So, after a couple of complaints from friends that I am not keeping the blog up to date, I resume with some comments I wrote to Gill Scharer one of the three (the others being George Clark and myself, who came to Southern Sudan under British Council auspices in 1981. (two others, Paul Fanning - now in Reading, his marvellous wife Eleanor died four years ago) and Mark Todd were already there at the University of Juba. Whereas we were to be based in Juba, she was posted to Maridi, a place I have now been back to a couple of times this year.

<< Gill, what I wanted to tell you about was my visit to Maridi and discovering (in my house in Entebbe where I am based these days) the books you wrote for Intermediate schools in 1983 (CDC/British Council) and how we may actually want to use them as source material again”.

Well, I went to Maridi to do a rescue operation for a British NGO which had let its local projects go horribly wrong.

The UK HQ was trying to get itself out of a sticky mess and chose exactly the wrong moment to switch its management from the Kampala office (good) to the Khartoum office (bad at this time) while trying to find out what had happened to the project itself.

So I was sent to sort it out which I did, and for once got well paid for it. The value of my work was seen in the fact that I told them categorically not to do X or Y if they wanted to keep the project (lots of DfID money) going. When I was out of the way, the Khartoum management promptly did X (= Do not send a northerner to look at the books, use someone from East Africa) in order to show who was boss, so the local man got his friends in SPLA Military intelligence to arrest the accountant and a few other people and throw them into jail, just as I predicted).

Well, back to Maridi – it has been the home of a CARE project funded by USAID, known as the ‘What happened to $25 million dollars project?’ or, more prosaically, the Sudan Basic Education Programme). Maridi was peaceful for a very long time, and quite a few NGOs are based there. Unfortunately the LRA en route to Congo attacked it very viciously twice and while I was there most expatriates had been evacuated. Very few compounds have any real security provision. Yambio was also attacked. In the same period (April) disaffected unpaid SPLA soldiers (Tall, black) attacked the UNHCR compound in Yei killed a staff member and wounded others, and got nothing, since UN does not normally keep cash on premises. That in turn led to Tim Brown (ex U of Juba) being evacuated. He had been working with UNHCR since the mid-90s, first as a UNV.

I stayed in the CARE residential compound very near your former house which is used by another NGO now. Part of the old complex were you worked is the big Amref nurses’ training school (where, while I was there two nurses viciously beat up the Ugandan principal because they failed their exams).

There is still a sort of Curriculum Development Centre (SPLM now GoSS) there, though since the Peace Agreement almost everything is centering back in Juba and the complexes, which were in ‘liberated territory both in Maridi and in Rumbek (and to a lesser extent in Yei) are diminishing somewhat.

I recalled the VSO Robert (any contact with him?) and your water tank ploy with William Wood, when you let him go without any water to wash for a whole weekend to prove the point that you had erratic water supplies. Of course, you had actually set up an alternative system, which
somehow you forgot to mention to him.

I also remembered that I had seen your, then our, land-rover in Juba last October when I first went back. Even Diana’s, old when the world was young, is still creeping around among the flashy Prados air-conditioned, tinted windows, used by the Government of Southern Sudan, the SPLM leadership (much of a muchness) and the UN and NGOs.

And your English source-book, typed manually, (CARE, the biggest NGO in Maridi has loads of computers, many using solar power, but no public internet café yet I have just put one up in Yei). Marididi still doesn’t have water or electricity either. In fact I could tell very little difference between 2006 and 1984 which was probably the last time I was there.
I don’t know how much you have been following Southern Sudan – it’s only a shortish segment of your varied life whereas for me it has been more than that, as I continued to have a lot to do with the Southern Sudanese refugees, with not much of a break since I left Juba in 1985 and Khartoum in 1990.

Right now (as Echo Bravo, my consultancy organisation) I run a project on behalf of the British Council (they are using my project and others to test the water) to teach English and Communication Skills to those who did not leave during the civil war and especially to the population of Juba who were twenty years or so cut off from anything but a tenuous connection with Khartoum.

In Juba during that period teachers had had to sign a declaration that they would teach in Arabic in order to continue getting salaries. In the liberated areas, on the other hand, while Juba Arabic remains the oral language of solidarity everything is in English (with the usual nod to vernacular teaching; the Summer Institute of Linguistics is tentatively returning and has reclaimed their compound in Juba).

This time round there is no ambiguity, at least as far as language is concerned. The 11 Ministers of Education (10 for each of the states of the south and one for Govt of SS) have made it clear that all the education system will be in English, though ‘When’ is the usual southern problem.
I told the Minister (who, bizarrely for such an important post is not from SPLM, but a southerner nominated by the National Congress (Islamist) party), that we could do it in two years. He doesn’t believe me (he’s a medical doctor) and says it will be done year by year, thus taking eight years for primary (intermediate doesn’t exist now).

People will vote with their feet – parents will send their children to English schools, for the time being in ex-liberated areas and in Uganda and Nairobi. Already a lot of young people who turned up in the first euphoria after the agreement was signed have gone back to Kenya and Uganda, disappointed that there are no serious efforts to get a University system going apart from a partial and very unensthusiastic return of the Unviersities of Juba, Wau and Malakal. Their staff make a lot of money in the North and don’t want to come back to a stinky, dusty Juba with high prices but no services.

Meanwhile, an attempt at setting up a high-cost private school in Juba got exactly two takers!
Why? Well, in way it never was before (throw away those rose-tinted glasses, Barry) Juba is a very miserable place to be. There is no decent accommodation for anyone coming in from outside. Huge sums are spent by GoSS and others on ‘safari-type’ tented accommodation – owned by ‘big’ Sudanese and run by Kenyans and Ugandans -- which can cost $130 a night, not always including food. The tents are cramped into tight compounds mainly along the river bank and some have as many as 100 tents bringing in over $100 each every night.
There is almost nothing cheaper (I tried once to stay in one which mainly houses SPLA officers; it was a nightmare and all but out of control. The officers had huge families staying with them who all ate for the price of one, from the meagre buffet. Going to the loo at night meant tripping over Kalashnikovs of sleeping guards outside many of the tents.
In eighteen months there has been no infrastructure development (naughty people say it is because they are working out how to get round the restrictions placed on the money so they can share out the contract spoils – that was certainly true for the small mobile phone network which has been set up).

There is less tarmac than there was in the eighties but just as much shit underfoot as the town still has no sewage system. There is one bus route, the same as when we were there. There is no electricity and the water is untreated, and as soon as you get off the Uganda-Juba road access through Yei (the East Bank road via Nimule still has LRA remnants on it and has not been repaired at all) the roads are as miserable as ever, indeed worse.

Outside Juba, throughout Equatoria, there is no electricity, no radio, no phones and everyone uses Uganda money (and drinks Uganda beer) as they have since the late eighties. (In Juba you use Sudanese dinars, of course. In the far east of Equatoria and other places reached from Kenya, like Rumbek, it is Kenya shillings).