My Favorite Day

Saturday, June 21, 2008
Today was, by far, the best day of this whole trip…well, the best day for me and probably the worst day for Emma. Ed let me sleep in until 9 AM (yes!), and I woke up ready to go shopping today. Emma, however, woke up to find $850 not in her wallet. She was not in the mood for shopping, and when Ed gave us an overview of the condition of the car, she definitely did not want to go shopping. This car is just calling for disaster. The brake fluid leaks, the brake lights don’t work (!), the battery is held in place by inner tubes, the fluid containers are sealed with plastic bags, the windows do not roll down, and to top it off, there is only one seatbelt in the back! I need a seatbelt. I am going to die. According to Ed, this car will bring us home without fail about 50% of the time. OH GAD.

After much pushing, we finally convinced Emma to come shopping with us. I was happy. Jerome, our driver, once swerved the car to prevent hitting a group of schoolchildren, but ended up crashing into a building. So Ed drove the car to teach Jerome the right way to drive. We wanted to get our dollars exchanged for a good rate, and we knew the bank would jip us from our money (we wanted 215 pounds/$100), so we went to the marketplace searching. We went near the Bishop’s house, at a bigger tin-roofed store, where they sold all sorts of food items. Emma gave the cashier 20 pounds for her mango juice, expecting to get 14 pounds of change back. The guy totally forgot to give us our change, and then when we asked for it, he refused. He then gave us back 10 pounds because he said the juice was 10 pounds. It was 6 pounds! So we forced him to give us the rest of our change, and he finally gave in. Jerk. Ed did not end up getting a good exchange rate offer, so he left the store, told us to stay put, and drove off to search. And so we stayed put. People walked by, stared at us. I took some pictures, Emma kept whining, and George and Lucy kept laughing at Emma. At one point, there were many donkey carts on the road, and Emma wanted to ride one of them. The journalist we met asked his friend if he could let Emma ride his donkey, and the friend let her. But the donkey was getting really uncomfortable and the friend told Emma to get off. That was pretty funny haha.

We definitely did not stay put though. We did not want Ed to again ruin the one chance we had to go shopping and do something fun, since he got to go off and do his own thing. So Lucy walked us along the street, by a row of tin-roofed stores. There were two donkeys standing right in the middle of the main road, blocking all traffic. After much honking, they finally started to move in the direction we were walking. We assumed they wanted to follow Emma. We turned a corner and noticed the familiar SPLM head building, “where all the goats were”. As usual, more people stopped their work, and yep…stared. We walk into the marketplace with no clear objective of what we really wanted to buy. I wanted to buy a shawl, the type that the Kenyan woman, Susan, wears at our compound, but there was nothing that looked distinctly African. And so Emma and I just window shopped (even if there were no windows). The marketplace seemed less chaotic and more organized than the one in Juba. There were no winding, narrow pathways for us to follow through the market. The stores were aligned in pretty distinct rows and the paths between them were pretty broad, most of the time. We saw some pink and blue mosquito nets hanging for sale. At one store we stopped by, a man offered all of us some free lollipops. At first I refused because I already have people staring at me because 1) I do not look American (I overheard two men mumbling to each other, guessing that I was probably Filipino…the first time I heard that one) and 2) I am short. All the schoolchildren stare at me because I do not look like a child, even though I am their height. And so having me suck on a lollipop was not going to help that case at all. But Emma told me it is wrong to refuse offers, which I understand completely because Indians get offended when guests refuse their food, so I accepted. Whatever, I should get used to the stares and the giggles.

After all the trouble Emma faced today, Emma decided she wanted to buy some chickens for dinner tonight. We have not had any chicken to eat since arriving in Torit because everyone eats goat or fish here, and to tell you the truth, I have for a long time been wanting some chicken as well. So we settled on a quest to go around the market and buy some live chickens, only to find out that this was the time of day not many people sell chickens. Lucy said it is best to buy them in the morning because chickens need to be plucked and prepared, but we refused to listen to her. We entered a section of the marketplace that was cubed in with a people shopping for groceries and meat. The stands were covered with pieces of cloth and were open for the public to pick pieces of produce displayed. People were propped up against the stands, chatting, haggling, and tasting, but then as soon as we came in, most of them turned their curious eyes toward us. I really wish I took a picture of the whole festive scene, but I was afraid of drawing more attention with my camera. Plus, there were a lot of SPLM people walking around, so I did not want them to snatch my camera away. The area reminded me of one of those stops my family took on the way to Shrinathaji, where there were lots of people selling food items in a similar setup. I will be brave enough to get a picture one day. We passed through and found a stand that cut up fresh meat. I had to avert my eyes because they had a bloody goat hanging from the top of the stand. But even with all that meat, we still saw no chicken. We got out of the back of the marketplace, walked around the periphery, saw the disco place near where Ed found our bamboo sticks, but failed to find a chicken. We saw some ducks swimming on some green, muddy pool, but we felt bad to steal one of them.

We ended up stopping at one of the outside stands to buy ourselves some soft drinks. I was really craving some coconut juice, but they did not have any…so I just had some guava juice. Luckily in that stand, we saw a family who owned a rooster. Ok, not exactly the chicken we were looking for, but close enough. We bought it off them for 17 pounds, and we bought a bag to hold the rooster. We were afraid Emma was becoming too friendly with the live rooster, so we opened the bag to let the rooster have some air. Ed picked us up from the same spot we asked Lucy to pick us up from that day we got lost, and we drove the chicken home.

Now this was not my favorite part of the whole day. We came home, ate some of the same lunch, and went to our respective rooms to rest. The generator was off, so we could not do much. I took a nap, and then Ed woke us up because he wanted to take us out to the countryside with Father Ben. THIS was my favorite part of the whole day…heck, my favorite part of the whole trip so far! We took a right on the road from our compound, a direction we had never gone before, and started out on our adventure with Father Ben as our guide. We passed by some abandoned brick school buildings that were bombed during the war and a village that Emma wanted to take pictures of, but turned out to be the SPLA barracks. We reached a fork in the road where one led to the towns Isoke and Ikotos, but had 4 landmines on it. We did not take that road. We went on the road toward the Imatong Mountains because, except for the last 12 kilometers, that road was clear of mines. We saw a lot of red markings on the sides of the road to indicate that there were landmines around, and I got scared every time Ed got too close to hitting the grass on the outside of the road. We saw some areas that were cultivated, so we knew those might have been safe. We then passed the abandoned Little Norway, which had more bombed smaller buildings and some small huts around. The Norwegians, by the way, have done so much for Sudan. They have built so many primary health care facilities and schools, and the Norwegian Church Aid is on very good terms here. The whole trip so far looked much like the one from Juba to Torit, except that there were more trees and the mountains were closer. But once we passed Torit County, I was in a state of awe. The dirt road got a lot narrower and bumpier, the trees were more diverse and crowded, and the grass was getting as tall as the hood of our car. We saw more of the green mountains beside us, some small rivers below, a wonderful teak plantation that looked so natural to the area, and so many different kinds of barked trees, from mahogany to banana to acacia to bamboo! We were driving into the hills of a forest, and I just fell in love. It was beautiful…so beautiful I would go back there again. The crazy number of pictures I took will never capture the vivid intensity of this landscape. It was just…gorgeous. My vision of heaven. We saw some villagers on the side of the road and waved to them. At times we would see the frame of an abandoned vehicle that had been overturned next to a river. We saw hills that would rise on both sides of us, where the SPLA used to hide and shoot down on the passing Arabs. We also saw areas in the green where the LRA would stay.

We stopped at a small village, near the end of the road, called Imilai (sp?). Again, I was struck by the beauty of the whole scene. This lucky village was nestled between a range of green mountains and tall trees. The huts did not at all disrupt the integrity of the setting. We walked along a narrow path of the village, through the thick of the grass (grass much taller than me), passed by more of their huts and chickens (amazing, we finally found Emma’s chickens!), some banana trees, and reached the end of a huge fallen tree that served as a bridge for the Kinyette (sp?) river underneath. We all stepped onto the tree, and I was tempted to walk further to explore more of this enchanting place, but we had to turn back.

We then sat at some open common space that the villagers cleared so that we could talk to the local priest. He told us about witchdoctors who did not give the correct kind of treatment, and so he would have to drive his people all the way to Isoke for proper care. Everyone was so friendly and we shook hands with all of them. I even met an old man who spoke Gujarati! Can you believe it?! I come all the way to Africa, to this remote village, expecting to hear some words in Latuko, have Africans shake my hand, when all of a sudden I hear one of them say, “Kemcho!”… I was stunned. He did not even speak Hindi; he spoke Gujarati, my language! At first I thought it was a fluke, but then he asked me what my name was in Gujarati, and then I knew I wasn’t crazy. Wow. Now I am definitely coming back. I loved the people; I loved this place. I did not want to leave. But then the sun was setting, and the time had come for us to go back home. Whatever, I will come back again.

To top this day off, Abigail, our cook, told us we had chicken! YES! Who cares if it was small! I had waited so long, and I was ready to eat some organic chicken. I went to sleep satisfied with our day. No health work on this Saturday; just plain touristy work.

Ok fine, I was not completely satisfied with the day. Ryan told me that the Lakers suffered a humiliating lost to the Celtics. I am sad; there goes our run for the title… See, I knew this day was too good to be true.

But other than that, and the fact that Bishop Paride is getting knee surgery (I hope he will be ok), this day was near perfect. I loved it.

-Neesha