Juba Raha

As travel would have it in the Sudan, heavy rains and a haboub cancelled flights from Juba back to Khartoum for two days, delaying my return to the north. While it is frustrating to make multiple trips to the airport, only to find out that the flights were cancelled, I must admit that I enjoyed my extra time in Juba.

The training with the SuWEP south women went incredibly well. In the end, we had 12 participants and we fit the three day training into two days, eight hours each day. Since English is the language of the GOSS, all of the participants were fluent in English making translation unnecessary and speeding up the pace of the workshop. All of the women were very satisfied and complementary of the training, and they expressed their gratitude for the time I put into the training. Below is a picture of the women with their certificates upon completion of the training.

I filled my extra time in Juba with meetings. I met with some women Parliamentarians in the GOSS, a local women’s organization, and attended the first National Prayer Breakfast for the GOSS. President Salva Kiir, Vice President Riek Machar, Rebecca Garang (wife of John Garang) and many other impressive leaders from the south were all in attendance. I enjoyed listening to the prayers and speeches given by these prominent figures about good governance and their hopes and promises for a New Sudan. I found it ironic however, that a government so committed to being “secular” would host a prayer breakfast which was about 95% Christian, 5% Muslim.

My last night in Juba I went with some friends to the Village, one of a handful of western style restaurants in Juba, for pizza, and from there we went to listen to local reggae bands play at Juba Raha, the Ugandan campground where all of the LRA peace negotiations have taken place. When there are no peace talks going on at the camp, the bar and outdoor space serves as a local party spot. We listened to some pretty interesting reggae and East African music with a strong Ugandan influence. We left the Raha slightly after 11:15 PM, giving us enough time to get back to camp before the midnight curfew. Because of the plethora of small arms held by all of the current and former SPLA in Juba, one must be careful about driving home late at night and running into drunken brawls which have been known to turn deadly on occasion. Thankfully, we made it back to camp without a problem, and just in time for a few hours of sleep before driving back out to the airport to fly back to Khartoum.

Commercial airlines in Sudan are an experience in themselves. There are no seat assignments, no boarding procedures, except to push forward as hard as you can and cram yourself into the line to board the plane, and flights rarely take off on time. Since two days of flights were cancelled from Juba to Khartoum, Marsland Airlines brought in an extra plane and flew three days worth of passengers back north on two aircraft. The beauty of this process was that no one knew which plane they were supposed to be on and luggage was randomly loaded into either plane. We waited three hours to board while the airline tried to make some sense of how they were getting all of the passengers and their luggage onto the planes. I was fortunate, or so I thought, to be pushed, literally, onto the first plane until I realized that my luggage was loaded on the second plane which departed a full hour and a half after the first one. So after landing in Khartoum, I waited in baggage claim for an additional two hours for my bags. I don’t think I will ever complain about airport travel in the U.S. again!