Bad Day (Mitigated by some good stuff)

Yesterday was a Bad Day.

To begin with (and quasi most-importantly) I discovered that all my money had been stolen. (Hopefully I will get the heads-up email off to my parents before they read that here). It was about $850. Can we say "OUCH"? The last time I checked it was about a week ago (the day I got really sunburned and went to the market with George) because Ed asked me for $100 to change into Sudanese Pounds and I had my money then. Today was the first day I checked it since because I kept it in the bottom of my suitcase and figured no one would ever find it there. The only thing I can think of is that there were a couple of guys working on our toilets who were in our rooms when we weren't; I think it disappeared then.
Understandably I freaked out and spent all of yesterday in a funk. I know it is only money, but that is A LOT of money-my parents money-money that I am not sure I (or we) could afford to lose. I feel irresponsible and stupid. If I had been mugged, at least I would know for sure how it was taken, and the first question everyone asked would be "Are you ok?" but this was just sheer stupidity on my part. I tried to keep the door locked all the time, but with two people living in the same room and only one key, sometimes it was left unlocked. There are people all around. I didn't think anyone would go in without someone else noticing (which is why I am blaming the toilet cleaners).
I ripped my entire room to shreds three times yesterday looking for it, and put it all back together today (still looking for it) but no sign. So I have to accept that right now, I have about 180 SP's to my name (or about 90 dollars). I know Ed wont leave me with nothing, but the idea of a month and a half here with nothing is scary and makes me feel vulnerable. Not to mention I feel sick every time I think about how much money it was. I hope the damned idiot is using it for like...building a school for blind children or something.

Anyway I was wandering around in a funk about it all morning. Of course that happened to be the day that we were going to the market, so I felt really sorry for myself. I was walking around in my only clean shirt (a zip up hoodie, not even a shirt) because of laundry, and I had the hood pulled over my face so only one eye showed and I was wandering around looking pathetic and a bit like the Grim Reaper. This was also the morning we investigated the car, which brings me to the second reason the day was awful. This car is a death trap. (Hopefully my parents will find this a more compelling and awful piece of news)

The car is a 1994 Mitsubishi Pajero. The flaws with it are numerous. Let me list them:
-No Left Side view Mirror
-Leaking gas tank
-Leaking brake fluid
-No brake lights
-Windows in the backseat don't roll down at all
-Our battery is tied together with a piece of inner tube
-Our seat belts were embedded in the backseat and when we pulled them out, revealed themselves to be coated in oil.
And that's just what we have discovered so far. Our driver, Jerome, is very nice, but hes a twenty year old guy. He is pretty much run on testosterone, beer, and fried goat. He is a good driver, but I worry that the age combined with Death Trap Car will mean fatal accident. Especially considering that according to Ed, car crashes are the most common cause of death in Southern Sudan.
How is this for the world's least reassuring post.

Lets get on to the (mostly) good news.
Ed has inspected the car very thoroughly. I'm going to take some driving lessons on it (it is automatic) "just in case" which isn't reassuring at all, but there you go.
We took it for a test drive with Jerome, which I'll get to.

Back to my bad day. So I'm moping around and somehow get convinced to go to the market with everyone, even though I don't feel like spending money since I am poor. We all cram into the Pajero. It smells like fish. (I mean really, how bad can this day get? The Death Trap Car smells like FISH. WHY?!) There is Ed and Mark in the front seat, Lucy, George, Neesha and I wedged in the back, and Jerome in the trunk, precariously balanced on the spare tire. Keep in mind, this is the first time we have driven this car at all and Ed is driving.
We turn out to be so wedged in that when we stop in the market place and Ed parks, I open the door and instantly fall on the ground. My day, clearly isn't improving, and George decides this is the time to tell me that the reason he convinced me to go to the market is because its not my day and I will be a lightening rod for bad luck, so his day will most probably be great.
We go to the Arab store (I inform everyone what I have been told about Arabs from my Sudanese friends, which is that they cheat people and live in squalor, which may not be true, or politically correct, but it seems to be the opinion of some-though that doesn't mean I should repeat it-anyway). The three of us (G, N, and me) buy some mango juice. The last time George and I were in this store, we were wandering around, dazed and confused, clearly American, and so thirsty that we were practically handing them 200 pounds to give us a soda-and they charged us six pounds. Now, we are with three native people and Ed, and they try to charge us 20 pounds. George and I react in outrage, and Ed tells us that we should yell the word for "change" in Arabic at them.

Want to know what the Arabic word for "change" is? Fucka. Seriously.

We leave Ed with the Arab traders haggling over the conversion rate of dollars to SP's, and go and sit in the market. Ed comes out with two Arab guys and says hes going to drive with them to get money and that we should wait for him. This seems sketchy but we let him drive off blissfully. Lucy, George, Neesha and I wait. And wait. And wait.
We start taking pictures of each other with the merchant hanging out with us. He tells me some men are eyeing me. I ask what a good bride price would be. They say 400 cows at least, maybe 600. Men passing on the street start throwing in their two cents. One guy tells me he would buy me for 400, another one ups it to 500, the Arab merchants sitting with us start laughing and telling me to keep going higher. One guy comes up to me and I think hes offering me cows, before I realize that its Charles, our journalist friend that took us to Lafon and did a radio article about us. We visit for a while and he starts to wander off when I see a donkey cart. I decide I want to pet the donkey.

Unfortunately for me, it turns out Charles knows this particular donkey cart owner, and before I know it, I am trying to struggle my way up onto the donkey cart (yes. there are pictures.) Then the guy tells me "Ride the donkey!".
So I ride the donkey.
The donkey wasn't particularly pleased with this arrangement. He started lurching at people (including a small boy selling eggs) and finally, after literally everyone in the market has pointed and laughed at me, the donkey cart guy says "OK. My donkey is annoyed. You get off now." That was fine with me.
After this debacle we decide we were conspicuous enough, and wandered off into the market. Two other unharnessed donkeys followed us up the street, after one of them caused a traffic jam because I was trying to pet it and it was running away. (sigh) They even waited for us when we went inside a shop, and then continued on behind us.
I decided since my day was so awful, I would buy a chicken (a live chicken!) for us to have for dinner, since we haven't had chicken since Juba and my protein level is like, nonexistent. Of course, the second I decide this, there are NO chickens to be found anywhere in the market. For real? COME ON.
I tried to ask a couple of merchants where we could buy a chicken, but their English wasn't good enough to understand the word chicken. So of course, being a jackass, I start miming and clucking and waving my arms around and going "CHICKEN. CHICKEN"
They got the idea, but didn't know where to find one. One gave us all free lollipops, probably because he thought i was mentally retarded. The children of the market were HIGHLY amused.
After about an hour of searching, I go to find a soda, and voila! a tied up rooster is under a table. We bargain and they sell it for us. I put it in a bag. Armed with my rooster in a bag, we go try to find Ed to give us a ride back for lunch.
(and, by the way, because my day was so bad, of course my lollipop fell out of my pocket while I was walking, so i didn't get to eat it)
I also got a bit attached to this rooster. I wanted to find it a lady chicken to give birth to lots of chicken babies so we could have chicken all the time. (I apparently don't really understand the gestation period of chickens as I thought all of this would happen in about a week and a half). Regardless, no chickens. Ed picked us up and we went back for lunch (which was fish, because my day was just THAT BAD)

But, I'll say something for Ed. He knows how to cheer a girl up. Partly to test the car and Jerome, and partly to make me feel quasi better, he took us on a drive to the Imotong Mountains. It was suppose to be an hour there and an hour back, but we kept on going and didn't get home until seven (we left at two thirty).
The mountains were incredible. Father Ben was our guide (he is 35! he looks like he is 23! I hassled him about this for like, ten minutes). We drove up and down the mills and mountains, past teak plantations (gorgeous) and into what I termed a "jungle" (in the sense that it was a wet forest) There was bamboo growing everywhere. In fact, I hate to add even more nerve wracking information to this post, but we drove through a mine field.
DON'T WORRY. It was mostly cleared. If you drove in between the two painted stones, you were fine. We drove past SPLA barracks and through rivers and over bridges. We finally got to the end of the road-the end of the cleared, mine free road, and stopped briefly at the village of Imilai. The pastor was there so Father Ben chatted with him. I found out where all the chickens of Torit had gone. To Imilai. You have never seen so many damn chickens. And BIG. We took a walk with a guide down to the Kenyatti river (their bridge was a huge tree pitched across the banks) and we walked onto the tree and seriously considered going swimming before I realized that I would of course get schistosomiasis because of my bad luck day.
As we were walking back, this little kid spotted us. He couldn't have been more than like...two. He was butt naked and the second he saw me, sweaty and white, he took off screaming after his parents. This little naked baby was running in front of me down the pathway screaming in terror, screaming "KHAWAJA! KHAWAJA!" so of course I video taped it. I mean come on, it was hilarious.
Then we sat around with the pastor and the chief for a while and talked about the health of the villages which was fascinating because this village is in the middle of nowhere, up in the mountains, about 19 km from any health site. We told him about our plans for nets and he seemed to really like the idea.
Then we headed back. Of course there was thunder and it threatened to rain the entire time. I was in the trunk because Jerome was driving and Ed had to sit up front with him, and I'll be damned if I let someone as brave and noble as Father Ben sit on a spare tire. I actually really liked it back there because there was a window. No seat belt. Sorry dad. But I figure the spare tire kept me pretty wedged in there.
As we were driving back it was night. The fires people were burning their garbage in was spotting the distance with pockets of light. And then, as we got to one of the barracks, we saw the most incredible, huge fires, reaching up higher than the houses, looking like the village was burning down. It wasn't, it was just the grass they were burning, but it was like driving through an inferno, with walls of fire on either side of the road, so close they could have licked the side of the car.
When we got home, Abigail had fried the chicken, and it was delicious. And then George and I got in a mango fight and he threw mangoes in my bed and I had to change my sheets and we bickered and then I read my books the whole night and fell asleep at nine. And during the night, the rain was so hard that I woke up and lay there, listening to it on the tin roof and watching it splash outside the window until I slowly fell back to sleep.