Nimule Part Three

Next morning, George slept very late but woke up hangover-free. Neesha and I walked to the orphanage with Maria. It was just a little past the hospital, down by where Mary lived. We walked in and were instantly mobbed by children. About five of the khawajas there were leaving that day and we had hoped they had already left so we could miss the pandemonium, but as characteristic of Sudan, they weren’t on time. It was really nice to meet them though, and see them interact with the children. Nimule has more white twenty-somethings than anywhere else we have been in Sudan. One, named Seth, was throwing little boys up in the air, who would squeal with delight. The kids all knew Maria and were crowded around her. We were introduced to the man who runs the orphanage, a white man who use to be part of the Brethren Church but left it. He has maintained ties with the church and was the founder of New Community Project and he has been working at the orphanage for a long time. We also met a girl named Sophie, who is our age. She has lived at the orphanage since January and is leaving in December. She originally went to the Eastern Menninite University with the other girls but left to stay in Sudan. The kids called her Momma Sophie.
The orphanage was very clean, and the children all dressed, clothed and shoed. Apparently originally the orphanage was supplied by World Food Program but then they pulled out so now they get by with just pocho (oogali), greens and beans every day. No meat. No rice. The kids can go to the school next door, or do some preschool things at the orphanage itself. They live in small tukuls dormitories, and there is even a pet monkey named Johnny Cash. It was really nice to see that the orphanage wasn’t as grim a place as you could imagine but it was hard for me to look at the children and know that most of them didn’t have parents (some did, but were unable to care for them-those kids would go visit their parents periodically). It is hard enough to live here, but to be completely alone in the world as well is just devastating. The kids ranged from ages 4 to 20, and unlike in American orphanages, they wouldn’t kick you out once you were a certain age-they helped you through your education. It was nice because the kids were just like all the other children we have seen, except for the fact that they had no place else to go.
After the orphanage we walked back towards the compound. We stopped briefly at the market and bought some cloth (so exciting!) and then headed back to the compound. When we got there, we were instantly grabbed into the car to head to Fula Falls with our guide, a man who is the brother of the Bishop, very old and called simply mzee. We drove up past the Nile school and walked into a tent with two SPLA officers in it. They sat us down and asked us how much money we were going to pay them to go to the falls. First, they helpfully suggested 200 USD a person, which we declined. We managed to talk them down to 200 SPs for the four of us, only to realize that we didnt actually have that much money-and that if we spent it we wouldn’t be able to get gas or oil for the car. Combine that with the fact that the guides said there were no elephants that day, and we passed. We promised to come later, and left. We dropped off mzee with our apologies at wasting his time and came back here. Unbreakable was on TV, so we watched the end of it (making me want to see the beginning). Then George and I watched this incredibly bizarre movie called The Crush, wherin Alicia Silverstone is a crazed and psychotic 14 year old trying to stalk the guy from Princess Bride. It had enough suspense music to keep us occupied for a good two hours.
After lunch we hung around for a bit and I took a nap with the cat and George and Neesha played cards. At five we walked down to the soccer pitch to watch the soccer game being played between two different schools.
The soccer games here are fantastic. Hundreds of people show up to them to watch 10 year olds play soccer. They lined the field like ropes, crowds of people lining the sides and going all the way up the hill to the road. To the side, a game of volleyball was being played. We were watching the game for a bit when Neesha started to get uncomfortable because we were being stared at. Ed had just called, so they went off to walk around the field and I stayed and chatted with Ed. The stares are defiantly disconcerting, but I’ve gotten use to them. Neesha I think has a harder time because she is shorter and therefore has a harder time of just looking resolutely over their heads. My strategy is to either talk to them, or stare back, both of which end up with giggling children which makes me happy. Further down the field, they had a run in with a man with no leg, and were stared at even more. I went over and watched the volleyball game, waiting for them to show up. I was leaned up against a tree, with a small child sitting in it. His name was Mandela and he was very shy. In his tree, and the tree next to us, children draped themselves over every branch, climbing up like monkeys, dangling from the branches, so that you couldn’t tell what were arms and what was tree. I made friends with them and learned their names, so we had a great time. I watched a girl play volleyball (yay feminism!) and then George, Neesha and Jerome showed up and we walked back. Some ladies were in the compound, and one of them had a baby. She let me hold her. The baby’s name is Tracy and she was covered by sticky lollipop candy. Turkeys (yes, there are turkey’s here) were wandering around our feet. They are creepy. I was holding the baby while her younger sisters (who looked to be about five to seven) milled around. The mother was so thin and tiny that I cant imagine a child came out of her but she is incredibly sweet. I was pleased that Tracy at least seemed to be a fat, healthy six month old. Until I found out she was a year and a half. She wasn’t healthy at all. She also wasn’t responsive. Normal babies are curious, alert, playful. She just sat on my hip, staring blankly into space. It completely depressed me.
This morning we went to the health center. I was having trouble sleeping so I woke up at six and just sat in the dining room, playing solitaire and writing. At noon, we walked next door to the clinic. Dr. Dominic was there, and he took us around the place. There was an ANC clinic and a lab, but no in-patient facilities. The midwife was Ugandan (we have yet to meet one of the ten elusive Sudanese midwives) and she talked to us about the normal procedure for pregnant mother’s visits. Most of the mothers don’t actually give birth at the center, because the Nimule hospital is right nearby. It seems that they have a very good working relationship with each other, and I was glad that even if the health care wasn’t perfect in Nimule, at least people had options as to where to go.
It was really interesting to see the main road of Nimule, because it is the chain of wealth from Uganda into Sudan. You can literally watch as the wealth and profit from Uganda bleeds into Sudan, first in Nimule, then up the main road to Juba, and then from Juba beyond to the rest of Southern Sudan. Trucks layered with African Long Horn Cattle on the bottom, then goats, then chickens, then people, file up and down the Juba road in Nimule, stopping periodically to unload passengers and commodities. The things they have in Nimule could only be a product of Uganda-turkeys, pigs, katenge cloth, music, timberland shoes and Sean Combs jeans and endless amounts of spare parts for the caravans that come through. The sheer variety is astonishing after being in Torit for so long, Torit which is relatively prosperous and developed. To be able to actually observe not only the flow of goods, but their impact at each place they stop, is awe inspiring. Just driving back to Torit, we saw the wealth leech away, eventually disappearing altogether. as we drove through towns further and further from the border, the chickens and goats faded from view, the clothing decreased in vibrancy and cleanliness, and more and more UNHCR white plastic tarps appeared on the roofs of tukuls made of crumbling mud, rather than brick and bamboo.
After seeing the center, we drove over to the hospital. Even though it was a weekday, because it was after two, the hospital was virtually abandoned. There were some patients milling about, but no administrators. I took some covert pictures, we saw the different buildings, and then we left. On the way back through town, Jerome and George stopped to get the car welded, and Neesha and I went off and bought more katenge cloth. When it became apparent that our car was going to need considerably more welding than we had originally thought (seriously, is anyone keeping count of how many times we have repaired this damn car?), Neesha and I decided to get some skirts made. We found a wonderful woman named Rebecca who told us she could make a skirt in thirty minutes, so I got three made and Neesha got two. She even tailored them for us (although one of them needs a bit more work, and one of them I think I’m going to give to Smisch because she would look bea-u-ti-ful in it). The extra cloth we had could be made into pillow cases and head scarves. It was so much fun being in the shop, because all of the walls were covered with bolts of cloth, sample clothing, and posters of different styles, and women would wander in and out to pick up their orders and stay and watch as we tried on our skirts, and make comments. Some of them even hung around just to watch us change into and out of the skirts, and they giggled about my white legs which would have been disheartening if it hadn’t been so funny. My butt eventually garnered more attention than the cloth itself, as people peeked inside to try and get a glimpse of it.
While we were waiting, we went next door to the place where the car was getting welded and sat on the crumbling plaster porch of the café nearby. George and Jerome wandered over eventually, and we tasted some frozen ice (bubble gum flavor-ew) that had come off the back of, I kid you not, an ice cream truck bicycle. It even played awful, repetitive music (It’s a small world after all) and there was a cooler strapped to the back that the vendor would scrape ice from and put on these cones in little plastic bags. It was less than satisfying, but I was so excited to be having anything even closely resembling ice cream that I didn’t mind.
A drunk man came out on the porch along with one of his friends and started chatting with me (and, inasmuch as she would speak, Neesha). It was a long, rambling conversation about how he, as a representative of the Sudanese people, wanted to unite with America, but the outcome was that he gave the three of us (George, Neesha and I) credit for the entire CPA agreement and, because he somehow got the idea that because I was named Emma, I was the sister of Emma Machar, the woman who married Riek Machar in the eighties and then died in a car accident, (and therefore, that I must have connections to Dr. Machar himself), he bought me a beer (an Eagle, which is less beer and more malt liquor (6.9% alcohol) while his friend took covert photos of me with his cellphone. That was a horrendous run on sentence and I apologize.
Eventually both the car and our skirts were ready and we headed out. We stopped by Jerome’s friend Hakim’s store (I love Hakim, seriously, he’s the best) and bought a compliation of Mel Gibson and Colin Ferrel movies (on one dvd, twenty movies, though half were missing) and spent the night watching Apocolypto which was kind of ridiculous and Hart’s War which I eventually got bored of.
We were supposed to leave the next day but didn’t because we still hadn’t seen the elephants. It was Sunday, and I woke up to hear wonderful singing from the church. We tinkered with the car for a while, and spent most of the day doing relatively nothing. The park was closed on the weekend, so we watched movies and worked on the computer and kept up on Al Jazeera. We played some cards that night, and watched The Recruit, and finally went to bed.