Broadcasting

Sometimes you wonder how you end up in certain surroundings. A national order has gone out to ban the sale of bushmeat in marketplaces. Two staff of the Wildlife Service were ordered to make this 'public service announcement' on Yambio State Radio in a variety of languages and at first they rejected the idea of taking listeners' calls. With it sounding dangerously like propaganda, the host cleverly persuaded them to do a Q&A session after the broadcast (which consisted of the host holding that mobile phone pictured against the microphone and audience members yelling their questions). The host also impressively asked whether the penalties for government officials caught trading in bushmeat would be the same, so it then had to be stated on air that there would be no difference in treatment for officers or civilians. A small bit of point scoring perhaps, but always important to rally against state sponsored corruption.

During a track I managed to interject so that listeners might relate to some of the reasons why bushmeat consumption is to be discouraged, rather than it be a centrally ordered message that is simply given and followed. Bushmeat poaching is rampant and unsustainable alongside high population growth. If people want to be able to catch duiker and bushpig decades into the future the pace of extraction must be slowed down. I urged the government to explain it in those terms rather than saying that those caught trading bushmeat would 'be judged according to the book'.

Bushmeat is very widely consumed in tropical Africa even in peaceful times. People have a cultural attachment to it. So to issue this order nationwide the same week as famine was declared in South Sudan is not the most empathetic move. This region of Western Equatoria isn't suffering from the most acute shortages yet across the country millions are on the brink of food insecurity, which tips over into painful hunger because of economic freefall and political blockading that hampers food relief. A policeman in the market today begged me for food. Government salaries are almost completely worthless.

As well as all of that it was a day packed full of scaring toddlers half to death with my white skin, sitting under a mango tree with Wildlife Service rangers, waiting an age for receipts at the stationers, being agog at the sharp price increases for commodities, sharpening pangas, chatting with the Ugandan handyman about witchcraft, shaking a gajillion hands, planning our field visit and awaiting our project partner whose flight from Uganda was aborted due to engine troubles. We also heard that Batista's mother, who I wrote about on Saturday, died this morning.

In the pharmacy:

Me: 'Hello, do you have any gel for mouth ulcers?' (starting to think malaria prophylaxis is the cause but not willing to come off it here...)

Pharmacist: 'What is your name?'

'Rrrrow-BAT'

'You were working with MSF (Medecins sans Frontieres)'

'No that is not me'

'You were with MSF'

'No, not me'

'Ahhhh. I remember. Wildlife?'

'Yes, that's it'

'You were in Nadiangere several years back'

'No'

'We met in Nadiapye'

'No'

<blank look as it seems inconceivable I could be a different person>

'Ah you must be thinking of another Robert. Australian. He worked here some time ago.'

It causes endless confusion that of the four or five people who've worked here with our programme over the years, there was another Robert and another bearing my surname. We are all seen as one and the same.