The Smiling Kawaaja

It is a strange thing being a white person (“kawaaja”) in Sudan. There aren’t many of us here. Besides Ross, I have seen about three other white people since we got to Nimule about a week and a half ago. This makes the few of us who are here into something of local celebrities. While I walk along the road during my daily trips to the Catholic diocese to download from the internet, small kids often (always?) see me and yell out, “Kawaaja!” I turn to them, smile, and wave, and they laugh and say, “How are you?” I respond, “I’m good. How are you?” Finally, they say, “I’m fine.” That’s about as far as the conversation can go as that’s about all the English that they know. Sometimes, just to throw them off, instead of asking “How are you?” I ask, “Ita kweys?” which is the Juba Arabic version of “Are you well?” They answer, “Ai,” (“Yes”) which is again about as far as the conversation can go as that’s about all the Arabic I know.

The kids also love to run up to me and shake my hand. Sometimes I feel like a politician or the pope walking down the road, having dozens of children run up to me to shake my hand and have me “bless” them. The curiosity of the Sudanese people is not confined to the children, though. The adults will usually stop and stare as I go by. On one of my trips, an older lady in the distance saw me walking, and she stopped and waved. When I smiled and waved back, she sprinted to the road, knelt to the ground, and held my hand. I wasn’t quite sure how to respond and wondered if she thought my shadow passing over here would heal her.

The faux-celebrity status was very uncomfortable to me, especially at first, but I am trying to take it in stride. I don’t enjoy usually being the center of attention but don’t have much of a choice here, so I figure I might as well make the best of it. I figure that I may be one of the few kawaaja that many of these people will come in contact w/, so I should try to make a good impression as much as I can.

After many days and trips to the Catholic diocese, I finally finished downloading Microsoft Access. I was so excited to have a unique project to work on for the children that I immediately got started putting together the database that I had been asked to create. Thankfully, my Access knowledge came back to me much more easily than I had expected, and the database has now been designed and built and is ready to be transferred to one of the office computers and to have the kids’ information begin to be input. I will probably work on inputting some of the kids’ information and on fine-tuning the database to be as useful as possible, but I imagine that I will soon move on to my next project of redesigning the accounting system here to make it simpler for the staff to use and more accurate for reporting purposes.

One of the recent additions to the children’s home has been a new pet monkey. For some time, the kids have had one monkey, named Johnny Cash. Well, now Johnny has a little friend, whom I named June Carter. We weren’t sure that June was a female monkey, so I thought if it were actually male, we could call it Jude Carter. When she first came, we kept June tied up so that she wouldn’t run away. She cried nonstop (One constant of life here is that there is ALWAYS someone, be it monkey or child, crying. I have quickly become highly desensitized to it and only respond when the volume and pitch indicate a high probability of imminent death or serious injury/maiming. The interval between cries is also very important. If they have enough time and presence of mind to get a full set of lungs, there’s no major issue.). Her cries rhythmically alternated between those of a deranged cat and a wild banshee. June now shares a large cage w/ Johnny Cash. At first Johnny was afraid of June, but now he is very friendly w/ her, if you get my drift. We may have to give the kids the “monkeys and the bees” talk sometime soon.