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Everything is not gwar in Sudan

By Alberta Schweitzer - posted Tuesday, 13 June 2006


Gwar is the Nuer word for OK and they use it all day. If this is what gwar is, I hope I never have to work somewhere it is not gwar.

The clinic staff are mostly Sudanese who grew up in refugee camps in Ethiopia, where they got a rudimentary education, compliments of the UNHCR, unlike if they had stayed here.

They walked there from all over south Sudan to escape the war, and spent the next 20 years, some of them, in one of several camps close to the Sudanese border. If my figures are reliable, there are still about 70,000 Sudanese in camps in Ethiopia, which doesn’t include the huge numbers in Kenya and Uganda.

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They have only been returning since the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed, and they felt they had some hope of safety. Probably mistakenly.

Many of our current staff walked alone or with small groups who were on the same trail, when they were as young as 10, but without their parents. Their parents had to stay to guard the cattle, and many of them were killed.

Those who have decided to return have done so because they have some family remaining to look after them. Once they re-enter the Sudan, they are no longer refugees under the UNHCR umbrella, and therefore are not being fed. They have a fantastic sense of family, and if one member is earning money then they are all eating. So any returnees are welcomed by the remaining family and move into the family tukul compound.

The local population is mainly Nuer, some Dinka, some Barun who do not have the facial scarring, and now that the rain has started, some nomadic Bagarra - Arab cattle herders who follow the feed. The Baggara are not welcomed in this area as they poach feed from the traditional occupants, are often armed, and reputed to leave with extra cattle rustled from the locals.

Each of these groups speaks a different language and often do not have a common one, which makes translation in the clinic a challenge.

The Nuer and Dinka have six circular lines cut into their foreheads. With the Nuer they reach around to their hairline, but with the Dinka they extend the cuts well into the hairline which is quite visible as their hair is in tight sparse coils and very short.

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This circle work is done to young men when they are about 13 as a decoration and an indication the boy has become a man. The young boy is not allowed to cry, while these, what must be very deep, cuts are made from one side of his forehead to the other, six times, with a pointed stick. And if that isn’t enough, in an additional beautification process, to prove you are tough they then cut little circle flaps out of the face, in geometric patterns, with a steel hook.

This is done to both young boys and girls, and most of them are adorned this way, though they tell me the tradition is dying, and many of the younger children are not decorated this way any more. I haven’t seen too many who aren’t though. All the children wear brightly coloured beads around their waists, from birth, as well as many around their necks and wrists.

The clothes they wear are rags and are often nylon nighties. They are obviously discarded clothes from the west. We always identify children by what they wear i.e. the small boy in the yellow shirt. Because that is all they have. One yellow shirt.

Their names are unprounceable - Nyamal Pal, Chome Ngome, Riak Puk Minydhot, Nyatouk Chuoi Wei, and even if you try to pronounce them phonetically, it isn’t the way the locals pronounce it, and they crack up when you try. So the “small boy with the yellow shirt” is the way to go, or sometimes “the small boy with the fever”, or abscess, or chest infection, or brucellosis, or malaria.

It would be a whole lot easier if they were all Tom, Dick or Harry from an identification point of view. Most of the women have Nya, which means woman, as a prefix to their names.

Another quaint tradition for both beautification and to facilitate the accuracy, velocity, and volume of spitting, is the removal of the four bottom teeth from both girls and boys. And again, they all seem to have had their teeth ripped out, and I can vouch for the fact that they sure as hell can spit. Men and women. Often. Right in front of where they are sitting or standing. Noisily. While talking to you. Though they never hit your feet.

And they all make this odd clicking sound in their throats to indicate agreement as they lift their heads.

They are mostly very tall, and very thin. And many of the sick ones walk with a long stick, especially the Kala-Azar patients, as they are flat-out walking.

From what I have worked out so far, the women are pretty much slaves. Marriages are arranged, and the girl has no selection rights. She is bought for a dowry, agreed upon by the families, which is often a number of cows. She is usually married by 13.

Until that time she has been her mother’s slave looking after her brothers and younger members of the family. It seems to be the small girl’s duty to carry water, which she does in a huge plastic jerry, which I could not even lift off the ground, on her head.

When she is married, she then moves into her husband's family’s compound, and is the property of her husband, so she gets to be the slave of a whole new set of “rellies”. She does all the water carrying, food preparation, tukul maintenance and cleaning. Her husband looks after the cattle if they are cattle herders, which involves a lot of sitting around and spitting, or if they are not cattle herders he sits around doing nothing except spitting.

Most of the men have several wives, even though this is a mainly Christian area. It is perfectly acceptable, not only to the less educated locals but to the staff, to beat the hell out of any wife if she fails to comply with directives.

We rescued one such unfortunate from the bush last week, unconscious, bleeding, and beaten with a stick. The doctor and I had a hard time persuading the guards to carry the stretcher along the airstrip and back to the clinic, as it is not a man’s job to carry things! It was all I could do not to take a stick to them.

We wanted to report the assault to the SRRC - Sudanese Rehabilitation and Relief Committee - a group here with a very greasy representative, who has to come to the compound every day and deal with the project co-ordinator about staff contracts, security, and why the airstrip isn’t being maintained etc, etc. I am sooooooo glad I don’t have to do that job - it is much more pleasant being up to my elbows in spitballs and placentas.

Men and women eat separately, only twice a day, and what they eat can only be described as awful. Porridge muck, with old warm clotted milk, poured from smelling rotten calabashes. It’s all I can do to look at it. If they are in the clinic, their family comes from outside, and they all sit around under the tree, or in the tukul: the women bring the food, the men eat in one group, and the women in another. It is how they operate in life outside, and they still do the same while in hospital.

We have only one female paramedic. She also came from an Ethiopian refugee camp, but was brought back to Sudan because her husband bought her from there. She speaks, therefore, quite good English and is our best paramedic. We would like to try and find some more women to work in the clinic as the men, without exception, have a zero caring factor, but most of the girls haven’t returned from the camps yet, and probably won’t until the area is more stable.

Sarah (some of them do have English names) the paramedic, is about 19, and pregnant. Her husband isn’t working, though she works full time. She had to ask for a day off yesterday as her husband said she had to go and buy food. So she had to walk for five hours to the nearest place she could buy grain, and back again, while he sat and waited and spat.

The security situation here is pretty iffy. Actually the whole of south Sudan is. The aid organisation I work for has evacuated several missions this past two months. Only last week the entire staff of a clinic had to spend a scary night on the floor of the clinic while bullets flew over their heads. They were evacuated the next day.

A couple of clinics were completely looted when the staff evacuated. They even emptied all the medications out of the plastic containers so they could use the containers. They trashed the whole clinic compound as well as the staff compound, so staff lost all their personal belongings, most of which they hadn’t been able to take on the evacuation aircraft. About 30 locals were shot by the White Army (which is what they call themselves - a pretty silly name I think for a bunch of very black men). I'm not quite sure of what their agenda is, but they must be short of plastic containers.

Nor am I sure what the organisation's long term plan is about remaining somewhere that keeps getting shot at and then razed to the ground. But, I guess, since we are an emergency medical organisation, if we pulled out of everywhere there was shooting, there wouldn’t be many places we could go. And again, it boils down to the fact without our presence, these people have absolutely no medical facilities, and the vulnerable are not the ones running around in army fatigues.

It goes on and on, and every day we get a new security brief, and an update on the evacuation procedure, and we find out more about the likelihood of being in the firing line here. It is not likely at all, we have been assured, but still I am pleased security is taken so seriously.

We lost our lab tech the other day to the army. Can you imagine anything less logical than the SPLA (or maybe it was the Government of Sudan - who knows or cares, they are all murderers) recruiting the only lab tech who works in the only health facility for hundreds of kilometres, and is solely responsible for the diagnostics on all their dreadful diseases. But the boys came into town looking for new canon fodder, and took our lab tech.

Thank goodness our organisation sent in a replacement, or my recent illness may have been diagnosed later and consequently been worse. I have only just surfaced after being flattened by some insidious, ghastly, gut-invading lurgy which caused extremely unattractive, non-stop, high-velocity trots; a fever which caused my teeth to chatter and my brain to explode; combined with cramps which were like the excruciating variety in child-birth, but with no reward at the end, only extreme lethargy and a feeling of having been run over by a steam roller.

Fortunately, high tech PHCC (Primary Health Care Clinic) that we are, we have a lab, and a lab tech, and he tested the vile excrement, took blood for malaria trials and other cell count type diagnostics and found I had amoebic dysentery. It has been zapped with the appropriate drug, and now I am at least off my bed and have graduated to drinking sweet black tea without having to rush to the loo.

On those nights that are clear, the Southern Cross is a beacon. It is so close I could touch it. I was so surprised to find that it could be seen this far north of the equator. It is the last thing I see every night before I enter my tukul. It is a beacon which reminds me about our beautiful, clean, safe, democratic, educated, idyllic country, and how utterly blessed we are to live in it.

I would rip off someone’s arms at the moment to get to a clean, crisp, delicious, fresh salad and grilled fish which was not going to reappear again within 30 minutes in mutant form. Tonight is my cooking night, so I have to go to the store and choose which can of bland vegetable will be to added to spongy potatoes and fried onions. None of which I can eat at the moment, but everyone else will.

Probably what I will have will be a Tusker (the very excellent Kenyan beer) and a couple of cigarettes. Sadly I have succumbed to the aid organisation affliction - but I just had to give myself a break on something, and it is only three at night, never during the day.

And we have the 10-day rotation plane to look forward to. This delivers some stringy fresh food which lasts about three days and a piece of horrendous billy-goat hock, which gets boiled all day, and added to the bland vegetables. It tastes like really old, really grissly, really smelly billy-goat. One that has been flogged all its life in the cattle camp, and had to walk from Uganda to the sale yard in Loki. Which, no doubt, it is.

My R & R comes up in three weeks and I am going to Lamu, an island off the Somali coast. Reputed to be very beautiful, historic, and safe, and has food that does not come in tins. Hope it isn’t a rerun of my R & R in River No 2 in Sierra Leone where I was greeted with poo floating on the water.

Be safe - I sure as hell am going to do my best to remain so.

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About the Author

Alberta Schweitzer is a health worker for an aid organisation in South Sudan. This is a pseudonym to protect her safety and that of her co-workers.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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