Eid Posting

My computer died Wednesday. I spilled some 7-Up on one corner of the keyboard. Even though we dried it off, the damage was done. It starts up, but the screen stays black; not very practical to work with. Fortunately, I learned on my last mission how to take out the disc drive, pirate the connector from my external drive, and then stock the data from the computer disc onto another computer. I got everything! It’s now on my own external drive, so I can work on other computers until a new one arrives from Paris.
Whew!

It’s Friday again, so we are off. That means that I will work less than 10 hours. And tomorrow is Eid, the end of the month of fasting, so it’s a four-day holiday for the office and house staff.

Tonight, we have invited the 2 expats from MSF Switzerland here in El Geneina to join the 3 of us expats from MSF France for dinner. It turns out that I know their newly arrived logistics guy from my last mission in Niger.

I have experimented a method of making a pie crust using vegetable oil, because we don’t find butter or lard here. It’s not bad. I’ll make a pie for this evening with the Swiss (who are both French – the only person here with a Swiss passport is our MSF France head of mission)

Sunday, we are getting together with the staff here for an Eid party. The meat for this party, a goat, is roaming around the compound somewhere for the moment, unsuspecting that these are his last days. The office and house guards will do him in Sunday morning.

Aside from the newly arrived (and soon departing) goat, we have Maurice. He’s a small hedgehog that the expats found when he was a baby. They raised him and he stayed in our living area, a screened porch, for a long time. One day he disappeared, but he has come back a couple of times this past week, just to say hi. There is also Bob, a bumble bee who lives under our dining table. Sometimes he is shut inside the screening at night, and he’s fairly pissed off when we open in the morning. There are also a variety of birds, insects and lizards who come and go, both inside and out, at they please.

This morning at 7:00 there was a lot of shooting. We’re assuming (hoping?) that it is to celebrate the last day of fasting. Anyway, it makes for a rude wake up call. The mullahs are singing “Allah Wakbar” continually. Tomorrow it’s over.

The expats turnover is in full bore right now. I have picked up the human resources responsibility, along with finance. A couple of people are leaving this week, and one more is out of here next week. We have some people coming in to fill the holes temporarily, but the permanent replacements aren’t yet lined up. Since coordination is already stretched pretty thin, I will not be moving to Nyala as soon as expected; not before the beginning of December at least. I was hoping to get to the field at the end of this month, but we need to have someone here at all times, and I may be the only one left for a few days!

On the security side, things are heating up for a couple of reasons. One is temporary: Eid. It’s like Christmas here; people need money to buy the food, party clothes, and gifts, so there’s a lot of theft. The other reason is more political. There is (I’m simplifying here) a lot of power positioning between the different factions before the new round of peace negotiations and the arrival of UN peacekeeping troops. There was tension in Nyala about 10 days ago, which erupted one morning in the market with no warning whatsoever. Zalingei, which has been pretty peaceful until now, has also had quite a bit of violence lately, including killings and kidnappings. Niertiti, which is at the frontier of the rebel zone, is always unstable; we have stopped going to our clinic in Thur twice a week because of violence on the road used to get there. Even here in El Geneina, we stopped using the 4x4s for a few days (these are frequent targets, especially the pickups, because they are in high demand), because a couple of guys were shot last week during the theft of a car.
Of course, if all was rosy, we wouldn’t be here! We realize that the context here is dangerous and complicated. We try to keep up to date on the security situation through contact with the other NGOs, the UN and the local population. We try to keep our security and evacuation guidelines up to date. And we stay neutral, which means that we are not a designated target. I have walked into town a couple of times, not at all feeling insecure. But we must remember to be cautious.