The Last Day in Juba

George, Neesha and I were sitting around waiting for Ed to come back from the convention so that we could get dinner when he finally showed up hollering around the Camboni compound. He announced to us that we were going on a special dinner with Steve from Malaria Consortium (it was only as an afterthought that he added that we may be crashing Steve's date with his girlfriend).
Steve is a Canadian guy who we met in one of our first meetings. He is something official at Malaria Consortium in Juba and he was the one who told us about the party at the UN Mine Action. Anyway he finally gave us a call and Ed told him to meet us at the main gate of the Logali House. Both Ed and Steve hung up, confident that they knew where they were meeting each other. Unfortunately, as it turns out, Ed's conception of where Logali House was located was very very wrong. It was not, in fact, the large orange hotel at the top of the street where we were staying. It was actually no where near that.
We tramped around this orange hotel for a while (it was Thai Night and smelled delicious) before Ed found a guy and asked for directions. Ed kept saying “Logali House!” and the guy kept nodding and smiling and pointing in the opposite direction. So we followed him. Keep in mind; it is pitch dark outside, eight thirty at night, none of us with flashlights because I stupidly convinced George not to bring one, and all of us in flip flops. There is also lightening.
So we get led off into the bush. We walk this long winding path absolutely filled with potholes and ditches-all of which are filled with sewage and garbage. None of us can see anything, we seem to be walking away from any kind of road a car could conceivably get down, and Ed is just merrily hiking ahead with this guy. Neesha, George and I struggled to keep up. Not so successfully. We walk like this for five or ten minutes before we finally emerge into this little lighted enclave with the most luxurious guest house/hotel I've seen in Juba. It’s gorgeous. It looks like there is air-conditioning. It’s got outdoor mood lighting. Completely extravagant. And Steve is waiting for us at the front door.
We pile in his car and head back the way we came (it seemed like it took a very long time). He tells us that we are getting Chinese food at the Chinese food restaurant that we saw in the market place. When we finally get there, it is gloriously breezy outside, and there are lights and lanterns hung up around the door of the restaurant, but the lights play a Happy New Year theme which I'm guessing they had been playing for a while because the sound is this creepy little melody that just keeps going and getting higher and higher in pitch. And they are red. It was like entering hell.
Except not. Because we got inside and see this big long table filled with about four guys and a lady (all white-or variations thereof) so we sit down with them and Steve introduces us (turns out, we weren’t crashing his date after all).
We ended up getting spring rolls accompanied by the most acidic soy sauce ever made and what I thought was a medium sized tomato egg drop soup for Ed (it turned out to be a tureen of soup the size of the table that all of us were expected to eat-so we did). WE also got something called sizzling beef (it sizzled) and chicken mixed with cashews and chicken in chili sauce and pineapple chicken and noodles and stir fried vegetables which George and I had ordered for Ed to be mean (he left us in charge of ordering for him) and I'm sorry to say that in Arabic, “Stir fried vegetables” actually translates to “watery cabbage” so no one ate that. We also had mango juice-odd combination with the food, but good in general. Anyway as we were eating, a new guy came and sat down. His name was Mike, and as it turned out, he was the same age as all three of us-just about to be a junior at Dickenson College. He was an “NGO brat” of sorts (rather than an army brat or a diplomat brat which is really fun to say) who was born in Thailand, and grew up in Nepal, Switzerland and the US. He was working with Malaria Consortium for a month while his father was in Khartoum. And get this. He grew up mostly in Larchmont! He knows Iden Ave., the street that my mother and all her family grew up on. He knows her house! Talk about a small world. He too is writing a blog (when I find where I packed the address, I'll link it on mine) and we may have convinced him to come and work with us in Torit but we have to see if that is possible. It was a really fun dinner. On the bar they had a TV blasting MTV (you can either get CNN news or MTV news in Juba) and they were showing a collection of videos, first of Lil Kim, then R Kelly-including an x-rated one that we all were kind of prudishly shocked at.
Anyway then we got home, and I was going to pack and then shower and then mop (but probably not in that order) but instead I went to sleep and told Neesha to wake me up in the morning. She got me up at 5:40 because we were supposed to leave by 7am. So I packed and then mopped and then went over and woke up George at six thirty so he could pack (oh men) and then filled up water, and watched cats play and got absolutely swarmed by bugs. When I said mosquitoes weren’t so bad, I was lying through my teeth. Neesha and Ed were sitting next to me going “Wow, what a nice morning out, and no bugs!” while meanwhile every insect in Juba is buzzing around my head like the little birds in cartoons that circle around people who have just run into a door. Except they were biting me.