Christmas Decor

Merry Christmas from South Sudan! I arrived back safe and sound in Parot on Monday evening with my teammates the Ward family, Andrew B. and Andrew's fiancée Laura, who has come to visit for a few weeks.

Our team Christmas celebrations are centred at the Wards' house (shown in the picture on the left).

The Wards' homemade Christmas decor is quite delightful, I think, and I thought I'd share it with you (with their permission :-) ).

What strikes me first when I go into the house are the paper snowflakes--a little blast of winter freshness amidst the warm weather!




The snowflakes dangle from strings strung between the roof beams.

The Wards' tree is made of sticks arranged like a teepee, with green twine strung around the sticks to provide some "treeish" colour and a support for decorations.

The Wards have a traditional Kikuyu crèche which was given to them by friends in Kenya, as well as a paper one that the kids made from a kit.

If we get chilly from the snow in the living room, we can warm ourselves at the fireplace in the dining room. :-)  This is a new addition to the Wards' Christmas decor, courtesy of our teammate Natalie. What a fun surprise for the Wards when they walked into their house on Monday evening. (Natalie and her family left on Tuesday, going out on R & R to Nairobi on the same plane that we came in on.)

Natalie created the fireplace on the Wards' blackboard, which is painted on the back of their wardrobe. (The wardrobe serves as a divider between the office and the dining room.)



The fireplace, mantle and fire are made of paper. The bricks and the fire are all hand-coloured. Natalie must have spent hours and hours on this. What a creative labour of love for those of us spending Christmas here!









With help, we have heard, from our teammate Laurie, Natalie sewed eight little stockings by hand, and hung them in order from oldest to youngest.

Plus, Natalie had Laura bring candy canes from the States, and she left other treats to put in the stockings as well. These included tiny home-made ginger snap cookies which were really delicious.

Juba Aerial View

Yesterday afternoon I flew down from Aweil Town to Juba, on my way to Kenya for three weeks of R&R. Today I flew from Juba to Nairobi. Soon after take-off my plane flew over the northwest part of Juba and I had a great view.

In the forefront of the picture is part of "Juba Town," the downtown (and oldest, I think) part of the city. As you can see, it has quite a few trees and lots of unpaved roads. (Some of the main roads in the city are paved, but most roads are not.)

The water you see in the top left part of the picture is the Bahr al Jabal (Mountain Nile), more commonly known as the White Nile, although some say that technically it doesn't become the White Nile until further north.

Here's the view as my plane began to fly over the river, looking towards the south. There are quite a few hotels and restaurants along the river on in the green, treed areas on what is the right side in the picture.

The White Nile flows north from Uganda, past Juba, through South Sudan and on into Sudan. At Khartoum it meets up with the Blue Nile, which comes from Ethiopia, to form the Nile.

I'll be taking a break from blogging until I return to South Sudan just before Christmas. 

Cattle Camp Migration

On a drive down to Aweil Town yesterday morning, we came upon a huge cattle camp moving down the road. At this time of year, the start of the dry season, cattle camps from our area head down south of here to where there is better grazing land.

We noticed quite a few calves walking alongside their mothers. It seemed like there were more than at other times of the year. We wondered if there were more calves born at certain times of the year than others. Something to ask our cattle owner friends about.



I don't know if the women standing in the road were part of the camp or just bystanders, but women do move along with the cattle camps to do things like cooking and milking.

Abundance of Aloe

The three small aloe plants that I brought back from Kenya three years ago have grown much bigger and multiplied exponentially.


Aloe plants don't multiply via seeds; new baby plants shoot up from the roots of existing plants.

My aloe bed has gotten very crowded during the past months so I decided to transplant some of the plants.

I asked my friend and "right hand woman" Agau to help me do this. We worked on it for a few hours this past Saturday morning.

All of the plants in the picture above came out of a small section of the main bed.


We planted some of the plants but still had a lot left over. So we decided that Agau would do some teaching Sunday after church about using aloe gel to treat burns and then offer interested women to come to my house and get some aloe plants to take home.


Aloe gel is wonderful for burns, and unfortunately burns are common here, particularly among small children, since cooking is done on fires at ground level.

These are some of the ladies who came after church to get plants. We would love to see aloe growing in many homes so that when someone gets burned, the gel would be readily available. Aloe is also helpful for minor cuts and wounds and skin irritations.

Homemade Toys

Toy cars and trucks are very popular with boys here. They don't buy them at a store, though; they make their own.

This is ten-year-old Deng, the son of one of my good friends, with a car he made from bottle caps, a flattened tin can or two and a few other odds and ends.

Deng really enjoys pulling the car along using a string attached to a stick.

Deng and his younger brother Bol.

Deng and Bol are the fifth and sixth in a family of seven children, which includes them and five sisters. Tragically, their father was killed in June in one of the civil war battles, fighting in the government army. He joined the army earlier in the year, attracted by the regular salary.

On A Happier Note

Here is a happy update to my sad Two Graves post of a few weeks ago. One of my friends, Abuk, is related to the young woman who died after giving birth. Last week I asked Abuk where the young woman's baby was. She said that her paternal grandmother was caring for her.

I told Abuk that my teammate Natalie had a can of powdered infant formula that she would be willing to donate to whomever was caring for the baby, if it was needed.

Three days ago Abuk brought the grandma and her sweet little month-old granddaughter to my house. I was very moved to see them. The grandma, Nyibol, is delighted to be taking care of little Awut. Nyibol is nursing her* (see "footnote" below) and supplementing her milk supply with powdered milk.

Nyibol was very happy to get the formula. I showed her how to prepare it and give it to Awut using a small cup (much easier to clean than the bottle she had been using), but also strongly encouraged her to continue to breastfeed Awut before giving formula, and to eat as well as she can and drink lots of water to help her body produce milk.

Isn't she precious? Please pray that Awut would be healthy and grow well, and that her grandma would also be healthy and able to continue to take care of her.

* Many women, even those who are older or who have never had a baby, can produce breast milk if they have a strong will to do so and if the baby suckles often. The suckling stimulates milk production. 

Bike Rack Baggage

Here are a few things I've seen my neighbours carrying on their bike racks recently. (Bikes are the main form of transportation here aside from walking).

Groundnuts (peanuts) freshly pulled up.

A load of wood for cooking fires, perhaps going to the market to be sold.

A bed, with the mattress folded on top.

House Construction Part 6: Roof Toppers

Here (finally!) is my final post on house construction.

Once the roof is thatched, it looks like this. The ends of the last layer of bundles form a tuft at the top of the roof.











The tuft looks kind of fun and punky, but it's not very solid or waterproof.














This house has a more finished look, with what I call a "roof topper," for lack of a better term.

This is the most common kind of roof topper. It is made by tying bundles of grass very securely and placing them "upside down," i.e. with the tied part at the top and the loose ends on the bottom, around the tuft at the top of the hut and tying them together. 

The loose ends at the bottom of the bundles are then trimmed off so that they are relatively equal.

The picture below shows two women starting to make a roof topper. They are placing bundles "upside down" around the tuft made by the top layer of bundles. 

These ladies were actually making a topper for a rectangular hut. Here's a little video of one of them trimming off the ends of the topper.

It's common here for people to add a cross to the top of the topper. 

Close-up of the bundles tied together.

Sometimes they get creative and stick other things on top!

Two Graves

My neighbours bury their dead in a simple grave in their yards, usually within a day of a person's death. For the first days and sometimes weeks after the death, the family decorates the grave with a colourful cloth, blanket or mat. Over time, as the body decomposes and the earth settles, the mound gets lower and lower and finally evens out with the earth around it.

The mound of light brown earth to the left of the chairs in the picture above is the grave of a young woman of 15 who died ten days ago. (There is usually a mat on the grave but I took this picture first thing in the morning and it had not yet been put on after the night.)

This is a closer view of the grave. The young woman was married and died soon after giving birth to her first child. She gave birth at home, as do most women here, to a healthy baby, and then bled to death. Her relatives did finally end up getting her to a maternity unit several kilometres away, but by then it was too late. So tragic. Just one example of why South Sudan has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.

This is the grave of a one-year-old girl who died four days ago. She had a bad case of thrush in her mouth, making it very painful for her to eat or drink. Her mother took her to the government hospital an hour's drive south of here, but they had no medicine to give her. Despite the efforts of her mother and grandmother to get her to eat or at least drink, she ended up dying, I believe from dehydration. Her family didn't have the means to do anything else to help her. So sad.

Recent Pix

This is a small part of the road between where I live and our training centre/radio/school compound. I walk by here most weekdays. These days it's quite lovely, bordered on each side by a profusions of bushes in bloom. The yellow flowers with their red centres look so cheerful.

These flowers are all over the place. I took this shot from the same road, nearer to my house.

Donkeys grazing peacefully. The one in the forefront is literally at the end of his rope. :-) The one in the back seems to have pulled his rope free and is dragging it behind him.

Half of the Cush Christian School first year class, meeting for their Dinka literacy class outside under a large tree in the schoolyard. (These students are with teacher Peter Lual, standing, for the first half of the morning, then they head inside for their oral English class with John Alou, switching places with the other half of the class.)

The Parot Church women's literacy class meeting on my porch. During the dry season, the class met at the church, but since the grass-mat roof has quite a few holes, it's not a practical place to meet during the rainy season. It has worked out well for me to have the class at my house. Teacher-trainee Abuk can do much of the teaching on her own, so I can be inside doing other things, keeping an ear out and coming out to help or observe when necessary.

Bovine Bell Choir

Keeping on the theme of my last post, here's a little video I shot the other day when a herd of cows walked by just outside our compound fence. People put bells on their cows to help them find the cows at the end of the day, when they need to be brought back home for the night.

Herds Heading Home

As I've mentioned before, some of us from my team usually come to a Samaritan's Purse base in a nearby village on Thursdays to use the high-speed internet. Our schedule right now is to arrive at SP around 4:00 p.m. and leave by 7:00, just before sunset. Lately we've often almost literally "run into" and literally driven through herds of cows and goats heading home after roaming around all day.

Sorry, this first photo is a little blurry. It's kind of hard to take a decent shot since the road is full of pot holes and our truck bounces a lot.

House Construction Part 5: Thatching (Cont'd)

I forgot to mention in my last post that house construction is almost always done in the dry season (December-April). (You may have noticed how brown and dry things are in the pictures.)

One tool that the women use in thatching is a flat wooden mallet.

The woman on the left is using a mallet to tap and even up the ends of the bundles that have been attached.






Another use of the mallet is to tighten up the rows of branches so that they are securely fixed to the roof frame below. That is what the woman in the video below is doing.

As the thatching goes higher, the women have to work from up on the thatch itself. They use a very basic ladder with one rung to get up onto the roof.

They support themselves on the roof by kneeling with their toes resting on a row of branches.

When they're up on the roof like that, the women have their supplies (rope, grass bundles, sticks) delivered by a helper. That saves them having to come down and get them.

The video below shows the thatching bee and a woman bringing bundles over from a storage rack to the thatching site. It then also shows the two women on the roof in the photos above and bundles and rope being handed up to them.