The Curse of Nzara

In addition to the first outbreak of Ebola and the marauding hippos I wrote about last week, a multitude of other issues have afflicted colleagues in the town of Nzara, which we passed through again today. The town has an air of despondency and the rate of alcoholism is reportedly high.

Ebola would have been killing remote village communities for a long time until an outbreak garnered attention. It happened here at a cotton factory when members of the local Azande tribe were gathered in close enough proximity for the disease to spread from bats in the roof space. The cotton factory is eerily abandoned today, visible from the road and now viewed with much suspicion by the townsfolk.

Various other pitfalls face conservationists working in Nzara. DeeAnn was once chased from the police station by drunk aggressive officers and the county commissioner is a snake in the grass. Her research team were accosted by rebels when netting bats in the field and there are the tsetse fly and toxic leaf zones to drive through on the road out of town; a road which turns into a red muddy bog in the rainy season.

On the subject of snakes in the grass, we were asked by the Wildlife Service to investigate reports of a large snake (likely a python) in the Nzara compound of the Ugandan People's Defence Force. This lot are there because of earlier dangers posed by the Lords Resistance Army in this area, currently happily less of a threat. We saw the trash pits the python is slithering through and advised the soldiers to make contact if it reappears. Pythons are protected under South Sudanese law and it's becoming patently clear that large scale awareness is needed on what can be hunted and killed.

One of my toenails came off. I think I need calcium. But I blame Nzara.

On the plus side, mandazi (fried things resembling doughnuts but less sweet) are cheap in Nzara. So amongst the rebels, drunkenness and killer wildlife, it has that going for it.