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?