Who to Believe?

Just For Your Information: If I were to be given two news articles on South Sudan where one quoted a United Nations source as saying that there were "X" number of people affected/killed/etc by an event and where the other article did not quote a United Nations source, I would be inclined to give more credibility to the one with the United Nations source.

Homesick in Juba

Wow, massive feelings of homesickness this morning.  Never had it this bad before.  Can't wait to get home to see my family. Only 3 months til vacation.  Miss you all.  Love, Kelly

Putting Out Fires

I'm not talking about administrative fires. I'm talking about real fires.  Chris Hannah came to pick me up at work and as we are driving out of the camp we notice a fire next to one of the buildings and nobody seems to be paying it any attention.  There is no one around tending it and we have no idea if it was deliberately set or not.  So, we immediately leapt into action.

While Chris parked the car I checked to see if anyone in the building knew about the fire.  No one did but only one person, Amit, cared enough to come and look.  Amit, Chris, and I ended up fighting the fire.  Some of the things I learned in my fire extinguisher course came back to me like (a.) do not use CO2 on a paper/cardboard fire (it just blows the burning paper all over the place); and (b.) when using a dry chemical extinguisher make sure that you have your back to the wind and nobody is standing downwind when you let loose (sorry, Amit!).

To be fair, the fire never got much bigger than a 25 foot diameter and the flames never got much higher than 3 - 4 feet.  However, I was dismayed by the lack of concern shown by others (maybe they thought the three of us had it all under control). Even the firehall didn't get too excited once we told them the fire was out.  Oh, well. Another hot and windless day in Southern Sudan ends well.

See below for the incident location
View Larger Map(http://maps.google.com/) 

Stay tuned for more exciting adventures from Amit, Chris, and Kelly!!!

Wild, Wild, West

If you ever hear me compare Juba to Dodge City, it's not just because we average 3 murders per day...

In the center-left of this photo you will see a tukel (grass-hut).
These are quickly being replaced with brick buildings.