Time flies. Its hard to believe its our third day in Juba already! So far it hasn’t been too uncomfortable or difficult, but I’m sure that might change by day 10. We were all super tired on Friday when we arrived, so we slept well on our traditional Sudanese string beds that night. We started off at 9am on Saturday and I even enjoyed a shower in the morning! It was cold… but it was a shower! We actually have a shower in our bathroom and I guess the ministry is ordering water in our tank to be refilled daily so as to provide us with water for a shower everyday. The water is from the Nile—pumped straight from the river to a truck to our water tank—so it’s not the cleanest stuff in the world, but with a lot of soap it will do the job. And in this humidity, a little cold water every morning is GREAT.
We had our opening meeting under the one large tree on site and did team intros and why we’re there and expectations. It was nice and cool under the tree, but the day was getting hotter by the hour. I really like this team—we’ve worked really well together so far, and I think we will continue to the rest of the week. Around 12:30 we went to the restaurant at the hotel next door for lunch and had a feast! (compared to our meager supper the night before). Chicken, beef, rice, bread, French fries, coffee… nothing super African, but it was definitely a lot of good food to give us energy for the day. It was a very LONG meal, about 3 hours long. We headed off to the girls orphanage site after lunch. The site is about 15 minutes across town from the boys site, and in a very nice neighborhood, apparently. You can tell an upscale neighborhood because of a few western-looking houses scattered amongst tukels and mud huts—the traditional housing here for most people.
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| Tukels. This is what most areas of Juba look like |
Traveling through Juba, I’m so confused! People live in these traditional tukels—typically round, thatched roof huts—and it looks like they don’t have running water or electricity directly in their tukel. But as we went to church today and as we’ve been around town, the majority of people dress to the nines. I’m going to be very honest here and clearly show that I am used to a western lifestyle, but it’s just hard for me to think about getting dressed up nicely (like for work or something) in a waterless, electricity-less tukel everyday. (a house with dirt floors) Now, I’m not knocking the tukel. They can actually be quite beautiful structures and are definitely economical here. But it’s just a way of life that I’m not familiar with, so it’s been very cool to see how people live similarly to us in very different environments. It also makes me realize all the things I think I “need” in order to be clean and presentable everyday, when really those are mostly luxuries.
The people have been very friendly here. Always waving and greeting us. I don’t feel threatened or unwelcomed by strangers. We have stayed mostly on the orphanage sites and not ventured too far into the markets or town, so that might change if do that. I don’t think we’ll end up going to the markets here… they are mass chaos and we don’t have ready access to transportation to get to and from them without dragging along Dr. James, who has a job to do at the orphanage.
One of the first cooky experiences was money exchanging. Dr. James (our makeshift chauffer) told us that the best exchange rate is from the boys on the street that do money exchange. These are basically guys with handfuls of money that mob your car when you pull over. So, Dr. James handled the money and exchanging, while we watched the craziness that was yelling in Sudanese Arabic and the bartering for exchange rates. One dollar exchanges for around 2.80 Sudanese pounds, and we got an exchange very close to that with the boys on the street. The bank was exchanging for 2.4.
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| The "office" |
Today we started with the master plan of the girls site. Coming into this I though we were just doing dorm buildings, but after having a programming meeting with Philip, the ministry director, turns out he has a LOT of plans and dreams for the site! So we are designing the master plan as if all these plans unfold as hoped, though they buildings will probably come in in phases. I worked on panoramas of the site and starting to get some rough layouts of some of the guest/staff housing done in CAD. It looks like I'll be doing CAD most of the week, with some hand-rendering closer to presentation time. The civil engineers/surveyors on the team will be heading out to the site the next couple days to get that done. I'm actually kind of glad that I will be hanging out at the boys site because it's much cooler in the "office" than it is out in the fields and sun of the girls site. But hopefully later on in the week Stu & I will be able to get out too!
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| Panorama of the girls' site |
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