have a meeting with Lainya Commissioner the morning after.

Surprisingly our visits to the centres finished quite early, around 17 pm, so we had nothing to do but go to our guesthouse.

Here I learnt that:

-you don’t need to book in advance a guesthouse which is in the middle of the countryside since the chance to have guests is quite low;

-I always took modernity as granted, but running water and electric light are not things you can easily find everywhere;

Fortunately I am in Yei since no more than 2 weeks, so James has a lot of questions to ask me to kill time before dinner. Here people are very catholic, so I always make a good impression saying that I am from Italy where the Vatican city is. James seems quite inspired by my story so it turns on his cell-phone to listen to a gospel song that says “…Jesus has changed the rhythm of my heart…”.

Jesus has surely changed the rhythm of his heart but wasn’t able to change the rhythm of this song since I have been listening to if for the last two hours, given that James has fallen asleep with his cell-phone on his belly.

I am not only hypnotized by the music, but also from the continual coming and going of the owner of the guesthouse, a Kenyan woman who, water-can on the top of her hand, goes back and forth between the nearby borehole and the guesthouse, to fill the water that her guests will need. But this is how it works in South Sudan, a place that looks like the world when it was born, with red soil that hasn’t been paved and green trees now burnt by the dry season and dark nights without street lamps. I am scared to walk without knowing where I put my feet, but my strategy is to selfishly walk behind James, so that he will be the first to fall down in the ridges of the land.

But nobody falls and we make it to Lainya town which actually wasn’t that far. Here we have dinner with cow beans accompanied with rice, matoke (a puree made out of a green banana, the matoke) and posho (which is a puree made out of I don’t know what). Everything tastes delicious and I am happy to go back and to brush my teeth under an enormous starry sky.

Here in South Sudan, I found out that nature can also be very noisy since cicadas, frogs, dogs, roosters, take you company in the night and wake you in the morning. However, I am sort of fresh and clean for my meeting and we reach the office of the commissioner after a breakfast with chapatti and beans.

It’s my third meeting with authorities since I am here, and I must confess that these commissioner look scary at first sight.  They are big, serious, silent and wear a military uniform. But when they finally open their mouth, always at the end, they are actually nice and smiling. The meeting with the Lainya commissioner is actually the best of the tree I took part to. He seems in fact quite an enlightened man, really committed to implement the Memorandum of Understanding that has been recently signed between Ibis and South Sudan.

One of the nice things about going to the field is that you can buy vegetable or fruit from the street-seller on the side of the road. I buy a bag of cassava, a tuber largely used in South Sudan, that I will eat once back home together with a good beer.

  

Copenhagen-Cairo-Juba-Yei: the journey

Copenhagen-

On February 13^th, I left Copenhagen for Juba where I landed the next day, since my St Valentine’s date was with South Sudan this year.

The first challenge of my trip was: how to get from my place to Copenhagen Kastrup Airport without a valid ticket? I was in fact stupid enough to spend the last money of my bank account buying a ticket to the airport the day before my departure, without knowing that the validity of the ticket starts the same minute you buy it…

To get a 750 kr fine is not exactly the best way to say goodbye to a lovely city as Copenhagen is, but fortunately it didn’t happen, because the patrol on the metro was busy giving a fine to someone else, so I made it to the airport without losing my dignity.

I checked in (I was allowed to bring with me 48 kg and the weight of my one-year Copenhagen life, that I was carrying in my luggage, was 44) with Egypt-airlines and before going to the gate, I killed my time using my really last 20 kr coins to buy a delicious double-cheese burger.

-Cairo-

I discovered that Egypt airline is great. We took off at 14:45 and we arrived in Cairo at 20:30, where we were supposed to wait for 12 hours but Egypt airlines provided us with a hotel not far from the airport which was included in the price of the ticket! Once we arrived at the hotel, another pleasant surprise was waiting for us: free dinner and free breakfast! I definitively consider Egypt airlines my favourite airway company.

On the way to the hotel, I befriended with my first travel companion R., a Lebanese guy, who was also going to Juba. I found out that Italians and Lebanese have a lot of things in common like hand gestures and disrespect for rules. Whereas the others were lining up to get their rooms’ keys, R. sneaked out of the line with non-chalance and invited me to do the same. I couldn’t disappoint my brand-new friend, so I was in my room at the third floor of Le Passage (that’s the name of the hotel) without waiting one minute.

After a quick shower, I went with R. to the restaurant where buffet dinner was already served. R. couldn’t really speak English but during our meal, he managed to tell me that: 

-I shouldn’t drink water while I eat; 

-Lebanese bread is better than the one we will have in Juba; 

-He has a company together with his cousin which sells electric generators in South Sudan.

In order to digest the insane amount of food we ate, we took a walk around the hotel, where in one of the conference room a wedding party was held. We weren’t exactly invited but R. didn’t really care and after a while we were amongst the guests, looking at them dancing and asking the waiter if he could bring us a “whisky-no-money”. If R. makes business as he sneaks into wedding parties, he will definitively make a fortune in South Sudan.

The morning after, we were at the airport at 6:30 waiting for our passports that were temporarily confiscated by Egypt airlines while we were enjoying food and drinks. Another guy was waiting for his passport with us, his name was D. and his destination was Juba too. Although South Sudanese himself, this extremely tall guy was going to South Sudan for the first time in his life after having lived in Cairo, Kenya, holding a British passport and a letter which said he was authorized to see his family in South Sudan. He hasn’t seen his father for more than 20 years.

Juba-

And here we are, me, R. and D. on the same plane to the same place. Egypt looks quite arid from above, the only thing you can see is the serpentine track of the rivers that were once running wild, whose waters have been sucked by the desert nowadays. But, as soon as we approach South Sudan, the landscape changes, everything is “green-dotted” as D. notices with a certain pride. But it’s the vivid brightness of the iron-sheets of Juba’s roofs that welcomes us and marks our arrival.

After having wished the best of luck to my friends, I am ready to set foot in hot Juba, whose temperature is around 40 degrees today, quite a difference from what I left in wondercool Copenhagen.

Peter McCanny, the programme coordinator of IBIS-South Sudan and my supervisor for my 6 months internship, is waiting for me at the entrance of Juba airport, right after the immigration desk where I am trying to get my passport stamped. I wave at him several times but he doesn’t recognize me while holding stubbornly in his hand a sign which says “IBIS”.

But when I am finally done with bureaucracy, I go to him to shake my hand and introduce myself. I am very happy to see him: it’s always very nice to have someone who picks you up at the airport, especially in a foreign country.

In the twinkling of an eye, we are at IBIS office. Here I meet the Juba staff and Abdu, who is instead part of the staff in Yei, my duty station, where I will go with him tomorrow.

I fight with my tiredness while listening carefully to Peter, who after having lived in South Sudan for eight years and worked for IBIS for four years, is surely the right person to talk about this country and what IBIS does here.

It’s time for dinner and I go with Abdu to the nearby guesthouse where we will also spend the night. We sit in the courtyard where other guests are enjoying their meal, and we share our table with N. and W., who are both from Kenya and who work in Juba for the World Bank. The air is fresh, the food is good, the company is enjoyable. They talk about the South Sudan Development Plan, the possible relocation of  the capital from Juba to Ramciel, but they also make fun of the difference between Kikuyu and Masai, the ethnic groups that N. and W. respectively belong to, and of the tradition of donating cattle that the groom has to respect in order to marry his bride.

They are surprised to hear that it’s my first time in Africa:

“Did you take with you a little pharmacy as every foreigner who come to Africa do?”.

I nod embarrassed. They laugh to tears.

Yei

On February 15, at 10 a.m, I am ready to reach my final destination. The distance between Juba to Yei is of only 132 km, however, on a bumpy road, this easily becomes a 6 hour car drive. Fortunately, me, Abdu, Dominique the driver, Abdu’s friend who asked for a lift to Yei and two children who are the sons of a colleague, have a lot to chat on the way. I get to know that Abdu grew up in Uganda as a refugee, came back to Sudan after the war, went to attend a Master in Education and Development in Oslo, and has been working for IBIS since a couple of years.

But Abdu is not the only one to have such an interesting story behind. Once arrived in Yei, I met Daniel, a former child-soldier who greets me with a bright smile saying: “Welcome to Yei, welcome to South Sudan!”. He is Yei’s project manager and will be my mentor during my internship here.

It’s late afternoon and I am taken to my room inside the lovely compound that IBIS share with the Danish Refugee Council. I am tired but I am also excited of all the things that happened in the last two days. Tomorrow it will be my first day at work. And I can’t wait.