Around the World in 50 Years (47 page)

Almost every South Sudanese I talked to was enthralled to finally have a state of their own after 57 years of nasty civil war (a peaceful hiatus prevailed from 1972–1982); to have “The People's Own President,” the Stetson-wearing lieutenant general who'd led their fight to freedom; and to finally have a government of their own, that cared about them (as the biased Arab/Muslim one in Khartoum never did), in a new nation where they might speak freely, assemble without fear of any secret police, and pursue their dreams. They had hope, ambition, and oil, but they were so impoverished and uneducated, and their land had been so long deprived of funding from Khartoum, and so shattered by the fight for freedom from the North, that experts estimated a best-case scenario would take South Sudan at least ten to 12 years to become a fully functioning and self-sufficient state—and that was only
if
all went well, and
if
Sudan did not attack them, and
if
Khartoum let them use its pipeline to export their oil to earn foreign exchange, and
if
South Sudan's mutually antagonistic Big Men were able to cooperate rather than fight, and
if
the age-old animosity between South Sudan's main tribes did not deteriorate into warfare, and
if
their people dreamed realistic dreams. The world's newest nation was a big
If
.

Numerous problems remained to be solved, high among them the unattainable expectations that had accompanied their independence. I met several veterans of the war, some missing an arm or a leg, who proudly—or sometimes angrily—showed me their ID card from the South Sudanese People's Liberation Army and expressed dissatisfaction with the high prices, the mass unemployment, and the slow pace of reconstruction and oil development. One of them forced me to put my camera away when he saw me photographing the shabby outdoor market, because he was ashamed of it: “Come back in two years and we will have a city here…”

The most flagrant instance of overblown expectations came from a college sophomore I met when deplaning, who helped me find a room at the South Sudan Two Hotel. I treated him to dinner there the next evening—a tasteless buffet of rice, potato chips, macaroni elbows, and scrawny chicken, without a single vegetable, at thrice the price it cost in most of East Africa. He confidently told me that when he graduated in three years he expected to have a starting salary of 300,000 South Sudanese pounds a month, the equivalent of one million dollars a year! I remonstrated with him, told him he was nuts, reminded him that more than 60 percent of his countrymen lived on less than two dollars a day, that even hard-charging minibus drivers, who worked seven days a week, only netted $200 a month. But he bizarrely insisted he was right. And he was majoring in
economic
s.

Perhaps this inability to think things through to a wise and valid conclusion is even more prevalent in South Sudan than in most of Africa, because this land had for decades been starved for food, health care, education, communication facilities, and everything else by the harsh regime in Khartoum that despised these non-Arabic Christians and animists. Small wonder that the three most popular shows on Juba TV—as compiled by my own, admittedly unscientific, market research—were patriotic speeches, soccer, and a syndicated wrestling program from the States called
TLC,
in which the combatants fight with tables, ladders, and chairs.

Take that economics major: I'd invited him to meet me at 7:00 p.m. at my hotel to discuss some business, but he came at 6:00 instead and left because he assumed I was out. He later told me he had pushed the door to my room, and when it didn't open, he presumed I was elsewhere. Did he try knocking on my door? No, never thought of that. Did he ask the receptionist if I was out? No, never considered it. Did he wait until our appointed time? You already know the answer. And remember, this kid is one of his country's intellectual elite.

Or consider the wiring in my hotel room: The fan on the wall sported two identically colored cords dangling an inch apart. One was the pull cord to turn it on; the other was a spliced wire for the current. Pull one in the dark and you get cooled; pull the other and you get cooked.

Or when I had to go to the South Sudan One Hotel to use the Internet: The driver dropped me at off at 2:00 p.m. and agreed to return for me at 5:00. He never showed. I went to reception and asked them to call South Sudan Two (their downscale branch, where I was staying) to have the van sent back. None of the staff knew the phone number—of their sister hotel! It took three hours to get a ride back.

South Sudan prices were exorbitantly high for everything, as a result of the influx of aid workers from the UN and NGOs, all wanting to do good, but many causing unintended harm to the economy because they imported their Western valuations and spending habits. I've seen this same NGO-induced inflation in other new countries having small populations—Macedonia, Kosovo, East Timor—where the proportion of humanitarian workers was large enough to push up the prices. These aid workers are willing, and able, to spend $60 for a dinner in a land where most folks don't earn that much in a month. Then they plunk down 300 to 400 bucks a night at the few good hotels and further warp the economy. They pay five dollars for a minibus ride that should (and previously did) cost ten cents. They go to the market and pay whatever is asked, no matter how inflated by local standards, because it seems cheap compared to what they paid at home, and they're too busy or too dignified to bargain. But in the process they (and those they hire to cook and work for them) drive up the prices of beans, rice, meat, vegetables, and other staples beyond the purses of the poor locals. The consequence is, inevitably, that the sellers raise their prices to meet what the traffic will bear—and distort the economy for years.

I'm not opposed to those who want to do good—indeed, I donate regularly to many of these organizations—but I wish their workers would be more self-sacrificing and leave at home their insistence on air conditioning, new mattresses, toilets with seats, and fancy food. If they'd live in a more frugal style in these countries, and try to be more sensitive to, and fit into, the established local economy, they'd benefit by not destabilizing that economy and by developing more empathy for the people they're there to help. If you're there to help folks who subsist on two dollars a day, try doing that yourself for a few days. Walk in their sandals, shop from their pockets. You'll be all the better for it. And so will they.

I spent my last two days in Juba preparing to transition from the deserts and dryness of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Ethiopia, Chad, Somalia, and South Sudan to the wet jungles and moist upland forests of Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. I disinfected everything (even the inside of my toiletries kit and the sports soles in my hiking boots) with iodine-pill solution, sprayed all my jungle clothes with pyrethrum to deter mosquitoes, finished off Tom Clancy's nine hundred-page
The Sum of All Fears
so I didn't have to drag it along, delighted the locals with gifts of used T-shirts, and tenderly cut the duct-taped legs off my old jungle pants to turn these faithful friends (who had seen me through some 60 countries in ten years) into shorts. I allocated my stash of dense, high-energy foods—cereal, peanuts, dried figs, dates, and power bars—to each of the remote campsites ahead, where food was scarce, and wrapped my medicine kit in extra insulation. I made an effort to catch up on the sleep I'd previously lost fitfully dozing under airport luggage counters while awaiting dawn flights. I consolidated supplies and containers to lighten my load from 80 pounds to around 70. (I'd left New York with 120.) I did my last wash of the trip (nothing will dry in the jungles), and I traveled six miles to find a cyber café to let my friends know that I missed them and wished them a Merry Christmas.

I informed the taxi driver who brought me from the cyber café to my hotel that I had to go to the airport the next morning at 11:00 a.m. and asked him to come for me. He agreed. But he never showed up. Aware of TIA, I had, as backup, also told the receptionist that I might need the hotel's van to take me to the airport, but when I saw her that morning she had forgotten, and the van was being washed in the Nile and would not return until afternoon. I knew that each of the twin South Sudan Hotels had its own van, so I asked for the other one. They told me it was “broken.” When I asked how it was broken, they said, “No gas.” I was unable to determine if that meant no gas in the vehicle, no gas in Juba, no gas in the whole country, or no gas between their ears.

I raised my voice—just a bit—and told them I
had
to get to the airport. The receptionist, the assistant receptionist, the guard, and the manager huddled and conversed, but none of them had any idea how I could get to the airport. “Maybe you could wait until tomorrow?”

“Do you have any guests checking out this morning?” I asked.

Yes, they did.

“Well, many of your guests came here in their own cars. There are a dozen in the parking lot. Why don't you ask one of them if they would give me a ride to the airport?”

They were stunned. Transfixed. Stupefied. They had never done this! Never even thought of it. And they could not absorb my suggestion.

Just then a man in a business suit with a large suitcase checked out and headed for a car.

“Excuse me, sir, but if you are going the airport, can you give me a lift?” I asked.

No problem.

I found the attitude of Air Uganda (“The Wings of East Africa”) refreshingly realistic and practical. No instructions on door dynamics to us passengers seated by the emergency exits. No preflight safety video. No announcement about what to do if our tired commuter jet crashed in the jungle en route from Juba to Kampala. And no stewardess standing in the aisle pulling life-vest toggles and blowing into inflation tubes, as if we might actually survive an “over-water emergency.” This four-year-old shoestring airline knew that if we were going down, we were going
down
. So the crew skipped all that useless salvation stuff.

They did tell us to tighten our seat belts, but that was primarily meant to curtail traffic to the galley for free Tusker on a route where a majority of the passengers seemed determined to set a record for most cans of beer drunk during a one-hour flight, likely inspired by the Tusker billboard at the airport featuring a photo of a well-endowed babe in a bikini embracing the copy line:
GOOD BODY GREAT HEAD NEVER BITTER
.

Although I seldom venture out at night in an African city, Kampala reputedly had fewer thieves and thugs per capita than most of the continent's capitals, tempting me to consider walking the kilometer from my hotel to catch Midnight Mass at Christ the King Church to see how it stacked up against St. Pat's.

“Is it safe to walk around tonight?” I asked my taxi driver, en route to town from the airport.

“No!”

“But don't the robbers take the night off for Christmas Eve?”

“No. They work extra hard to make a good Christmas for themselves. And YOU will be their Christmas.”

Not me, sports fans. I suddenly remembered I was Jewish, and decided to go to bed early and save my ecumenical efforts for daylight.

Before I turned in I got a call from Andrew, who had not shown up at our hotel. He told me he was at the Sheraton, sick, heading home, abandoning our trip, and that, sorry, I'd have to watch my own back. I took a cab to the Sheraton and found him in bad shape.

I have no idea what he ate or drank after we'd separated, but he'd picked up some bad bug and had painful cramps, hourly diarrhea, and other indicia of GI distress. I usually recommend that, if someone gets the tourist trots, they just let nature take its course, with the result that everything will usually come out all right in the end (so to speak). But Andrew had symptoms of amebic dysentery, and he'd soon be stuck in an airplane for many hours, which mandated more active intervention. I gave him Immodium (with a Kaopectate backup) to curtail the toilet trips and a regimen of metronidazole to kill the bugs.

I also finally understood the cause of his recent odd behavior: He was experiencing severe psychological distress from the mefloquine hydrochloride he'd been taking to prevent malaria. Its side effects can include sharp mood swings, paranoia, insomnia, nightmares, anxiety, depression, confusion, hallucinations, irritability, and other semipsychotic effects in about 70 percent of those who take it. “It causes toxic brain injury,” said a former Army doctor now at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Heath, and CBS News had summed it up in a report: “In plain language, it can make you lose your mind.”

I'd tried it twice, five years before and two years before, and I had to quit each time after just one pill and switch to Malarone. I'd warned Andrew about it a month before we left the States, but he explained that he preferred to use the once-a-week mefloquine to the one-a-day Malarone. Since he was set on using it, I told him to at least test it out for a week or two before he left the States to see if it caused him any psychological problems. I should have realized that Andrew, as an ultra-macho kid, would likely opt to tough it out regardless of the increasing discomfort and disorientation.

Fortunately, the symptoms usually disappear within a few weeks after taking the last pill, so he'd likely be better by New Year's. But the poor kid had a really crappy Christmas. So to speak.

After Andrew headed home, I toured Kampala and became aware how totally different the street life had been in each of the capitals I'd visited on this swing. Their signature characteristics were:

Riyadh
—A lot of overweight and often overbearing men in spotless white robes with red-and-white checked head scarves followed, a diffident pace or two behind, by a woman covered from head to toe with a shapeless black robe, of whom only the eyes could be seen—although you are not supposed to look.