Estoni's Blog

It’s hot here in Lokichoggio, and the mid afternoon sun beats down relentlessly. This is Kenya – North Kenya – which is an arid land that sustains few people. The Turkana tribe survive here, as do the Toposa. Lord knows how.

My colleagues and I live in a diesel powered camp with a bore hole well for water. We have air conditioning and wifi, and at the bar the beers are icy cold. The contrast to how the locals live couldn’t be more stark. In the village  is a settlement of Turkana that live in grass huts that look like upside down cupcakes; without electricity, running water or any form of sewage system they survive on very meager resources indeed.

A few miles away from here lies the border, and beyond that stretches the vast Sudan; even hotter and drier. Tomorrow we will fly there, my co-pilot Ken and I; and we’ll spend the day delivering people and supplies to a handful of MSF (Doctors without Borders) camps providing aid in the south. We’ll be airborne for at least six hours, and in this time will have covered only a fraction of the country.

Working in South Sudan has been a real eye opener. I’ve never known a flatter, more desperate place. Much of the land is devoid of even a single hill, and in the midday the temperatures soar into the 40s (100+F). After decades of conflict the place resembles (to my mind anyway) a biker bar the morning after – once the drunken brawling has ended and it is time to tidy up. The remains of the war days are evident, with carcases of airplanes and fighting machines littering the edges of most runways, and I sometimes sense a stunned emptiness in the people. Or is it just my imagination?

While on the whole the Sudanese we meet are incredibly friendly, I’m cautious around the police and soldiers. They have a reputation for “snapping” and becoming unreasonable and violent. Away from the capital city of Juba, most people appear to be constantly hungry and thirsty, and this goes for the army and police too.

The MSF staff are a good bunch. They are generally very positive people working in extremely trying conditions to help as best they can with medical emergencies. Sometimes I feel like the MSF workers are benefitting as much from their work as the people they help. Giver, receiver and gift are indistinguishable after all.

I’ve also noted (with pride) how many Kenyans are involved in these operations. There are Kenyan doctors and nurses, pilots, technicians and administrators doing good work here. The local Sudanese (with some notable exceptions) just don’t have the skill sets needed to work in the NGO world yet; and can you blame them?

There is an odd juxtaposition I feel, in the Sudan, between the thatch villages one sees deep in the interior far from any roads, and the aid centers where we land. I don’t know anything at all about the Sudanese really, but in the aid camps there is a helplessness I sense amongst the people. I imagine that this is due to the war, which has torn the country apart in countless ways for many years, leaving behind a people stuck in limbo between the traditional lifestyle of their nomadic forefathers and survival today in a rapidly changing modern world. I would bet that much of  this helplessness is also due to the aid missions from abroad.

One of my colleagues, Jamie, came back from a rotation flying for MSF recently with a story that comes to mind now. This was just before the recent referendum for a new South Sudan. He had landed at the old colonial Pibor Post with a delivery of over a tonne of medical supplies and emergency food for the MSF center there. On the airfield was our friend, Twig, just stepping out of his aircraft. Twig runs a small fleet of Dorniers around this part of the world, and to Jamie’s surprise he was unloading crates of guns from the cargo pod of his plane. In his Australian accent Twig joked loudly, “This is the way it’s meant to work, mate. One of us brings in the guns and the other brings the medecine.”

I imagine that in the interior – where people are evidently surviving without any modern infrastructure at all – that the ancient, traditional knowledge of living off the land survives. We see the circular settlements from the air, forming organic patterns in the grasslands thousands of feet beneath us. For me they represent timeless footprints of the origins of our human life.

This land fills me with questions, and makes me wonder about whether it can offer us answers about how we humans might live in more harmony. I do hope that the transition ahead to an independent South Sudan remains a peaceful process. Kenyans (and Ugandans, and Ethiopians) should hope for the same. Apart from the regional stability that a peaceful transition promises – as South Sudan finds itself and grows – it’s neighbours will benefit too. Already there are thousands of Kenyans – from places like Kitale and Kisumu, Nairobi and Mombasa – employed in aid and development work in the Sudan. Collaboration can only lead to good things.