Lessening the sting

Philip the Community Wildlife Ambassador fills in some information after two days in the forest. Philip is the kind of guy who if born anywhere other than remote South Sudan and in receipt of a decent education, would be flourishing in whatever career he’d pursued. He is one of the most literate and vocal people in the village and acts as a strong community spokesperson (although isn’t the village chief) to try and ensure he and his neighbours get treated fairly in whatever happens to them in turbulent South Sudan.

After this brief orientation to one of the forest sites where our project works, we drove back to Yambio on one of those rural African journeys that make you happy to be living in the moment, and glad to be out of the rat race. Everybody was pouring to church and then getting drunk on homebrew at one of the Sunday markets. We craned to look for evidence of bushmeat as we drove past, but saw none this time. Racing towards us were brake-less bicycles and motorbikes laden with goods to sell at the South Sudan-Congo border markets that start the following day. A man with a huge smile and a bicycle dripping with green and yellow bananas stopped to let us pass and yelled ‘good morning’ even though it was 3pm. A Wildlife Service ranger in the car who’d dug the project vehicle out of a muddy tractor rut on the previous trip said to me, ‘what is my name?’ He’d been on a previous journey where the team had to sleep in the vehicle as it kept getting stuck and although it was dry this time, the track was so rutted that we were thrown around for hours. The vegetation left a gap of about 1 metre on the road so we were pelted by foliage and branches that deposited stinging leaves and biting ants that irritated our skin for a long time afterwards.

At the end of it all we rejoined the smoother (comparatively…) main road, found a shop selling coca cola, and I drank one while collapsed in the vehicle looking like an insect-bitten and battered version of the dude from the diet coke ads, more likely to be thrown a towel and some soap than have people fawning over my sweaty t-shirt.