The Convention

I didn’t quite realize how lucky we were to be able to stay in Juba for this health convention until these past few days. For an American college student, it really was a once in a lifetime opportunity-at least for where I am now in my life, when I cant get invited (let alone afford) to fly off to a remote third world city to attend a country-wide health convention.
The convention that we finagled an invitation to was the Disease Control Priorities Convention. It's a three day convention held at the Beijing Juba Hotel (the worst hotel ever constructed by man-but I'll talk about that later) about a mile away from where we are staying (We know. We walked there.) The purpose of it is to bring all the ministers of health from the ten different states together, as well as community leaders or representatives, and experts in different fields, together to learn, discuss and decide on the best ways to combat the biggest health risks in Southern Sudan. It is, in a word, perfect, for what we are doing in Torit. Originally we were going to gate-crash it (the UN party was suppose to be practice) but we sent the organizers an email telling them who we are and casually dropping Bishop Paride's name, and we got a very welcoming email back inviting us to come.
The opening ceremonies of the convention took place at night on Sunday. We walked over that night. It was nice out, but a bit muggy since it had rained earlier but by the time we got to the hotel I was sweating a ridiculous amount.
Quickly, a word about the Beijing Juba Hotel. It is, by common consensus, the least wheelchair accessible hotel ever made. The ENTIRE hotel is made of stairs. But not useful stairs. Completely random, unnecessary stairs, which are not a uniform height, but rather every height of stair possible. Some are large steps down that are literally up to my knee, some are small steps, barely steps at all, that seem to serve no purpose other than to trip you for the entertainment of others. George joked that a stair convention had just finished, but it’s true! The patio has random levels, the inside has random levels, and the entire main hotel is two floors and about 965 different actual levels. There are no rooms in the main hotel, even though it is easily the size of the Camboni Brothers entire compound. Except for VIP rooms (located in the stairwell, where else) the rooms are located in glorified portables and trailers. The hotel itself is constructed out of what looks to be every material found inside home depot (metal sheeting, pvc piping, giant metal grids that I'm assuming are suppose to count as a ceiling) And the floor is TILED in this ridiculous, mind boggling pattern, making it completely impossible for your depth perception to work-at all. Adding to its credentials as “Worst Hotel Ever”, there are doorways thrown up in the middle of a room, slicing the room in half but leading to nowhere and connecting to nowhere. There are doorways (not doors) that do lead places, and those places happen to be huge piles of construction waste. The floors are made out of oak tag pretty much. And this is where they chose to host this convention. (Don’t worry, I'll put up pictures)
Anyway we got there for the opening ceremony. We registered and got these tote-brief case things with a labeled pen, a pad of paper and a schedule. But it says DCP2, Juba Sudan across the front so that’s a cool souvenir. Ed convinced us to wait until every other person at the event (150 people) had gotten their food before getting on line, so that we could schmooze. Lesson Number One: Schmoozing is much more successful if people have been fed-no one wants to talk to you if they have an empty stomach. So finally we got fed up with waiting for him so we got on line and ate-Chinese food! It was weird. And Chinese wine, I rediscovered, is awful. But we met the Minister of Health for Eastern Equatoria (a woman), and a man named John Rumunu who is one of the big guys in the government (it’s his signature of approval that we need to get our grant) so the night wasn’t a waste. They had this big grill up on the side of the patio looking out over the hillside, and the trees were all lit up with Christmas lights of red, green and blue that twinkled and zigzagged and would have made any epileptic have a seizure, but it was definitely pretty. The sun was setting and the whole place smelled like roasting meat and they put candles on every table (stuck onto a plate, I’m not sure how they managed that one) and the bugs kept away by and large. The only problem was that people kept falling off the buffet line because they didn’t notice that there was a huge stair they had to go up and down.
The second day (or rather the first day) of the convention was on Monday. It started at eight am, so for the first time since getting here, I got up early and saw what Sudan looks like in early morning sunlight (very pretty, very blue). We headed over with the assurance from Ed that they would be serving us breakfast (although he had already had cake so I don’t think he was particularly interested in that part of the morning). We got there. They weren’t serving breakfast. There was the talk from eight till ten about what the word “priorities” meant and how to rate interventions by their importance-which no one could hear much of because the speakers were right next to the microphone so there was lots of feedback and a wicked bag echo. Afterwards, they announced that there would be tea served, and then the first panel. I should mention that a big part of this convention was to make use of and distribute this new book about disease control, and while on line for lunch (there was lunch) we met one of the editors who had delivered the morning's speech. He talked to us a lot about rehydration in Peru. But I digress.
I went to a talk on Maternal Mortality and Perinatal Complications, a talk on Combating Malaria, and a talk on Neglected Tropical Diseases. All of them were run by experts in their field, and all of them were accompanied by a PowerPoint (we are actually getting copies of every PowerPoint from the convention which is fantastic). Each talk would have about an hour of lecture, and then open it up for discussion, where all the different members of the states could voice their concerns or debate effective methods of treatments. It was really incredible to see the dedication and depth that each person gave to the convention-every person was there because they were committed to improving the health of their state, and because it was a life or death matter. No convention I have ever been to was like it. Every single person was involved in the discussions and the presentations. It was especially interesting to hear the government's policies and views on the different matters being brought up because not only were there the ministers of health from all the states, and the community members, there were also lots of politicians. And the people who lectured came from all over East Africa.
Everything was going well and good until it came to getting home. Bishop came to pick us up but Ed insisted on staying for these group workshops (a fact he neither informed us of, or consulted us on) We did some sight seeing-to the market and the cultural center (a glorified furniture store honestly, though I think it was under construction and the dining room was lovely) and then we went home. At this point, it was like...7:30 or so. We said goodbye to the Bishop and suddenly realized that Ed hadn’t considered dinner for us. We were on our own. Not expecting him to remember that he had three charges that had not eaten, we decided to be self sufficient. We were not happy about this, but we did it anyway. I had some packs of plain oatmeal and George had Gatorade and Neesha had some of her week old lunch from the plane so we decided to make a meal. We made the Gatorade (I spilled powder on George’s floor which later solidified into a gel that stuck to his feet-oops) and then we had to figure out boiled water. We briefly considered lighting a fire of twigs before abandoning it as impractical, labor intensive, a fire hazard and kind of pathetic. So we went into the kitchen to see if the brothers could help us at all (they could). We put our boiling water into a Nalgene (its a miracle it didn’t melt or scald someone) and brought it to Georges room where we proceeded to make three packets of oatmeal in a single bowl (we didn’t have more) and to eat it with two spoons and a fork (one each). Halfway through the first completely tasteless bowl George realized he had some flavored oatmeal so we added that too until we had about six packets in this one foldable bowl. We ate it and felt sorry for ourselves. Oatmeal globs kept falling on the floor. It was a pathetic and rather disheartening meal. We were feeling mutinous. Ed had forgotten about is. It was at this opportune moment that he decided to call. He sounded a bit far away on the phone as he informed us that he was at the restaurant. (the restaurant by the way is in the complete opposite direction of the Beijing Juba Hotel-past a traffic circle, so for Ed to have gotten lost there was a feat of distraction.) He told us to come and meet him and we explained that we couldn’t because it was too late and the Bishop was asleep and blah blah and what does he say? “Oh, ok. Well I'll just have some food here and then come back.”
You can imagine how we reacted to that one. (Not well). We informed him that he would be bringing us food home as well, or we would behave badly. He kind of grunted and hung up the phone. But about 30 minutes later he showed up with a bag of chicken and bread and some beers and we had a little picnic in the hallway of the dorm. So that ended up alright.
The second day (today) we woke up later because we were not planning on going to the eight am section again. The plan was to go shopping for plug adaptors but that ended up not happening. We got there in time to see half of the morning's presentation (I went to one on Improving the Quality of Care, which had the most phenomenal speaker from Uganda who would NOT take no for an answer, and who had to leave to catch a flight to Ethiopia right after she finished talking to us), and then we had lunch and George and I played Hearts (and lost spectacularly) while we waited for Ed and Neesha to finish up. After lunch we went to a talk about Diarrhea and Water Sanitation-fantastic-and then we got a cab home.
This is going to fit so well into my medical anthropology class. It was really a great.
Anyway we are missing the last day of the convention because we are leaving for Torit tomorrow morning at seven. I can’t wait! Yes I can. I'm not packed. I was petting the kitten.

And by the way, the sisters just told us...we were on TV! Local TV (Juba only has one station) but still! Our white faces could easily be seen in the sea of black when the panned over the opening ceremonies.