an evening in Juba

from a couple of weeks ago while I was in Juba for almost 3 weeks...

Juba is the new wild west. The wide dusty streets offer anything you can think of, in a distinctly ad hoc, improvised manner. Land cruisers and Prados fly down the roads, careening around potholes and each other, in search of the latest hotspot. And a hotspot in Juba is certainly hot!

Flies are everywhere and the heat is unreal. Either you deal with it or you suffer. The contrast of places we saw last night is from top to bottom, from bottom to top.

There’s a new Chinese place over by the university, we were told – excellent food, and prices are not bad - for Juba. Turns out to be the same price as a regular Chinese place in Canada, so that’s really not bad. But we were in a metal pre-fab building – leaving the relatively cool air of the mid-evening to suffer in an airless metal box that’s been baking in the sun all day. They have a glass Chinese server in the middle of a table that can fit all of us, and we stick around. Ken orders for all of us, including medium hot and sour and chicken noodle soups – each enough for 8! Everything was great, and we were truly impressed. On to the next place.

Home & Away is the newest venue in town – a complex of permanently built restaurants, bars, and conference halls. It’s where we’re having the NPA Expo next weekend, so I’ve been there quite a bit in the past week organizing and sampling their fare. Admirable pad thai for lunch the same day, and now we’re back for a post-Chinese drink. The place is filled with young Sudanese men in baggy new clothes, and young ladies from all over East Africa in tight ones. This is the young elite crowd – sons of ministers and others who benefited in corruption deals like the place itself, which is rumoured to be partially owned by a former Finance Minister in the fledging Southern Sudanese government. The President is there, in the conference hall where we’ll hold our Expo next weekend, along with his military detail. It’s rather smarmy to be here, and we vacate.

Now, we’ve been invited to the Joint Donor Office, a grand complex with air as cold as freezers, and even smarmier than Home & Away because it’s all expats. Outside the fence are the huts typical of most of the population, some even propped up lamely by the imported spiked iron fence. The furniture is Danish and the party is Dutch – someone’s leaving Juba. I grab one of the many nice bottles of red wine, and though we were invited, we see almost no-one we know – NPA doesn’t usually move in the high-end embassy/donor crowd. We leave.

We drop off the former director of NPA, who’s now here as a consultant, at the guesthouse, and we head toward the next party to crash. I’m driving, with Theo our Tanzanian chef as my guest and passenger. We follow Ken Miller as I didn’t want to chance ending up stranded in case he decides to stay somewhere, so we’re in separate 4x4s. The Sunflower camp is on the River Nile, and the people we were supposed to see at the last party are magically here instead. Bryan Adams gets us onto the dancefloor, we dance under the Juba sky, and plan our next move.

The Heron – an Ethiopian camp a little way up the river, where we expected to meet up with our Ethiopian colleagues – is closed, but the Juba Bridge next door has a live band, complete with an Ethiopian singer. My attempts at shoulder dancing are appreciated – Ethiopian dancing is all about the shoulders, along with funny head and chin movements – but I’m afraid I don’t do it much justice, despite my colleague Ezana’s many lessons. We close the place and move on.

The next stop is hell’s oven – a smouldering bread-making factory in Juba town. What a place. I really have no idea why this is included on Ken’s after-midnight tour. Tall sweating Sudanese men are baking thousands of small loaves to be delivered for the morning’s breakfast all over the city. The heat is indescribable, and the industry of these all-night workers is jaw-dropping. Bread is shovelled out of huge ovens onto waiting tables, all very orderly and systematic. I didn’t realize the work that goes on at this time of night and in these conditions. Inspiring. We grab 25 loaves or so, and head out.

The last stop is a complete departure from the high-end swanky joints we started out in – we are now in a local local bar, filled with hundreds of young animal men, and about 3 women including me. I was mobbed, swarmed, grabbed, pinched, groped, and gawked at. I literally swatted them away like flies. I zeroed in on the women and tried to make friends, hoping to dance together like we women do at western clubs, in our own space. I pushed the men away and told them RESPECT the ladies! The other women were suffering much more – for me, it’s only a novelty, and I’m able to shove the guys and get away with it. They, on the other hand, were practically being raped on the floor. These young men, most likely ex-soldiers, have not one clue between them about social norms and etiquette. I didn’t feel threatened, since Ken & Theo were still there, but very close to it. Out back of the bar was a stinking pit of urine soaked dust, and I saw ladies pulling their pants down just along the side of the building – no safe place to pee, for going into the one block of pit latrines would guarantee they would not get relief, but much worse. It was awful, and real – where true gender awareness must make an impact, and soon. I was happy to leave.

We bounced along the craters and mud holes called roads, and arrived at the guesthouse at the same time as Ezana and Dr Elias. They had gone back to Home & Away, which turned into a nightclub after the President had left, full of young beautiful Sudanese diaspora and government kids.

An even, average standard of living seems impossible in this place. Juba is competing with Tokyo for the most outrageously expensive capital city in the world. Money can buy anything, and you can have all of the comforts of Denmark or Thailand here in this unbelievable backwater if you have enough of it. If you don’t, living in Juba can be hell itself.