Ngakidamdam

Ngakidamdams are giant celebrations, and apparently the Toposa have a lot to celebrate because these things happen a lot. This is one of the most confusing things about their culture because so far we haven't noticed many patterns or "rules" about what goes on at one of these things. I do know they involve karoting ("karot" is the Toposa word for jump) in a circle, whistle-blowing, gunshots, and they last for hours. The time of day is irrelevant. Ngakidamdams can happen at 2am or in the middle of the afternoon. Sometimes it is one village, sometimes it is multiple villages, sometimes it is for a certain occasion and today it was for nyapeses, or unmarried girls. Except even this was confusing because there were plenty of married women, men, and boys there, too. Alyssa, Carrie and I went to just observe and it turned out to be a gold mine of weird Toposa things. Due to the Toposa clothing (or lack thereof), I'm not going to post as many pictures as I'd like to. You're welcome.

 Notice the green skirts of the girls on the other side of the circle. These are made out of goat skins and look green because of the yellow and green beads that the girls sew onto their skirts. These are their special ngakidamdam skirts and aren't worn every day. The smoke in the background is where they are cooking the bull that was slaughtered earlier in the day. And no, I did not eat any.

This little girl had bottle caps tied or sewn or somehow attached to her hair. What? Why? I haven't seen this on anyone else and I don't know what the deal was. Interesting fashion statement.

This video shows the karoting. Sometimes they will all karot, but since this ngakidamdam was especially for nyapeses, everyone stood in a huge circle and sang/clapped while some of the unmarried girls karoted in the middle. During certain songs they would invite others to karot, too. 

Black Friday

Let me just preface this post by saying that I'm currently listening to Bing Crosby's White Christmas album in my tukel in the middle of South Sudan, which is just weird.

Anyways.

The past two days have been filled with things that only happen in Africa. It was either the best or worst Thanksgiving I've ever had, and I'll let you decide which one you think it should be. Alyssa and I had plan A for Thursday, which was to fly from Nairobi to Lokichoggio, Kenya and then drive the 4 hours to where we live in South Sudan. This is what ended up happening:

-It's raining in Nairobi so we are told we can only take 15kgs of hand luggage to make it easier for the plane to take off. Alyssa and I had a total of 57kgs (re-stocked on some groceries in Nairobi) so we re-packed the essentials into one bag and left the rest to be brought to Loki by the airline on Saturday and we could pick it up then. Uh, we don't live in Loki so that won't work well. I think we looked a little desperate/pathetic so the luggage loader guy snuck ALL of our bags on the plane when the guy in charge wasn't looking.

-We get to Loki only to find out that it's been raining all day so the river is flowing...so we can't cross it. Remember, dirt roads and no bridges.

-Alyssa and I go to a place in Loki to eat our pretend Thanksgiving lunch. Our only option was African food buffet style. Sketchy. Some sort of "meat" stew, a green food that tasted just like mashed potatoes, some rice and this beans/hominy mixture that was suspiciously crunchy. The place had a TV so we watched some terrible '90s movie while we waited for the rain to stop.

-It didn't. On to plan B, which is spend the night in Loki at a tented camp. We got to stay in a private house, which was odd but spacious. Round two of Thanksgiving dinner was African food again. Alyssa and I decided that the closest we could get to pumpkin pie was to eat the rest of our package of peach-O's candy...because it's orange and that's the best we could manage.

-The rain stopped during the night and the river was low enough to drive through! We know a guy who drives a taxi in Loki so we had hired him to drive us to Kapoeta. Halfway out of town he says he's sick so he finds his friend to drive us instead.

-It takes us two hours to cross the Kenya border/customs and get through the South Sudan border/customs process. We saw about 5 cars get stuck in the mud so thank you Jesus that never happened to us. The customs process is ridiculous and includes many rounds of passport stamping, car registering, baggage checking, and trying your best to blend in and not appear to be the only white people within a hundred miles. 

-My favorite sign in the South Sudanese immigration shipping container office said "immigration employees shall not play cards, checkers or dominoes during work hours." Guess dominoes got to be too interfering with productivity...

-Flat tire in between the border and Kapoeta. Africa is communal and this situation was no exception. Three cars of people stopped to help and that tire was changed in under ten minutes. Our driver didn't want us to get out of the car so we just sat in the backseat while the car was jacked up and tilted to the side.

-6 hours later we get to the tented camp in Kapoeta where our truck was parked. Fortunately it hadn't rained recently so the river outside Kapoeta was easy to cross.

-The villages closest to our compound were having a huge celebration as we drove past. Lots of whistles, singing, gunshots (final count was 20-something), jumping etc. I'm pretty sure it was a welcome home party for us. At least that's what I'm telling myself.

-We get home to find that bats have taken up residence in our kitchen (bat poop all over the floor) and that the elusive rat had managed to chew the edges of TWO containers on our kitchen counter AND somehow got the lid off of one. Not using that dry milk powder anymore...yuck.

So, that was Thanksgiving...Africa style. Everyone of you should go eat a piece of leftover pumpkin pie in my honor :)

Equator

Did you know that the Equator runs through Uganda? I didn't. But now I can say that I've stood on both hemispheres at the same time!

 Water swirls one direction in the northern hemisphere, the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere, and straight down on top of the Equator!

One of the gift shops has the marker line running through it on the floor. Kinda cool!

Thanksgiving AND Christmas in Uganda

The first day of our meeting was our Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and I will miss our huge family Thanksgiving get together that we have in Dallas every year. This year I celebrated with my Africa family instead!

 Hello.

 The kids put on a skit with the narration of the Christmas story from the gospel of Luke. I think I've become like an aunt to the Lewis kids because I kept trying to take pictures of the boys and I definitely think they did the best job. Davis was Joseph.

 Walker was the hotel manager who had "no room for Mary and Joseph in the inn"

 That night we had a white elephant gift exchange with about 50 people!

 My gift. Coffee and chocolate, perfect!

 Alyssa got coffee and THIRTEEN packets of gravy mix. HA!

Even though I won't be able to do my usual holiday traditions with my Dallas family, it is nice to know that I have a new family here in Africa! Alyssa and I are trying to come up with fun Thanksgiving and Christmas traditions that we could do for the next two years. Got any suggestions?

Rafting the NILE!

Yep, that's right. I got to raft the Nile last week! SO cool!

We went to Uganda for a regional prayer retreat with other people from our company that live in various places in East Africa. It was a great week because not only did we get to go to the retreat but we got to do so many extra things as well! God is good and definitely knows how to bless me with good friends that I get to see all over the world. Alyssa and I stayed in Kampala the first night with our friend Carolyn, then went to Jinja for rafting and the prayer retreat, then back to Kampala to stay with Carolyn a few more nights.

First up, a visit with my aunt Janet and uncle Steve! They were in Kampala the week before I got there and were leaving the night I got there. I got to spend four hours with them, which was wonderful. Thank you both for encouraging me and praying for me. And shout out to my cousins Will and Cara--thanks for the magazine and chocolate!

 My favorite British aunt and uncle

 We had to get up REALLY early to ride the bus from Kampala to Jinja to go rafting. Can you tell we're excited?!

 WC stands for water closet aka bathrooms. HA! How great is this?!

 You know you're getting too close with someone when you accidentally bring the same outfit from South Sudan to raft in. Three people asked us if we were twins...what? Clearly not. If you look closely you can see the Nile river behind us. We spent about 4 hours rafting and the minute we finished it started raining! Rafting was great--the perfect mix of fun and terrifying when the rapids made our raft flip. 

 We spent the night at a hostel in Jinja. We were a liiiiiitle cramped, as you can see. Also sunburned, but it was for a good cause :)

This was down the street from where we stayed. What's wrong with this picture?

Nairobi!

Due to the whole mess of South Sudan's new travel laws, Alyssa and I unexpectedly got three extra days in Nairobi this weekend! Our whole team was going to Uganda for a prayer retreat with other missionaries, but if we had stuck with our original itinerary and left on Tuesday we would have to overnight in Juba, which would have made us miss the plans we had in Uganda before the prayer retreat starts on Friday. This was originally super frustrating but God knows better than we do and He turned the whole thing around and now because we had to make all new plans to leave Sudan at the last minute, we got to go to Nairobi three days early and see friends!

We stayed the night with three girls who are doing their two-year Journeyman term here in Nairobi. I know Emily and Ester from FPO and Alyssa was friends with the other Emily so it was wonderful how we each got to see friends! Alyssa and I will head to Uganda tomorrow and our plan is to go to Jinja to raft the Nile on Wednesday and go quad-biking on Thursday before the prayer retreat starts. This kind of thing is right up my alley and I am SO excited!

 Java House for dinner on Sunday night.

 Alyssa and Emily

 Me and Ester

KFC is the only American chain in Nairobi and it just opened a couple of months ago. Notice the African "tomato sauce" replacement for ketchup. NOT the same thing.

Blessed

Alyssa's dad and three men from her church are here for the world's quickest visit. South Sudan is coming up with as many pointless new travel laws as possible so between the new laws and the constant rain we've been having lately, their visit was getting less and less likely. But long story short, they made it here yesterday and it's been great to have them! A little part of me feels like it's my family visiting, too and it's been great to see Alyssa get to "show off" Toposaland to people she loves.

AND...I am on gift overload because not only did I get the rest of my own stuff (I only brought one suitcase with me to South Sudan and the rest of my bags stayed in Nairobi due to cargo restrictions on my flight) but I got a whole action packer full of American things from Cody, my mom, and Alyssa's family. I am normally not a gift person, but being so far away from anything remotely familiar has brought me to the point of almost crying when I opened an entire action packer full of cereal, coffee flavoring, seasoning packets, dried fruit, etc. Nothing special to anyone else, but it was a whole box of people caring enough to send me something. A whole box of thinking about what I might want. A whole box of remembering the things I like for breakfast and what kind of shampoo I use. A whole box of being thankful for things that I've never thought twice about before now. So wonderful.

I was going to take pictures but my camera is broken. Boo. But since all the best blog posts have pictures  I will leave you with the last pictures I took when my camera was still alive. We have the five cutest puppies you have ever seen. South African boerboel-Rhodesian ridgeback-rottweiler mix.

Pumpkin for a snack!

Haha, milk mustache!

My Day

There is no "typical day" here. I can't even think about what I usually do, because there is no usual for me yet. But I can write about today, and you can hopefully appreciate South Sudan a little bit more.

6:30am: Alyssa and I go for a walk hike through the mud. I've already been awake for almost an hour because of the birds that like to have a party as early in the morning as possible. Usually puts me in a bad mood and today was no exception. There are about 20 kids outside our gate when we leave. Exercise (aka walking somewhere with no reason) is an unexplainable concept to the Toposa, so we go through the same conversation every time.
-Where are you going?
-Uhhh, just over there. [hand motion toward the path]
-Why?
-Just to go.
-By your feet?
-Yes.
-[Laughter. We leave]
I decided during this walk that I needed to adjust my attitude because being that hostile so early in the morning was not going to set me up for a good day. For some reason I had the song I Will Follow You by Chris Tomlin stuck in my head while we were walking. I liked the song before, but I think I'm enjoying it less now that the "where you go, I'll go" part is a little more drastic.

9:45am: I started making bread to have later this week. This rainy season is not stopping so I was trying to take advantage of a sunny day. Last time I made dough bricks bread it was a disaster, but this time I did a better job and the yeast actually made the bread rise.

Late morning: Emails and reading on my Kindle while waiting on the dough to rise. A ginormous rat made an appearance running through the kitchen somewhere in this time frame. I almost vomited. The thing was huge. I don't do rats.

12:15pm: Lunch. Last week we bought the world's largest head of cabbage and we have been eating cabbage every day since then...and I think we're finally halfway through it. Lunch was coleslaw, lentils, passion fruit and a homemade tortilla. Rustic. The bread baking endeavor was a success, whew.

1:30pm: Carrie, Alyssa and I leave for Naskal to pick up the translator so Alyssa can tell an AIDS story and a gospel story in another village. We drive around Naskal and can't find him. A guy working at the clinic ran up to the car asking if we could take him to get the clinic vehicle since he needed to take a severely anemic child to the hospital. Of course we get stuck in the mud while trying to drive this guy to wherever the clinic vehicle was. Stuck in the mud means knee deep Sudanese mud, tires completely stuck. We had a winch to pull ourselves out with so 20 minutes and two uprooted trees later, we were good to go. Perfect picture opportunity but no camera.

3pm: We give up on finding our translator so we drive back to Paringa, stopping by another village on the way back.

3:45pm: Alyssa and I dig a trench in our yard for our shower to drain into. It's approximately one million degrees outside and at this point I can't remember a time before I started sweating. Bucket baths have never seemed so appealing. But then I remembered that I really did appreciate having a shower, and was okay with helping dig the mud pit drainage system so that the water won't back up into the shower.

5:30: Dinner prep begins. A healthy mix of carrot, eggplant, onion, cabbage (more!), and tomatoes sauteed in the skillet, successfully negated by a family sized box of Easy Mac. Yum.

YOU KNOW YOU LIVE IN SOUTH SUDAN WHEN...you ask "so, did you hear the bomb go off this morning?" and it's not a weird question. The UN likes to detonate bombs outside of Kapoeta so we hear them go off on a regular basis. Totally normal dinner conversation, right?

Where I Live

My tukel is a one-room concrete hut. Alyssa has her own tukel (the one with the blue door behind mine) and there is another tukel that teams stay in when they come.

Outdoor bathroom. Shower is on the right, and long drop outhouse is around the corner on the left. The water in the shower is one temperature (cold) but it feels good 90% of the time since it's usually pretty warm outside and will only get hotter as we get into January and February!

Mosquito nets are a must! Since there is no air conditioning it can make the bed a little stuffy, but it's better than getting malaria. I thought about moving the other bunk bed into the guest tukel but then I decided that it would be good shelf space. My action packer makes a pretty nice footstool. Most of my stuff is still in Nairobi but it's coming to South Sudan next week. Hopefully my tukel will start to feel less like a concrete room and more like home once I have all of my things.

Alyssa and I share the kitchen. We have a solar powered fridge, and a gas stove and oven so we haven't had any problems with cooking our food. There's no "dining room" obviously, so we eat on the porch. Samson is our ferocious guard dog who decided to take a short break to be in the picture. Everything has to be cooked from scratch unless we plan months ahead of time and bring it from Nairobi or request that volunteer teams bring things for us. We've made bread twice (once successfully, once needed some major work!) and tortillas several times. When Carrie and I were in Kapoeta on Tuesday we saw some people selling some really nice eggplants so we took advantage of the opportunity and I brought five home. Alyssa and I got creative and made lasagna with two of them. We cut the eggplant into slices and used them in place of lasagna noodles. Delicious!

One of the chickens decided that our porch was the place she absolutely had to lay her eggs. This is the second day we've found one on our couch. Yuck.

Our solar panel makes a nice yard decoration. It's been acting up lately so if any of you have any experience with solar power/batteries let me know! It would be nice to have enough power to get through an entire evening. It was working fine but the past few days we've woken up with no power stored in the batteries. I waited until the sun had been out for several hours before I started a load of laundry in the washing machine but it didn't even make it halfway through the cycle before the battery was drained again. Now I have the washer paused and I'm letting the batteries juice back up. Hopefully it will make it through the rest of the cycle by the end of the afternoon.