The Roundabouts

Some of you may be wondering why I haven’t been posting blogs for this long. And I must apologize for having introduced you and promise to keep feeding you back some description of my Sudan’s stay and about my work. Things have been incredibly busy here. Just to get my project rolling, I have been running here and there between governments and NGOs offices and from county to county and from Boma (village) to Boma. So I am taking this little time, 7 am in the morning, to try to fulfill my promise to you: to write at least one blog for this month. I am also doing my master’s paper and it’s not fun!!

In my first to trip to one of the counties I will be working in, Aweil North, I saw these hilarious scenes of roundabouts. This area is mostly populated by returnees. Years before the war and years after, the Arabs sponsored militia has been operating here. Literally, they are equivalent of current Janja weed operations in Darfur. Even the locals here call them jur aa jiewak (people of the horse). They are raided cattle, abducted children and women (in most cases the rapped them). I heard grim stories of how the lynched people here during the war. This was good enough a recipe for complete desertion of the area. So when war came to an end just about four years ago, people who survived these atrocities quickly came back to settle in their places. And with the creation of the semi-autonomous government of South Sudan, they started to design administrative boundaries between states, counties, and payam. This also meant creation of local governments for these administrative entities. Now begin the real development. They started making roads. By the way, as a side note, this roads construction caused great destruction in many of the villages in Aweil areas. The road construction company literally thwarted waterways and creating no passage for the water to flow. In places where they should have built bigger culverts, they put in place something that looks like an open barrel of oil on both ends. These were not enough to drain water away fast. So the water decided to show its might: whole of Aweil town and the surrounding was underwater in the last rainy season. This is not meant to bore you; I am trying to put this into development’s perspectives. Once can see clear neglect this whole entire story. This can be an example of where consultation has gone terribly wrong. Either the road construction company failed, out of ignorance, to consult with local communities or they just cared about achieving their goals of building roads to be paid their contract agreement’s money.

So as I was driving north of Aweil town to Gok-Machar, administrative head of Aweil North County, I saw another example of failure of this roads construction company to consult with communities. Huts after huts were sitting in the middle of the road. When I talk about roads, I mean piles of mud compacted hard enough to pave way to these remote areas. They are good until it starts raining; and we may be back in square one again. But the whole point of this discussion is to see relevancy in doing development. In the mind of this roads construction company or whoever sponsored these roads constructions, development meant physical existence of roads. While this may be true to some extent, development must mean more than that. It must mean physical existence up to a point where other necessary conditions are met. It must mean sustainability. It must mean overall public awareness and serious community consultations. And when these preconditions are not met, you end up being force to unnecessary roundabouts such as the one you see in the picture.

Mango trees are also sacred here and you don’t want to touch them! They can have their own roundabouts
I hope you enjoy reading it. More will come when I find some times in the morning such as this one.