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One must negotiate to get anywhere

By Steve Young

Argus  Leader

Sunday: A stop to see mom

We arrived in Gambella, Ethiopia, late in the week on our way to David Jal’s village just across the border in South Sudan. The Sioux Falls probation officer intends to build a school in that village.

 But first he wanted to stop in Gambella to see his mother and the other 30 people living in her home. Besides his mother and sister there are nieces, nephews, sisters-in-law and even mothers-in-law.

It is a sprawling compound including four thatched huts and a three-room concrete house that Jal had built for his mother 10 years ago.

 The women spread their mats in the dirt and sit on them much of the day, leaving the five or six plastic chairs for the men to sit on. There is a concrete outbuilding for storage. And a narrow hallway with a 6-inch hole in it and 2-foot-long paths on both sides.

 This is where they stand and squat when they have to go to the bathroom.

 After an evening of conversation and meal of lentils and cornmeal, children prepared for bed. Several will sleep on a concrete pad outside at the entrance to the house. Others string mosquito netting over a clothesline then put it over a pad and mattress they placed on the ground.

 As a three-quarter moon cuts across the sky overhead, there is a young girl’s voice from one of the mosquito netting softly singing hallelujah over and over again.

 Monday: Booming black market

 Our journey to the Khor Wakow region of South Sudan where Jal is building a school requires the acquiring of transportation in Gambella, in western Ethiopia, to the Sudanese border.

 In Gambella, you don’t call a travel agent.

 This part of Africa is a black market world where the business of negotiation is an art form. And Jal is good.

 He has well diggers waiting for him in Khor Wakow, and he is anxious to get there. On Saturday, Jal, myself and Joel Hirschman, a Sioux Falls truck driver and volunteer for Jal, go the home of one of Jal’s friends to inquire about a ride.

 If we can wait for several days, we can catch a lift with a government vehicle and would simply have to pay for gas. But because of Jal’s need for urgency, the cost would be significantly more to go now.

Over sodas, beers and a meal of fish, whose hollow eyes stare at us as we consume them, Jal agrees to a price of 4,500 Ethiopian dollars called bier. Roughly 1,700 bier equals $100 in American money.

 The cost is more expensive because we are required to take police escorts with us. Recent elections have put new people in power in Gambella, and clans disenchanted with the outcome are known to go after foreigners if they find out about them, stealing all they have.

 Jal gives half the asking price up front with the understanding we will leave at 6 a.m. the next day. When morning comes, we are awakened at 4 a.m. in our huts by the singing of men in the nearby Ethiopian Orthodox church, calling members to worship. No one arrives at 6 a.m. It is four hours later before our driver and escort show up, prompting Jal to say, “No wonder nothing ever gets done in this country.”

 The driver immediately demands another 500 bier. He says the vehicle we were supposed to take broke down the day before and he was doing us a favor taking us in this other vehicle.

 “Pay or stay,” he says. So David pays.

 There are 11 of us who pile in the white Jen Bie Cargo van, along with four grinding mills and our suitcases. The next 150 miles are driving rutted, pock-marked, washboard gravel. One hour out, we encounter a baboon crossing the road on his way to the smoldering slash piles that once was his forest home before it was cleared for farmland.

 Two miles after that we pass an Ethiopian solider with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder.

 As we go on, a friend of the driver’s named Balau nervously sticks his head out the window to check the rear passenger tire that he worries will go flat.

 It should have been the least of his worries. Two-and-a-half hours into the trip, a clanking sound erupts beneath the engine. It rattles and clunks, so we stop to check it out.

 A piece of metal is dangling on the ground. The driver crawls underneath to inspect and rig the metal to the frame. He informs us that five of us have to get out and the rest will go on to a slow crawl to a town seven or eight miles away. The three in our group get to ride. David’s 21-year-old nephew, Chuol, must walk in the 100-degree heat

We drive an hour until we come to a large farming operation.

 The Indian manager says they will weld the metal back on at no charge. He also provides David Jal and me a meal of fish and rice and sends a tractor for the walkers. It takes 2½ hours to fix the truck.

 We get to the Ethiopian-Sudan border.

 The entire journey takes 7½ hours.

 Tuesday: Stalled at the river

 David Jal promised us that our trip to the South Sudan would take us to the other side of the world.

 He wasn’t kidding.

 After a 150-mile, 7½-hour trip Sunday, from his mother’s home in Gambella, Ethiopia, to the gritty, dirty river town of Matar on the South Sudanese border, our trip is coming to standstill. We need a speedboat to take us from Matar to Nasir, South Sudan, to his Khor Wakow homeland.

 No arrangements come through Monday, so we wait.

 Within moments of arriving in Matar, we are greeted by the sight of hundreds of men and women and children bathing nude in the nearby Bora River. As people bathed, goats and dogs sauntered through the shallow river beside them.

 We wandered down to the river only to stumble onto a vicious fistfight between two young men who did not appreciate each other’s humor. At least two vicious hooks landed on the side of one man’s head, and Jal stepped in to break it up.

We ate in darkness with flies swarming on our injera, a thin pancake-like bread, that we tore off and scooped lentils, beets and other delicacies into.

 At one point, back at the hut, a soldier walked by, waved and repositioned the AK-47 on his shoulder. Children came to greet us, many of them nude and seemingly oblivious to the flies swarming to the mucus in their tear ducts and noses.

 We are a long way from home, and it is obvious.

 Wednesday: Sudan at last

 We have finally arrived in Nasir, South Sudan, and David Jal’s homeland, but not without a last bit of drama.

 For three days, we sat stuck in the gritty river town of Matar on the Ethiopian-South Sudan border, waiting for a boat to Nasir.

 Matar’s garbage-filled streets were so dirty that I would clean my fingernails in the morning and they would be black by night without ever having handled a thing.

Though most of the people there are friendly, there is an ugliness as bad as the dirt in Matar. One evening as we walked to our huts, a woman lay on her forearms and knees in the street, crying out as a man beat her viciously with what looked like a shoe.

 Your instinct is to run to her aid. But the man screamed at those who came too close that he would respond savagely to anyone who tried to help her.

 So we walked on.

 The mayor’s office in Nasir said it would send a boat for us Monday morning. By nightfall Monday, it had not come. So we burned through precious satellite-phone minutes trying to call the mayor back. There was no answer, so we walked to the clinic run by Doctors Without Borders to see if they could give us a ride on their boat. They said it was against their policy. So we talked to UNICEF. We called David’s brother, Andrew, in Nasir as well to see if he could find a boat.

 Finally, on Tuesday night, the mayor’s boat showed up. The crew said they had waited all day for us at another site. We’re not sure whether that was true.

 Immediately, a citizen of Matar came forward and said the driver of the boat owed him a tank of gas. If he didn’t pay, the man said, he would take the motor. Jal said he would not be drawn into that discussion and started to walk away.

 I’m not sure how it was resolved. But then the boat driver said he needed 1,000 Ethiopian dollars, or bier, to fix problems with his motor or we could not go. About $60 American, Jal said, he would pay.

 So we left at 8:45 Wednesday morning. About halfway through the 3½-hour trip, the driver stopped the boat to discuss his driver’s fee with Jal. The mayor had never mentioned a driver’s fee to Jal. The driver said we would pay him 600 Sudanese pounds, or roughly $200 American. That was paid, too, or we might still be treading water in the Sobat River.

 It really is good to be in Nasir.