Those of you who know me well understand that some of the best years of my life – to date – were spent in Port Townsend, Washington. I learned a great deal about who I am and what I want from life by living in that funky little village of 8,500 on the Olympic Peninsula. No matter where my work and travels take me, I insist that a part of my soul remains in Port Townsend. One day I will return to both. I lead a life that is anything but typical for someone my age. I don’t have a husband, children, a pet, and least of all a home. I do, however, have a mean storage unit in New Orleans. However, at the risk of jinxing my dream, dare I have finally started having thoughts of my “later” years. The dream is to buy a small plot of land, preferably overlooking the waters of Puget Sound near Port Townsend, and build a straw bale house (with a detached yoga hut). I would live off the grid, drawing my power from the sun and my water from the rain. No flush toilets for this property – a latrine is the dream (sorry, couldn’t resist the rhyme). This off-the-grid vision now strikes me as ironic. You see, I am living off the grid now. Here in Yambio, our lives are quite simple. We have two separate properties – one for work and one for home. At home, we have two latrines (equipped with toilet like seats for added comfort), and two showers. The showers are fed by a large water tank that is filled daily by one of our cleaners/water carriers. He used to have to fetch the water from a borehole a couple blocks away and ferry it back by vehicle. But as of last week we have a rainwater collection system. The heavy rains that fall this time of year slide off the tin roof into rain gutters that dump into a substantially sized plastic water tank. This water can then be used to fill the tank that feeds the showers. It also provides our cooks with the water they need to wash our dishes and cook our food. We moved into the house in April, having been forced out of the ridiculously expensive UNICEF compound. The house was never properly outfitted, and since we will be closed by Dec. 1, there’s not much sense in upgrading it. So without a kitchen sink, our cooks wash our dishes in a wheelbarrow in the yard and put them to dry in the sun on a large drying rack. Without a proper stove, they cook like many other Sudanese women – from a charcoal-fed three-legged stove that requires them to bend over or hunker down in front of it. Without a bathroom sink, we brush out teeth outside and spit our toothpaste in the grass. The refrigerator is fueled by kerosene. Our electricity comes from a diesel-powered chitty chitty bang bang generator that runs from 7:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. nightly.
I have grown accustomed to this life. I have even become a fan of cold morning outdoor showers. Despite these limitations, we have more than most. The Sudanese by and large live in tukuls (mud huts with grass roofs). If they live in a city with boreholes, they walk to or send their children to gather water in plastic 20-liter jerry cans. If they live in an area without boreholes or wells, they are forced to draw river or pond water, or in some cases, water from nothing more than a large pothole. If they don’t have a latrine, they simply do their business in the bush. In a survey that my dear friend Kara did last fall at our other site in Tambura, it was found that nearly 20 percent of those interviewed lack any sort of latrine – pit or bucket style. You can imagine how this contributes to disease. The situation seems even worse in the capital of Juba. Never a day passed there when I didn’t seem someone (mostly men, but sometimes children) urinating. Doing so in the open is so common that no one attempts to be discreet. I have never understood why the situation in Juba seems worse than in other locations, such as Yambio. I was told by a former refugee that the Arabs who ruled the south prior to war did not allow the digging of latrines. Anyone caught doing so would be told that they were essentially digging their own grave. I have no way to know if this true; often one person’s story is contradicted by another’s. Regardless, it’s painfully obvious that much that this region in highly underdeveloped.
So while for me living off the grid in the United States is a dream, for the people of South Sudan, it is a cold, stark reality.
Photo caption: Speaking of community water sources, this hole in the ground filled with turbid, stagnant water is the community water source during the rainy season for the village of Ndoromo, located about 10 miles north of the Sudan-Congo border. Elizabeth, our training and capacity building officer, and Esto, a primary health care supervision support officer, examine the hole along with Community Health Worker Samuel Appolo (middle). During the dry season, community members hike some distance to a river to gather their water.
