From Stories: South Sudan

Abstract

From Stories:South Sudan Adrie Kusserow (bio) mating knot Yei, South Sudan Between wars, when it's safe and the Lord's Resistance Army isn't on another child-kidnapping tour, our whole family stays out in the bush while the girls' school is built. Along with the students from the college where we teach, we sleep in battered tents, shooing chickens away. Between the mangos falling on our tent, the diesel generator belching on and off, the diving bats, and the eerie drums marking the death of a toddler, we can't sleep. So I dig into my purse of endless pharmaceuticals, find a soggy Benadryl to put an end to this God-awful day. Hours later, still awake, adrenaline waging war against Benadryl, I sneak off in the hopes of plugging my laptop into the generator outlet. The competition is steep. Students watch their laptop batteries obsessively, competing for the best spot near the generator in the early morning queue. Even in the dim moonlight, you can't miss it, a vast T-shaped vein of electric current, mauled by the charging cords of NGO laptops and iPhones, a tangled nest of dozens of lines wrapped around each other. I can barely look at it, so like the writhing pile of snakes we see near the river in a mating knot, the one female with her head barely rising from the suffocating mass. When I worm my fingers deep into the pile of electrical cables, I risk pushing other out, but amidst the hot heap I find one spot open and push my cord deep into the socket, hoping it won't overload. I feel sick, taking so much from this stick-thin, anemic country that keeps getting pummeled with war. Still, plugged in I feel safe, backed up, and know I'll finally sleep. When I get back to the tent, there is my daughter, child of perpetual worry and wakefulness, limp and finally asleep, her fingers white-knuckle gripped around her iPhone, her headphones on her pillow, the tiny sounds of Harry Potter skittering like mice into the vast Sudanese bush. [End Page 104] the fat claw of my heart Sudanese refugee camp, northwest Uganda Part African bush, part Wild West, Arua, where we're based, is a grungy, dusty, frontier town. Giant diesel trucks barrel through, with obese sacks of grain lying like walrus inside. I chase Willem from malarial puddle to puddle, my white blouse frilled like a gaudy gladiola, my lavish concern for my chubby son suddenly rococo, absurd. Our drivers gun insanely over the dusty red roads, lurching from pothole to pothole, in a caravan of slick, shiny white vans, tattooed with symbols of western aid. Willem on my lap, trying to nurse between bumps, my hands a helmet to his bobbing skull. A three-legged goat hobbles to the side, and though we imagine we are a huge interruption, women balancing jerrycans on their heads face our wake of dust and rage as they would any other gust of wind—water, sun, NGO. We arrive covered in orange dust, coughing, our fleet of SUVs parked under the trees, engines cooling, alarms beeping and squawking as we lock up the vehicles and leave them black-windowed, self-contained as UFOs. Behind the gate, we stumble through the boiling, shoulder-deep sun, Willem and I trying to play soccer as a trickle of Sudanese kids crosses the road, hanging against the fence, watching the muzungu boy I've toted around Uganda like a pot of gold. Three years old, he knows they're watching, so he does a little dance, his Spider Man shoes lighting up as they hit the dust. The seven-foot giants of the Sudan People's Liberation Army huddle together, drinking, talking Dinka politics, repatriation, the New Sudan, while lanky wives set food on the table and move slowly away. In candlelight, the men's forehead scars gleam, I flutter, acting more deferential than I'm used to, known as Robert's wife, I stick with the other wives in the back kitchen. Slowly I'm learning Sudanese grammar: men are the verbs, women the conjunctions that link them...