Kimotong

Our first impression of Kimotong was marred by a couple of pretty intense things. To begin with, we were headed there at five thirty at night, about the time the sun begins to set. Our night driving up to this point has been confined to…well…none, so no one in the backseat was particularly happy when Ed decided we should drive there to go on a fishing expedition. He was searching for two men, one named Hillary and the other named Peter Lamong.
The drive there was very beautiful, strictly speaking. Palm trees stretched into the air and bushy plants leaned out over dry river beds. To be honest, it felt like we were driving through the set of Jurassic Park, and as we drove over the rivers, which were, at the moment, rivers of dry, cracked sand, I could easily imagine a huge T-Rex galloping down the sand towards our car. It was really cool, but not a reassuring image. The coconuts were orange and unripe and you could see them hanging in clusters from the topmost reaches of the palm trees. But soon, the lush greenery became more and more interspersed with scrubby thorn bushes and stunted trees, and more of the ground underfoot became sandy and cracked. I was sitting by the window, and as the wind whipped past our car windows, I kept thinking that I heard little children laughing. As Neesha pointed out, they would be less likely to laugh, as to shout Khawaja if they were real children and not just my imagination, but it was eerie hearing children giggling, while looking out the window at nothing but blank and empty land.
We soon ran into a traffic jam of cows. They were stretched up the road as far as the eyes could see, and the men tending them shepherded the ones who didn’t respond to Jerome’s honk of the horn, onto the side of the road. They were carrying guns, or spears, or bows and arrows, bright jewelry around their necks or studded in their noses, shirtless, or pants-less, and running, tall, alongside our car. Some of them were carrying spears in one hand, and huge legs of skinned goat in the other, and the red meat was slowly solidifying in the hot air so that it looked like jerky. We were saying Salaam as we drove past, and some of them ran fast enough to shake our hands, before falling back into the dust being kicked up by our tires, so I leaned out the window and shouted hello to one boy. He shouted Salaam back, but apparently, it was only afterwards that he saw my skin color. And he Freaked Out. He started chasing our car screaming incoherently, brandishing his spear in one hand and his goat leg in the other, and even though he was soon left in the dust behind us, it was scary and confusing. Kimotong isn’t that remote. But it was remote enough that not many people had seen white skin before, I guess. Regardless, to go from phantom laughing to being chased by a spear wielding boy, was not a move in a more welcoming direction.
We finally pulled into Kimotong and our car was almost instantly surrounded. Children mobbed the sides, interspersed with tall, handsome men, while the elders crowded around the front windows, trying to talk all at once. We inched forwards and parked, and all unpiled from the car. Instantly packs of children were pressed in on all sides. Older people crowded behind them. This is typical. But unlike other villages, and perhaps due to the feeling already settling itself in me, it felt like they were surrounding us. This feeling was not at ALL helped by the man who came up to me first. He was barefoot, dressed in a white shirt that went to his ankles. He had hot, feverish eyes that stayed fixed on my face, not blinking. He didn’t blink once the entire time we were in Kimotong. He talked in short, staccato bursts of violent sound, and when he shook my hand, he didn’t let go. I couldn’t tell he was drunk. I don’t seem to be able to tell here. (I think it is because everyone is so new and different that my baseline for sobriety is non-existent, I don’t know what is drunkenness and what is eccentricity, what is slurred speech from beer and what is English as a second language) He tried to lead me off to a building, but Ed alerted me to the fact that he was very drunk and I went over to George and Neesha and Jerome, who were all huddled together, also feeling uncomfortable. A small girl shyly shook my hand, and lingered, feeling my hand with her fingers as if expecting white skin to feel different. Maybe it did.
The drunk man wouldn’t leave us alone, and meanwhile more and more men were circling around us, shaking our hands, standing mute and solid behind our backs. One man was blind in one eye; it looked like his eye had merely rolled back into his head on one side. The drunk man kept asking me to take a picture, and Jerome told me to get the children in it too to make it less awkward, so I shuffled them all in and took the picture, and the usual crowding and shouting and jostling broke out until some old men broke it up with some quick slaps. The drunk guy took my camera from me, and I wrestled it back. He asked me where I was from, and Jerome supplied that I was from South Africa. He seemed content with this answer, and began loudly explaining in brief sentences that we were in Sudan, and that there were black people here. This was something we figured out a long time ago, and we followed Ed, who had found the chief, up to the guest compound, the drunk man following two inches behind me.
We got to the compound, where they were apparently in the middle of a radio distribution, though they stopped it when we came in. Some men brought chairs and centered them in the middle of the courtyard made by the L-shaped guest house, and then men, endless amounts of men, lined up on every side and every seat surrounding us. We were facing Peter Lamong, who had a disability of some type that made him have to have arm crutches (polio?) and Hillary, the chief. Hillary was an old man dressed all in black, and he seemed to be made up of nothing but skin, hollowed muscle, and bone. His cheeks were pitted, his collarbone sunken, but wiry muscle covered his arms, making him seem a bit like a rope of licorice, twined, twisted, thin but strong.
Ed conducted his meeting, while Neesha, George and I just looked around. Next to us were the mountains. A wall of rock fed up, folding over on itself to make ledges where goats were scaling and women, balancing water in jugs on their head, were making their way carefully down. I was astonished by their strength and balance. It was straight down a cliff but they just picked their way daintily down. Jerome hiked up a bit, and I was jealous, because the air was cool and the sun was setting, and far up on the rock was open space, not space crowded with people whose eyes bore into your back. Ed asked me to go get the car, and Jerome came down and the two of us went and brought the car up to the compound. I was fishing around in the trunk for my notebook, and as I turned around, the drunk man was literally a couple of inches away from me, his eyes staring right at me. I stepped around him and he followed me back to my chair. George later told me that he just stared at my back for the entire, hour long meeting, not blinking, not looking away. While I was gone, a man apparently asked Ed what it would cost to marry me (I think (hope) to his son, because he had earlier been bragging about how he had three wives who were constantly pregnant, and he looked about sixty, and lewd, so I wasn’t at all keen to imagine him sizing me up for himself). Ed told him 140 fertile cows, and they bartered a bit and thank GOD I wasn’t there for it because I would have turned bright red and been uncomfortable. Obviously.
At the end of the meeting, we shook hands, and got in the car to drive back. Neesha was scared of driving at night because of all the stories we had heard about bandits, but Ed assured us that he had made sure the road was safe and so we hopped in the car and headed off into the last vestiges of sunlight. After about ten minutes or so, the sun had sunk in earnest, so as we were passing these villages near Kimotong, it was completely dark. One village had had what appeared to be a rocket launcher draped in drying laundry when we had driven in, and that same village was filled with screaming young men when we passed out. They were shouting and waving at our car, but we couldn’t tell what they were saying, and just kept driving. Needless to say, it was unnerving.
The drive home was nice, but at times equally nerve wracking. The entire evening seemed coated with this palpable unease. There was no light except what was being made by our headlights. The stars were gorgeous and covered the sky completely, and though there wasn’t a moon, one particularly bright star gave anchor to the whole sky. The smell was fantastic, this thick, heady smell of vegetation thriving, and I put in my headphones to drown out the talk about malaria (which I am sick of , at least in terms of hearing it 24/7) and just relaxed. Well, relaxed as much as anyone can relax hitting every single pothole in the road. At one point, Ed stopped the car (he had taken over driving for Jerome so he (Ed) could “stretch his legs”) on the middle of a bridge, and turned off the lights. He tells us “this is where lions like to hang out” and then tells us to listen. We ask what we are suppose to be listening for, being a bit nervous about the idea of lions, and he says “Frogs”. FROGS. We can hear frogs in Torit. We tell him to stop being ridiculous and get back in the car, and we drive off again. We saw two huge porcupines with their quills sticking straight up running alongside the road and followed them for a while before they dashed off into the brush. Two foxes darted next to our car, and an owl swooped down and up out of the light of our headlights.
But the most spectacular thing was the heat lightening. The sky would just light up, brilliantly, with these dashes of pure white light that would illuminate the clouds and their outlines and temporarily illuminate the trees and the road and everything in its path. It was like a present for getting through the day ok. We just watched the heat lightening scatter across the sky, and looked at the stars spread thick across the sky like the sister’s mango jam, and smelled the scent of the grass growing as tall as our cars, and listened to the absolute silence of the land around us, and drove.