Donate NowDavid Morse, for the Pulitzer Center
The more I learn about my traveling companions, the deeper the question becomes. What will we find in Sudan?
Each day spent here in Nairobi has been an eye-opening experience, as we go through the process of making decisions - How many mosquito nets are enough for two villages? How do we weigh the cost of getting these supplies into the bush against our collective ability to pay?
Who are we? What is this process really about? And who are we as a team?
Nairobi itself is an apt staging-ground for decisions. It's a lean city. It seems not to have changed since I was here a year and a half ago. A lean city whose bones show through the billboards and blue exhaust fumes of Maiyaki Way and Ngong Road. Matatus painted some with tiger stripes and Praise God invectives, some blaring hip hop. Everywhere the rusty dusty clay, pink as a cow's udder, crowding the pavement in foot-worn folds. Everywhere a hunger that pushes against the law, rising as ubiquitous as smoke from charcoal fires roasting ears of corn for roadside consumption.
Our guys, the three Lost Boys we are following - men now in their twenties who have spent six years in the U.S. - have become Americanized enough that they wear new white running shoes, stylish sunglasses - have brought way too much stuff. Some of is to give away to friends from Kakuma refugee camp who live now in Nairobi; some if maybe because, as horrific as their childhoods were - the trek for hundreds of miles through jungle and desert, many of their comrades dying along the way of thirst and hunger, the year and a half or so in Ethiopia, the trek again to Kakuma, the scant rations barely enough for survival - they want to have enough; and surrounded as they are by American consumerism, that sense of "enough" gets translated into things. Not cattle, as in the old Dinka way. But Nikes.
Or that's my conjecture for now. But as I get to know them better through these decisions, through sharing the same sweaty space and some of the same laughter, and see the embraces,experience the loud Dinka guffaws and tender taps the men give each other - all of it a prelude to what we will experience once we arrive in their home villages - as I learn better who they are, the question goes beyond stereotypes and easy answers and into that trembling edge of existence that we all share.
What will they find?
What parents and relatives and friends will still be alive? And just as profoundly, what old selves will they unearth? What new selves?
Today we purchased 300 mosquito nets. One mosquito net, treated with repellent (which lasts for several years) will serve to repel mosquitoes from surrounding tukuls as well. At about ten dollars per net, we laid out more than $3,000. Together with our own supplies - rice, beans, cooking oil, etc. - the bill came to $4,000.
"Do you realize," asked Wesley Kirinya, who is acting as our driver but who creates video games in his real life, "We've just spent a quarter of a million Kenyan shillings in twenty minutes?"
"Somebody had to spend it," says Melinda, one of our Tucson Girl Fridays.
I did the calculations. That was enough to buy a sixteenth of an acre of mid-line real estate in Nairobi.
"Koor," I said to the Lost Boy who had raised the money for medical supplies, "we're going to need mosquito netting too. Is it okay if we borrow from the 300 and return them when we leave?"
He studied the matter for a moment, and said "No."He wanted to deliver the whole 300.
So we purchase our own and will leave them behind for the villages.