Remembrance Day Mail

We received packages from Canada recently, mail from home and real newspapers! It was Christmas come early - no kidding. Especially the packages I received from Teri and Liam (with coffee!)

We also received Remembrance Day cards from school children, as well as some early Christmas cards. It's great to receive their notes of thanks here.

On Nov 11 this year I was on the road in South Sudan for 3-day patrol. I took a moment to pause at 11:00 am, said a few words to my foreign patrol mates who did not know about Remembrance Day, then moved on with the patrol.

Accommodation on the Road

Just so you can see that we are not roughing it too much.....

"Hotel Bunj" - the open air Tukel we stayed in was actually a nice change, with fresh air at night.


"Hotel Arank" was actually indoors!







Some other tukels look like this, where the people in the area live














And, this our Tukel, outside our accommodation trailers - which would make anyone's porch or backyard proud!

Air Patrol - WADEKONA

Wadekona is a fairly sizable town, typical of just about everywhere here in South Sudan. Thatch roofed huts called Tukels, a few corrugated metal structures and the odd mud brink building. This place, at least, was well laid out and looked quite neat actually.

As usual for an air patrol, the local forces organized "transport" for us on arrival (in the truck taking pictures is our Indian Army Col from the Melut Team Site protection force).









The photo of the kids who gathered to see us off (seeing white guys is cool, but seeing helicopter is obviously way cooler) is a good representation of how sometimes it seems the UN views things here. We were not very happy with this air patrol. Despite our best efforts and the cost involved, the UN bureaucracy that runs the flight ops would only give us 45 mins on the ground. In a place visited by the UN no more than three times a year. Insulting to them really.




Our assessment after the patrol - we will visit much more regularly, for much longer periods. Hopefully stay over a few days.

Crossing the River

It's been a while since I added to this - sorry, kind of fell off the blog wagon for a while. I have actually been sort of busy. For a while there, the team site was down to just 5 Military Observers (UNMOs) so we were conducting patrols daily, doing the paperwork, back out again, etc. We have started to receive new UNMOs though, all of whom are welcome additions to the team.

In the past weeks, I have been on an Air Patrol north to a place called WADEKONA and a 3-day vehicle patrol to a place called ARANK, near the North/South border crossing. I will add some pics of these trips and a bit on what we have been doing there.

Flying by helo let us get a glipse at much of the area we can otherwise not see - the whole west side of the Nile. There are no bridges for hundreds of kms north or south of here, certainly none in three days drive either direction. So, we and all the people living in the area, have a very hard time getting across the river. Our only option is to patrol that area by air. The 45 min flight north allowed us to see much of the varied landscape and visit a remote location in our AOR.

Children of the Nomads

I had to add these great pics of children riding in the Nomad train. Their faces are full of wonder, looking at us!

...the first is my favourite, taken as we passed in the car

Nomads "Myseria Tribe" on the move

Last week I was on a long range patrol for three days to a place called BUNJ, a small village/town 250 kms away from our team site. To give you an idea of the road conditions, it took us over 5 hours in the 4X4's to get there.

There we had a task to count and verify soldiers and wpns at the encampment of the Joint Integrated Unit (JIUs) based there. The JIUs are an attempt to form one army out of the northern SAF and the souther SPLA troops. Predictibly, they are encamped in separate locations, wear different uniforms and are anything but "joint". At least in BUNJ, they seem to have good relations though.

We saw the coolest site on the way back, we encountered a tribe of Nomads moving from the north to south for winter. About 1000 cows, goats, assorted animals and 300-400 men, women and children. Very colourful, kind of friendly. the women were riding the cows, young girls as well carrying calves, and themen and boys walked along picking up straglers from the herd. I got the impression that they were as amazed to see us "white guys" as we were to see them. These are basically wandering non-state peoples - no address, no papers, no schooling, a society of their own. They carry their shelters and all belongings with them. Very interesting, a real "National Geographic moment!" You can see us in one of the jeeps trying to make our way through it all.

Patrol our Area of Operations, around MELUT. Mostly very tiny villages, with troops stationed here and there. Some roads, which are more passable now that the rainy season is over, but as we found out on this trip, many places are still cut off by swampy rivers or where the road just disappears. Flat, flat, flat - the whole place around here is about 300 m above sea level - and grass growing 5-6 feet.

the road just ended - I had to use the "expedient UN Observation Post" to see the objective - a village we anted to observe to see if there were any troop movements.

The best part of our patrols is seeing the children. They are almost always all smiles, incredibly curious of the "Kawajas" (which means foreigners or white guys). For many, the UN personnel are probably the only non-black skinned people they have ever seen in their lives. I always try to stop and speak to them, and am pleasantly surprised to hear many speak a lot of English (so there must be some schooling out there somewhere). Amazing, when you consider the town we live in has only two, barrack-dorm style schools for hundreds of children, almost no school supplies, few desks, hardly anything at all.

The two girls in the photo above are carrying home groceries for their family - on their heads, mid-day, 40 degrees, wearing only flip flops. Not sure where they were going, but the nearest hut or Tukel was about 3 kms away!

The other two photos are of some children who kept looking in the window of a commanders house/office when we were making a visit to a nearby military camp. One little girl came all the way in to see us! Of course, the commander refused to speak to us, because he had "not been informed of our visit", despite our coordinating it with his HQ two days before, so basically we had to return without meeting anyone. Not an unusual occurance. At least the kids made it a worthwhile visit.

Ultimately, the children are one of the few signs of hope around.