The Town

I’ve given you some sense of the hospital environment, so I thought I should also describe the town.

Aweil has an official population of somewhere around 35,000 (a little less than that in the 2010 census, but, what with population movements caused by the war, it’s hard to be very exact right now). As those of you who have spent time in developing world towns will suspect, however, it “looks” – to the eyes of a westerner – much smaller. At first blush, in fact, it looks much less substantial to me than, say, Shelburne, Nova Scotia, a town where I spent many summers as a child, population 1,600. I’ve always explained this to myself (and I think it makes sense) in terms of resources – if you are rich enough to build (or rent) a big house, with a yard, and drive a car to stores that are stocked with lots and lots of things that only rich people (relatively speaking) can buy, etc., etc., well – your one life just has a bigger footprint than one life over here. So that 1,600 of you can end up looking like more than 35,000 South Sudanese. (We talk a lot these days about the relatively abstract “carbon footprint,” but it’s interesting how physical – how visible – it actually is.)

The town has one paved road and is otherwise arranged around a network – more or less gridlike – of red-dirt streets which, in the absence of any regular grading, often have undulations and holes as large or larger than a car, and sometimes two or three feet deep (after a rain, these are called “lakes”). We often ride to and from the hospital in cars because of security requirements, but negotiating these streets means the car trip is only minimally shorter than walking.

It appears to me that more than half of the structures in the town – in fact, maybe 80% of them? – are mud-walled and grass-roofed, the grass being set out in tiers rising to a little witch’s-hat peak – quite attractive, although most of the roofs are a bit bedraggled. The remainder of the buildings – mostly in the market area, but also the hospital and a handful of others – are stuccoed brick or cinder-block. Their predominant pattern, seen throughout the market, is a long one-storey building, divided linearly into rooms or shops, with a concrete porch in front covered by a corrugated metal awning held up by rough 4 by 4s. The stucco is painted varying shades of taupe and yellow, with also quite a lot of sea-green scattered around. The rooms are generally closed with metal shutters, which are often painted royal blue with a yellow star on each panel. The town is very colorful, in other words, if also always smudged and smeared (as are we) with red dust.

Apart from this, there are a few buildings of the linear, market type that have a second storey, though it often appears to be unfinished and/or unoccupied. And I’ve seen two three-storey buildings. One is a bank; the other is of unknown purpose, but everyone thinks that it – like everything around here that smacks of greater-than-subsistence living – belongs either to the government or to the military.

The main (paved) road is lined with huge green trees, also dusty, but pleasant and attractive. And the town – or, at least, the market area, which is the only area I see with any regularity – is bustling with people. In the morning, and again in the early afternoon, there are troops of children in their blue school uniforms heading off to and then home from class. And throughout the day, there are shoppers, merchants, street children, motorcycle-taxi drivers, auto-rickshaw drivers, mothers with babies, sharply dressed young men moving with purpose, town drunks and lunatics, you name it, ambling or occasionally hurrying around the market.

Speaking of schoolchildren – it’s nice to see that, here at least, the basic education system appears to be functioning. Although last week, a dispute over the management of a school led by some strange chain of events to a policeman shooting a teenager in the back. NOT what you want to have happen in a country already on edge. For a short while that afternoon, there was an absolute ban on movements (we couldn’t even go to the hospital), and we were required to stay inside our huts. But nothing else happened, it all settled down quickly – and the kid, pretty amazingly, is doing fine.

One final observation: As I also noticed, again and again, in Ethiopia, the largest, cleanest-looking, most attractive building in town is the (Catholic) church. Maybe familiarity makes it look particularly nice to me: You could pick it up and plunk it down in Boston or Philadelphia (or, probably, somewhere in France) and no one would look at it twice. A waste of resources in a hungry country? Or an excellent investment in a place that relies on spiritual sustenance to get it through the times when material sustenance is lean? You make the call!

I want to start giving you some impressions of the people I’m seeing and working with here, too – I’ll do that next time.