The Adventure

George and I headed off to our meeting with the SSRRC. Having been instructed to make friends, we set about shaking hands with every single person we saw. As there was a row of people sitting in the shade of the overhang of the roof, we just made our way down the line. I was practising my Arabic. This is what I've learned so far.FYI I'm spelling them phonetically so don't hold me to this:
Sa-laam Ma-ley-ka: God be with you, doubles as Greetings to you
Kev: How are you?
Qwaace: Fine/Good (or, if you keep saying it, apparently “More More” which George and I found out by trial and error)
Ma-ba-tal: Not bad
Ana: I am, as in I am Emma (Ana Emma, I am Emma)
Is-me: My name is, as in Isme Emma, My name is Emma
Shoek-krun (roll the r): Thank You
Inshallah: God Willing
Boq-ra (roll the r): Tomorrow
Malalaise: Sorry/Too Bad
(these last three are what Europeans use when they have broken something. People come and ask you, can you fix it? And you say inshallah. They come back later and you say boqra boqra. They come back the next day and say have you fixed it and you say malalaise)
I also learned Asante Sana in Kiswahili which means thank you very much.
Anyway we were wandering around the market trying to speak Arabic which made people laugh but i think they gave us credit for trying. The market here is so much nicer than Juba (in fact, everything here is nicer than Juba). The markets are much more open and less crowded here so they seem fresher, cooler, and nicer to shop in. First thing, we got a carton of cold mango juice and a soda with a name we didn't recognize. The mango juice here, when you buy it in stores or order it in restaurants, is in big cartons that in the US you would buy to keep in your fridge for a week. Here you drink it all in one go. It was delicious though. And our soda turned out to be ginger beer. We passed through the Random Stuff quarter where about ten men tried to sell us Manchester United watches, the cloth and clothing aisle where women looked at us and made comments to each other that caused them to giggle (I hope they were nice but they were probably along the lines of-look at that girl. Her legs look diseased. And that boy needs to cut his hair), the Salt and Sugar quarter where I bought some cinnamon (I bought it to chew on, though I'm not so sure that's what you are suppose to do with it, but its like having a cinnamon flavored toothpick, its very nice). The guy who sold it to me tried to charge me five SP (Sudanese pounds) for a tiny bag a little bigger than the size of a match box but when i spoke Arabic (badly) to him and he explained he didn't know English and i explained that i was pretending to know Arabic (all of this through sign language basically) he gave me four pounds back. Everyone was friendly. There were big bowls of salt and cups of rice and packets of Indian tea and arrays of things that looked like relics, the kinds of things you find in really old Five and Tens in the US, that have been waiting to be bought for 20 years. The general store where we got our mango juice ended up having the plugs we needed as well, proving that once you give up on something, you find it. Particularly in Sudan.
We were taking turns at random, and unlike in Juba, where every alleyway had a store, in Torit when we cut through alleys we were often walking right past people having lunch, or just corrugated tin walls. There was less sewage and waste, and we found ourselves ultimately in the Fresh Fruit quarter (which hugged the meat section). The fresh fruit stalls had women sitting at them, wrapped in clothes as brightly colored as their merchandise. There were trees here, so that the stalls didn't need to be covered by tarps, though some where. Everywhere, ordinary people were buying what they would cook for dinner and women were haggling and bargaining and loading sacks of rice onto their heads and testing the ripeness of oranges. The Meat Aisle smelled like raw pieces of meat-indiscernible as having come from any specific animal. Men had hanks of beef or goat or sheep on stumps of trees and were hacking them in half with axes. Piles of chopped up bits of animal insides were heaped on plates, two boys in aprons struggled with a giant cow leg down the middle of the market road. Everywhere there was the strange, tangy, metallic smell of raw flesh and the ground had splashes of blood on it that had dripped down from the stall. One man saw us and called hello and when he responded he said “here! Come here!” and held up a plate with some meat on it which we refused politely and ran away from.
All these twists and turns were great, and provided excellent scenery, but unfortunately we soon got completely lost. We were standing by a mud building that said 'Equatoria Clinic” on the side so we thought we would go in and ask them about health while we were there. When we got to it though, there were just some people sewing inside. So we turned around and headed back the way we came and finally found the place we had gotten bamboo and the disco we wanted to go to. We may go there to watch the soccer game later this week.
We were wandering back, heading over towards the Bishop's house, when a man stopped us. He didn't speak English, and attempted for about ten minutes to mime to us what he wanted. We figured out after about five minutes that it was money and it took us another five to extract ourselves. A small boy wandered up to me while George was struggling with the guy (who kept saying I could leave, but George had to stay and talk to him, which made George very very uncomfortable and amused me to no end) and the boy handed me a 200 shillings note from Kenya (I think). Because i didn't know what he wanted with it i said no, and hello and he gave me “the eye” and swaggered off. He was like eight. George said later he was trying to buy me which made me very very uncomfortable and amused George to no end. As we were about a block and half (if you can divide it like that) from the Bishop's house, a man came up to us. At this point we were pretty wary of men asking for things.
He told us that his boss wanted to speak to us and gestured over to this walled compound. We refused. He insisted. We asked him who his boss was and he wouldn't tell us. He kept saying “My boss needs to see you, for national security reasons.” which i originally laughed at, and he didn't, letting me know that he wasn't kidding around. A second guy came up to us and said the same thing. The kept trying to get us to come to see their boss but they wouldn't tell us why or who their boss was. We kept repeating that we were with the Diocese, that the bishop was expecting us, dropping names, etc, but they wouldn't let up. I honestly thought they had to be kidding that we would be stupid enough to go off with them to talk to the murky character of “the boss” but they clearly weren't.
After about five minutes of arguing, one man said, please, right under that tree. I figured since it was under a tree, and not in a compound, that we would be ok, so I said fine and George looked uneasy and followed. We instantly assessed the situation for guns but we didn't see any. We did notice however, two nice new Toyota trucks, and the fact that the man sitting in the chair that we were suppose to meet had two thuraya satellite phones that he was rather ostentatiously toying with. He was in a graphic printed button up and was reclining in a very nonchalant way in his chair. We shook hands with all of them, and I asked him his name. He wouldn't tell me, and gestured for George and I to sit down. We did.
We introduced ourselves and he said his name was Martin, which is completely unhelpful information seeing as literally a third of the people i have met here have been named Martin. I asked him what group he was from but he ignored me and started interrogating us. He asked who we were and what we were doing in Torit and where we were living (we told him the Bishops compound, which is kind of a lie and kind of the truth). We kept stressing that we were with the church, and good friends with the bishop of Eastern Equatoria, etc, and he kept asking us questions until finally he stopped and said “I could tell you were new here” to which i almost responded “what tipped you off” but I restrained myself. He told us that since we hadn't said hello to them as we walked past, that we had been suspicious and that in Sudan it was common to say hi to anyone you passed, and that he wanted us to learn the Sudanese cultural ways.
We were kind of skeptical about this, and also exasperated since we had been saying hi to everyone all morning, and the one group of people, very secluded under a tree and hidden behind a truck, that we hadn't greeted, and wigged out and declared us a national security risk.
Anyway i finally got out of him that he worked for SLRC (which I'm pretty sure he made up because no one has heard of it) and then he let us go and we scampered off. It turns out they WERE national security, although that isn't a consolation whatsoever. According to Father Vuney, they are THE most hated group of people in Torit and in most of EE state. They are bad guys. He said that in the old days, if you ran into them you often disappeared for a while and people would have to really raise hell to find out where you had gone. Both him and Ed assured us we had handled the situation well, and said next time we should ask for identification cards, but i suppose in this case it might have been pushing our luck. Regardless, both George and I congratulated ourselves on being cool under pressure, and have been spending today swaggering around feeling cool and adventurous. (Especially since later, when Ed picked us up and we parked to look for plugs and left George in the car, they drove their car to where we were and parked across from us. Sketchy much? George was not pleased.)
Anyway now we are back and getting sporadic internet. We are going to go visit the Lutheran neighbors a little later, and Lucy just went to town to get beer and fruit (all you need in life really) and I did some research so I feel ok taking time out to write this.
Also lets be honest. I figured if I left my parents wondering for too long what “George and I had a national security run in gotta go bye!” meant that they might flip out.