Sudaniversary

(Note: this should have been posted about 3 weeks ago, but life - as it does - got in the way)

Not too long ago, I returned to the first village I visited in South Sudan.I was back to Baliet. Back along the Sobat river. Back to where it basically all began.

A year prior – nearly to the day – I was a newbie. I had just arrived in Juba. I was exhausted, and excited. Everything was new, and green and dirty. I was shuffled off onto my first Humanitarian Air Service flight after only three nights in country, and spent most of my energy at the airport that day trying not to let anyone notice the sparkle in my eye that would have given away what I was really thinking: “This is soooo cool. Does everyone else realize how cool we are?”

I remember sitting on the plane, looking out the window. I couldn’t figure out what I was seeing down below. I thought my gravol  have been messing with my head, because no matter how much I tried to concentrate so I could figure out what I was seeing, the vast expanse of black pattern down below had no place in my frame of reference. I would later learn that I was simply seeing the earth. Black cotton soil it’s called. Dark and rich, with cracks so deep and defined that they played with my brain as we flew over top of them. And I remember jotting it down as one of the many things that I was going to write about on this blog; one of many things that felt worthy of attention at the time, and also one of the few that actually made its way to this intended destination, even if it did take a year. I later learned to despise it, because when wet, it clumps to your shoes like partially set concrete might, weighing you down, sucking you in. And sometimes you laugh and stomp around in an effort to win a game of 'who got more mud on them', but after that first time or two, this usually happens once you’ve been in the field long enough that your good humour has already packed up and is sitting by the side of the car park waiting to be allowed to go home. If I were feeling poetic, I might draw some comparisons between this very soil and the larger realities of my chosen career path.

The time when I was drunk on the newness and dizzied by the unknown has been lost in the last year. That was before one flight turned into much closer to 100, when one country turned into two, and one work location turned into 6.

But at least I got to come full circle. To see progress. Because last time I was in Baliet, I was fresh and new but also had no idea what I was doing. The MICS was a foreign concept. Daunting, and huge and of dubious value, depending on who you spoke too. I couldn’t yet wrap my head around the task that I was going to be expected not only to figure out, but take responsibility for.

Now, back for the next round, I own this bitch.

And that, my dear friends, feels good. So at least there's that.