Impressions from the first two days in South Sudan

- First 16 hours here – not much to say. It is very beautiful and green from the air (rainy season has started), though flat. “The whole country is a flood plain,” I am told. Juba airport tiny (although there is evidence of a “real” terminal being built beside it). In one of those bad-dream-like concatenations, where every line you switch to suddenly becomes the slowest-moving one, I somehow manage to be the absolute LAST person from the plane to make it through passport control. But the Customs guy laughs and tells me I look like “Ivanovich from Chelsea” (I check later, and, yes – I can see the resemblance!), and all is mended. Then it is meetings; a short trip through the dusty, hardscrabble, but big-tree-filled capital; a tasty dinner at the residence; an interrupted, jet-lagged sleep where, famished in the middle of the night, I come out and eat a whole second big meal; then sleep again, shower, office, and off to the airport once more.

- One thing I do hear chatting with other staff on the porch: At an MSF project in the north – which I am told is “in a swamp,” with impossible conditions for both residents and MSF folks, now made immeasurably worse by the rains – they recently had a young child whose head was bitten by “a tiger.” Of course, there are no tigers in Africa (? – or are there? The strangeness almost makes you wonder). A leopard? Except that, they being my favorite animal notwithstanding, leopards don't fuck around – everyone feels like, if a leopard had grabbed the kid’s head, it would still have it. A cheetah? But they are quite small, and also need running room, which a swamp doesn’t give them. Whatever it was, the kid (who is doing fine now) had big, cat-teeth impressions all around his head. Amazing story….

- Arriving at the airport for my United Nations World Food Program flight to Aweil, I find a scene of apparent chaos – people packed into the one open door, enough to make it burst. How will I ever find where to go; how will I ever fight my way through the lines? Except that, as soon as I approach the door, everything resolves itself. The WFP check-in desk is clearly marked; the security line is orderly (although – perhaps in a stunning display of good sense? – no one stops me from bringing my half-full cup of coffee through). A reminder of how easily I can perceive the unfamiliar as fearsome or even hostile….

- As the plane taxis out, my eye is caught by a person walking next to the runway. Except it isn’t a person – it is a marabou stork. About as tall as a teenager, it picks it’s way over the ground, looking down as if contemplating something. Who could not feel some sort of kinship with this creature, if we didn’t immediately think of it as “just an animal”?

- Waiting in the overfilled gate area, I pass the time by watching the film “Trumbo,” cleverly downloaded to my IPhone for just such occasions. Beside me, a young soldier notices me laughing and looks over to see, too. I show him the screen – and immediately become aware, and abashed both because of the fact itself and because I hadn’t previously noticed it, that the movie is all white people in expensive suits and expensive locales, and the only black people are in prison.

- Most of the people on the flight are going to Wau (Wow!), a town that has recently seen a flare-up of inter-ethnic violence. I wonder what is true about the situation here, or what the range of truths is. What I hear from the expats is that the civil war could re-explode at any moment, and that violence can be unexpected and surprisingly extreme (as it certainly seems to have been when the civil war started, or started on a large scale, in late 2013). I haven’t yet gotten to know anyone from the country well enough to get their impression (and, realistically, might not do that in my entire time here). Also, expats say that, whatever the colonial and post-colonial governments did to stoke interethnic conflict, it has existed here for a long, long time. Which accords with what I’ve picked up from my reading – basically, whether or not ethnic differences have been used to divide-and-rule by various powers, if people themselves describe the tension as ethnic, and if soldiers and gangs choose whom to kill on the basis of ethnicity, then it is an ethnic conflict – isn’t it? Maybe having an awareness of how the conflict was “constructed” by outsiders is useful and important in some ways, but, for a person like me who is here for a short time and just wondering what is likely to happen – if it walks like a duck, etc., can we just call it a duck? Is there a kind of obfuscating PC operating here (oh, no – shades of Donald Trump!)? I am hesitant to say so – I know so little about it, after all - but all I can say is that everyone in my universe here talks like this, ethnicity, is the first-order fault line; the place that things happen when pressure is applied.

- Wau is maybe 50 miles from Aweil, and there is another flare-up to our west. Already, people are moving from Wau towards Aweil, although, as I understand it, those moving here are part of the same ethnic group as the vast majority of Aweil residents, which I hope makes conflict less likely. If one or both of the conflict zones do move toward Aweil, however, the situation here – and at the hospital – could become very different.

- During the tour I’m given of the MSF “base,” I am shown our three, count ‘em, three “safe rooms” (anyone remember the Jodie Foster movie??). They have food, water, even air conditioning (that is, if whoever is attacking doesn’t think to turn off the generator, which, I have to say, doesn’t seem that likely to me!). We’re supposed to go there if we hear shooting, if there is sustained conflict outside the base, etc. Hmmmm…. I’m also shown the system for coping with being held at gunpoint (which, they do inform me, they have “never had to use”!). As I said before, the extreme rarity of actual physical violence, whether on the streets of NY or to expats working on international health projects, usually means that it’s the last thing I worry about. But this does make it all a bit easier to imagine…!

- Ahh – first visit to the hospital! So important. Before, I have visions of some super-emergency operation where I can’t find the spinal kits, don’t know how the ventilator works, etc. Now – in addition to having seen for myself what everyone has told me: how on top of everything my local colleague is – I feel like, in a pinch, I could make it work. (Although the ventilator does seem strangely complicated and bizarre.) It was also mercifully “light” in the OR today. It’s 2 pm and I’m already sitting at the porch table. Resting up for tomorrow. Breathing easy.