Digging Malakal Soak Pit

Last Wednesday, one of our teachers in the first year programme, Elizabeth, told Ninet she had endured a terrible toothache for the past ten days. So Ninet rang the dental section of the United Nations and out we drove to ‘Log Base’, the UN compound a few kilometres out of Malakal. The Indian dentist attended immediately to two fillings and told her to come back for work on three root canals…all at no charge. 

Most of the population of Malakal do not have access to dentists. If the people can get to Log Base, they will be assisted for free but it is a daunting proposition for most of them. The capacity of many local people to talk with ‘ex-pats’ let alone pay for any kind of health service is normally very limited, even for teachers. In first world countries we take a lot for granted and expect a lot.   

All of my life I have expected a clean water supply but here I have had to become used to showering and washing my clothes in water containing varying amounts of river colloids. I try to avoid the hours just after pumping when the stirred up water is at its muddiest. We never drink it but the locals do! We go often to the water purification plant near the Nile to fill-up gerry cans of clean water  – for free. We are lucky. Our community in Juba has to buy drinking water. By the way, I can buy a 600ml bottle of water here for about 29 cents? Why is it so expensive in many first world countries?  

We don’t have hot and cold taps – just a tap where clean or muddy water comes out, hot, warm or cold, depending on the time of the day, but we are grateful that the tap works even if it leaks a little. I have not seen any hot water systems in Southern Sudan but we do have electric jugs to heat water – when there is power – and kettles to put on the gas or charcoal burners at other times. 

We don’t have fresh milk. Here,‘Pass the milk’ means pass the powered milk tin! It has its advantages! You can use a lot of powder in the water to get full cream milk or a little to get skinny milk. Now that would be a simple solution to the bewildering choice of varieties of milk in modern supermarkets – and we are not concerned about use-by dates!  

We don’t worry about the choice of butter or margarine, low salt, low fat, cholesterol-free. We simply don’t have butter or margarine. There is one margarine-like spread widely available in Juba, but not here. We don’t have and we do have – it is not really important. We adapt and find something else and we continue to be better off than most. We enjoy being here together.  

Our butchers give us a simple choice – beef or goat. Beef is about $4.50 per kilo, in hunks – no choice of cut, just be early or only goat will be available. I have not seen pork for sale here but you can get chicken if you enquire on the right day. 

Supplies are not consistent. I bought corn flour once in a grocery shop but they it has never been in stock since. Now I can’t find any shop that sells corn flour, soy sauce, or Worcestershire sauce but occasionally one variety of yoghurt comes to town and some of our sisters rejoice!   

In the markets in Malakal I have never seen peas, beans, lettuce of any kind, cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli, brusssel sprouts, mushrooms, parsnips or celery. We can buy potatoes, pumpkin and watermelon in season, cucumbers, capsicums, chillies, garlic, egg plant, lemons, onions, tomatoes and sometimes carrots, and okra which we avoid! Fruit consists mostly of bananas, mangoes, oranges and grapefruit – and maybe apples from time to time. So we eat quite well but, yes, we would like pineapples and beans occasionally to be available as they are in Juba. Yet there is a wider variety of canned fruit here in Malakal than in Juba, including tins of pineapple slices!  

We don’t have night-time entertainment; we do have a curfew set at 10pm but the UN says be home by nine! Being a ‘good boy’, I have not been out after 8pm. So life is a lot easier than running a College with many evening commitments! It is regrettable that more people cannot enjoy this less complicated existence.                                                               

Br Bill