People

So, you’d think writing about the people I see and have met and treat here would be one of the first things I’d do (you would, that is, if you didn’t know what an introverted curmudgeon I can sometimes be). But, you know – it’s hard. As I think I’ve said before, of all the places I’ve worked except, perhaps, Vietnam, Africa (and perhaps eastern and southern Africa in particular?) is the place I feel I get to know people the least. I know some of that is my problem. The history of Europe/whites in Africa is so fraught with horrors – I can remember the first time I went on a work trip to Kenya, I found myself thinking, “My God, I can’t believe these people will even talk to me!” And then, as this summer continues to show us, the sequelae of those horrors are far from played out. So maybe that makes ME stiff – self-conscious – a little guilty and earnest – in a nutshell, a little blocked and not good at communicating.

I think it’s more than that, though. As a contrast: In India, I have the sense (correct me, those who think this is crazy!) that there was a certain consonance between colonizer and colonized. Meaning that the Mughal state was a large, integrated, stratified, bureaucratic state, and so was England – in some weird way, they “got along.” Plus, England was messing around there for a LONG time, starting at a time when the technological pre-eminence of the “West” wasn’t quite as strong as it later became. So I feel a bit like the Indian substrate and the European overlay kind of grew together, to the point that now, in cities, anyway, what remains is a culture that is different but not alien, that speaks an English you can understand, that has entry points but is still unequivocally “local” (it’s one of the things I LOVE about India).

But I feel like Europe came at Africa when it had guns and steamships and railroads and mining equipment, technology that gave Europe power WAY beyond what Africa could muster. And it came at Africa with centuries of contempt for its people, and with more or less one objective – to profit (oh – and maybe to convert, too). So that I feel like what happened in the places where the Europeans came and lived and worked is that they simply pushed African cultures aside, wished them away, made them go into the background and underground. The result being that, often, in many places in Africa, you can go to a supermarket, or a gas station, or in some places a downtown, and it feels rather dully familiar. But to make the jump from this simulacrum of the West and enter, even a little, into how people actually live must take time, and patience, and a kind of commitment.

So, anyway – I don’t feel like I have much of a sense of the actual lives of the people here (beyond certain physical conditions which I can observe). But here are some impressions:

English is now one of the official languages of South Sudan (it used to be Arabic, when it was part of Sudan proper, a scant 5 years ago), but most people speak it in a way that makes us fairly mutually uncomprehending. I frequently have to ask the guys I work with in the OR two or three times what it is they are trying to tell me, and sometimes I have the sense, with me, that they just kind of give up and make assenting noises, though they don’t really know what I’ve said. This does not make for easy conversations! On the other hand, there are these wonderful bits of music that come along with the way English is spoken here that make me smile. For example, “even” as a modifier always seems to go at the beginning of a phrase – so it’s not “You can even wash it,” but “Even you can wash it.” (That just cracks me up!) And “that” does not appear to be enough to indicate an antecedent; it has to be “that one” (the way in Romance languages you often have to use an object pronoun where it is understood, in English?). “You can use that one;” “That one (speaking of my IPhone) is very nice!” It is subtle (they are not saying “that IPhone in contrast to other IPhones,” they are saying “that IPhone”), but unmistakable when you hear it. Gives the sentences a little catch in their step.

There is a certain interest in American politics here – people have even asked me about Hillary’s e-mail problems! And there seems to be a widespread belief that, after 8 years of a Democratic president, a Republican has to be elected, and vice-versa. (I have made it clear I very much do not want this to come true!) It actually makes 100% perfect sense when you think that the people I have talked to who hold the belief a) are all pretty young and so know no Presidents before Bill Clinton, b) live in a country where power-sharing seems to be the only hope for avoiding intercommunal bloodshed, and c) may very well not have experienced “elections” as having much to do with their actual choices. They’ve asked me about Trump, and I’ve told them what I think – I can’t get much sense if they have an independent opinion (I remember arriving in India in the ‘80s and being amazed how many people LOVED Reagan!), since I sort of think they just agree with me out of politeness. When I ask them about the situation here, they – like the Irish people I talked to during the “troubles;” like most people in most war-torn places, I imagine – shake their heads and tell me “what South Sudan needs is peace.”

People come in all shapes and sizes, as you might imagine, but there does seem to be something along the lines of a “classic” Dinka physiognomy. VERY thin, VERY tall, with purple-y black skin (think “classic” Dutch physiognomy but thinner and a whole lot darker!) I think I am below-average height among the OR personnel, which doesn’t happen to me very often, and I have run into women who are taller than I am. And the men’s hips are stunningly narrow; they are like humans as bright gesture, a brushstroke in the air. One of the “techs” is about 6’3” and I think he weighs, max, 130 pounds (and I don’t think he is malnourished, although maybe deficits in early nutrition contribute - ?). Some Dinkas also do traditional things with their teeth – removing the lower incisors (one of the letters in their alphabet is actually kind of hard to say if you have lower incisors) and, it seems, intentionally cultivating buckteeth in the upper incisors – although I have met many people who have not done this. You also see very delicate scarification patterns (on the face, on the torso), which, apparently, make people’s ethnicity instantly recognizable – during the civil war, having “Nuer” scarifications in a Dinka area could apparently be deadly – but I truly know nothing about this.

As so often everywhere, men tend to look a lot shlumpier than women – t-shirts, random pants. Although – as far as I can tell, almost all the clothing stores (er – stalls, rather) in town sell used clothes, arrived here by whatever Byzantine route, and it is impressive how sharp some of the guys can make a second-hand button-up look. The women, by contrast, wear all sorts of colorful clothes, ranging from things that look like a suit you might see (or have seen 15 years ago) in a suburban office, to dresses indistinguishable from those on sale at NY summer street fairs, to – most commonly – something that looks to me like a sari (apologies to those who know how a sari is actually wrapped!): Tight undergarments of some kind swathed in a wrapping of colorful fabric, usually with a tie of the same fabric covering the head. My favorite, however, goes one step further: Many women (and I wonder if it has something to do with religion? we are very close to Sudan proper here, and I hear the call to prayer every day) continue the wrap of cloth so that the end of it sort of wraps and piles onto and floats over their head, like a kind of colorful cloud. I’m not sure where I’ve seen photos of this style before, but something about it seems classically Saharan. Picture it: A tall, thin, dark woman, with a nimbus of bright orange fabric winding about her body and face, perhaps walking along with a bundle on her head. I don’t want to exoticize, but it looks very – exotic! And beautiful. (Not to leave the men out completely: The other day, I saw a guy dressed entirely in white, his head topped with a white cowboy hat, peddling along on a white bicycle. He looked like he should be an important person in the community; I wonder if he was?) Men basically all seem to wear their hair cropped close to the skull; women – any manner of braid, weave, extension, what have you, you can imagine.

I think that – like many places on earth – there may be a formality in public intercourse here that makes swearing not like at home – makes it a VERY serious matter (we could probably use a dose of that in the States, no?). I actually said “fuck” in the OR yesterday (not AT anyone, nothing like that, but it was still totally stupid – me getting worked up over something that turned out not even to be a problem), and I had a subtle feeling I might really have offended people. More, that I might have lost some respect, in their eyes. I did my best to apologize, clearly and more than once, and everyone has been very nice since, so maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought, or maybe they accepted my apology (or maybe they are just nice).

Well – hmm – that’s all fine and good, but I’m not sure I have anything more intimate to say about the folks who live here. People are usually friendly when you say hi on the street, although, as I’ve said before, they also (especially patients in the hospital) often look at me like I’m from Mars – either a potentially dangerous life form that must be carefully negotiated, or an irrelevance. Though, you know, I think some of that is probably me overinterpreting the serious look of someone who has to be in the darn hospital, for Chrissake. Today, I had to get a woman to bring her child for a lumbar puncture, then take him back to his bed, and we wordlessly communicated just fine – I wondered whether there might even have been the little hint of a smile.

Little kids NEVER seem to tire of yelling out “khawadja!” (“white person!”) when we walk by, even though we walk by every morning, and they are the same kids every morning. Lauren, I don’t know if you are reading this, but it always makes me think of a story you told me one time in the basement of Foley House – how, when you were in Spain in the late 70s or early 80s, people would sometimes point at you and yell “negra!” and you wanted to yell back at them “I know!!” Makes me smile to this day.

There are street kids at the hospital gate who will follow you around asking incessantly for money, bringing up all the issues that one is never satisfactorily resolving – why shouldn’t he have some of my money; but it might sow conflict if he gets some and another kid doesn’t; and isn’t it demeaning to be put in a position to beg, and to encourage it; and, anyway, what happens when I go in a few weeks and no one’s giving him money any more – on and on. All coming down to the ineluctable fact that, for some reason that doesn’t make any actual sense, things being left as they are, I get to be comfortable and he doesn’t (unless he’s a Zen master, which, who knows, maybe he is).

Some of the babies seem a bit freaked out by white people, but there was one yesterday – maybe 6 months old, doing great after a bout of croup, about to be discharged – whom I got some great baby smiles out of while we were hanging out by his bed. (I love the occasionally bobbing, uncertain carriage of the head at that age!) His mother seemed happy, too.

And maybe I’ll leave it at that.

Except to say that – I’m sick! I’m sick! My stomach has NEVER been right since I got here, but I’ve actually felt pretty okay except when I eat (!). And my eyes have been burning, and then I started to get a cold a couple of days ago – but I still felt basically okay. Today, however, still feeling fine, I passed a colleague at the hospital and she asked “Are you okay? You’re looking a little peaked there.” And, wouldn’t you know it - she was right. Within a couple of hours I started to have that light-headed sick feeling, and this afternoon – well, lets just say I’m losing a lot of WATER, through the LOWER (not upper, happily) orifice. Still light-headed and headachy; maybe a little fever – but, hey, actually, it’s not that bad. I started taking antibiotics this afternoon (I’ve had many bouts with bacterial GI stuff, and this feels like it might be that), and am all ready with my anti-parasite meds if I’m not better by tomorrow (Giardia has been a bit of a problem here…). Drinking my oral rehydration salts mixed with Emergen-C (not bad, actually). Expect to be able to report a full recovery…sometime soon. (Tomorrow is my day off, wouldn’t you know it? Well, probably better to have it as a day to recover rather than feel this way in the OR.)

Have a good weekend, everyone – talk with you soon!